Citizens of 14 countries will be subject to intensified scrutiny
The citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, flying to the United States will continue to be subject to the intense screening sparked by the attempted bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day, the U.S. government announced. American citizens and most others who are not flying through those designated countries on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security. The new rule applies to citizens of countries regarded as “state sponsors of terrorism,” a list that includes Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, and “countries of interest,” which includes Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. The announcement will be protested by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says legal director Nawar Shora, who calls the new screening rules “extreme and very dangerous”: “All of a sudden people are labelled as being related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from.”