More on legal scholar who criticized Bush and ended up on the no-fly list

Just to follow up on Monday's post about Walter Murphy, the legal scholar caught on the government's no-fly list ...

Mark Graber from Balkinization today catches the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto spinning the story like a top.

Go read his take-down (with a hat tip to former AlterNet staffer Onnesha Roychoudhuri).

I liked Graber's postscript:

My sense of the Murphy debate on the blogosphere is that the dominant positions are one of two extremes. Either this was part of a systematic effort to harass opponents of the Bush administration or this was entirely random. Neither seems fully true to the facts for reasons persons on one side point out about the other. Let me suggest a third alternative, which seems to best fit the facts (although hardly any explanation is perfect). I think there is a fair degree of evidence that there was some targeting going on, given both the initial stop and the baggage lost on the return flight. On the other hand, one thing we know about secretive processes is that people can sometimes get on the wrong list simply because someone has a grudge against them. Needless to say, the FBI has hardly been immune to this problem. Consider how a false tip from Walter Winchell led to an extensive investigation of the entertainer Josephine Baker (see http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/jbaker.htm --thanks to MaryDudziak for this tip). So consider the possibility that someone, upset with Professor Murphy's talk at Princeton, either put him on the list or made a complaint to the FBI. Put differently, there is randomness going on, but a randomness that is enabling citizens to use and abuse government to harass persons whose politics or persona they do not like.