But what's particularly infuriating here is that, if they had evidence that Long has done anything wrong, they easily could have arrested him at any point over the last ten weeks when he was in the US. The reality is that they could have arrested him at any time over the last decade because he has lived in three countries with highly US-loyal autocracies: Egypt, the UAE and Qatar. But he was never arrested, never charged with anything - just denied the basic right to travel.
As Abbas told me after that incident occurred: "Our sense is that a particular FBI agent, or perhaps a small group of them, in Oklahoma City are looking to inflict some pain on Saadiq and his family - maybe in retaliation for the embarrassment he caused them or the thousands of emails that ended up getting sent to their field office there."
The worst part of all of this is the complete lack of remedy available to Long. Abbas told me: "unfortunately, because of arcane jurisdictional complications, we don't think seeking a preliminary injunction is necessarily an expeditious option for getting Saadiq on a plane." Even worse:
