Yahya Wehelie is an American citizen, born and raised in Virginia, trapped by President Obama‘s homeland security apparatus in a literally Kafkaesque nightmare which ranks right along with some of George Bush‘s most ludicrous homeland security shenanigans.

This is far from the first time that Obama has been in the spotlight for seamlessly continuing the Bush era philosophy that in The War Against Terror it’s perfectly okay to cheerfully trample all over the Constitution, and then come back and jump on it with hob-nailed boots for good measure.

As a 26-year-old Muslim American man who spent 18 months in Yemen before heading home to Virginia in early May, Yahya Wehelie caught the attention of the F.B.I. Agents stopped him while he was changing planes in Cairo, told him he was on the no-fly list and questioned him about his contacts with another American in Yemen, one accused of joining Al Qaeda and fatally shooting a hospital guard.

For six weeks, Mr. Wehelie has been in limbo in the Egyptian capital. He and his parents say he has no radical views, despises Al Qaeda and merely wants to get home to complete his education and get a job.

But after many hours of questioning by F.B.I. agents, he remains on the no-fly list. When he offered to fly home handcuffed and flanked by air marshals, Mr. Wehelie said, F.B.I. agents turned him down.
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On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based group that has been working with Mr. Wehelie’s family, wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to protest what its executive director, Nihad Awad, called “apparently illegal pressure tactics” against Muslim American travelers.

“If the F.B.I. wishes to question American citizens, they should be allowed to return to the United States, where they will be able to maintain their constitutional rights free of threats or intimidation,” Mr. Awad wrote.

Mr. Awad noted that Yahya Wehelie’s younger brother, Yusuf, 19, who was stopped with him in Cairo, faced a shorter but even more harrowing time in Egypt. Questioned first by the F.B.I., Yusuf was later held for three days by Egyptian security officers, blindfolded, chained to a wall and roughed up before being allowed to travel home May 12, he said in an interview.

The American Civil Liberties Union says it has been contacted by a dozen people who say they have been improperly placed on the no-fly list since December, half of them Americans abroad.

“For many of these Americans, placement on the no-fly list effectively amounts to banishment from their country,” said Ben Wizner, a senior staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. He called such treatment “both unfair and unconstitutional.”
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The no-fly list gives the American authorities greater leverage in assessing travelers who are under suspicion, because to reverse the flying ban many are willing to undergo hours of questioning.

But sometimes the questioning concludes neither with criminal charges nor with permission to fly. The Transportation Security Administration has a procedure allowing people to challenge their watch list status in cases of mistaken identity or name mix-up, but Mr. Wehelie does not fit those categories.
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The American authorities in Cairo canceled his passport and issued a new one Sunday with the notation, “valid only for return to the United States before Sept. 12, 2010,” Mr. Wehelie said. That is his goal, he said, but he has no idea how to get home.

How beautiful is that? Without even the most perfunctory kind of legal proceeding, the Obama administration has taken away an American citizen’s passport, and given him a “passport” that is good only for one-way travel to the US, expiring in three months’ time, but refused him permission to actually use that “passport” to fly to the US, not even in handcuffs sandwiched between armed US marshals.

And the real beauty of the situation is that he has no way, none at all, to challenge any of this. (The FBI, incidentally, has proclaimed that it has carefully protected Yahya Wehelie’s civil rights, because “In conducting such investigations … the F.B.I. is always careful to protect the civil rights and privacy concerns of all Americans.” Indeed. And we have just finished eating the pudding that contained the proof of that statement, haven’t we?)

Because when President Obama’s homeland security apparatus intercepts you in Cairo, you ain’t got no damn rights at all. And that’s how President Obama likes it, apparently. And that prime defender of the laws of the land, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., too.

And why exactly has all of this happened to Yahya Wehelie? Well, God presumably knows. God, and some nameless bureaucrat, who in the time of Obama, is authorized to arbitrarily sentence American citizens to exile, no questions asked.

This, incidentally, is Yahya Wehelie’s family background:

At a news conference in Washington on Wednesday, Wehelie’s parents spoke of their patriotism and their disavowal of Islamic extremists; they noted that Yahya’s older brother served in Iraq with the U.S. Army and that members of their extended family work at the Department of Homeland Security.

Yahya Wehelie has been intensively interrogated : “he has spoken with the FBI 10 times and submitted to a polygraph test.” No charges of any kind have been brought. There is no evidence at all — or, at least, none has been adduced — that he is actually guilty of anything, or that there is a reasonable suspicion at this time that he might be involved in terrorist activities of any kind.

Will even the John Roberts Supreme Court be willing to sign off on something as blatantly outrageous as this?

If so, what happens to Yahya Wehelie on September 13, if his name has not yet been lifted from the no-fly list, and he is still stranded in Cairo? At that point, will he cease to be a citizen of the United States? Egypt will be free to clap him in jail, and do whatever they want with him, because he will literally be a man without a country?