Are Scott, Carly and Larry risking time at Camp X-Ray? (The Register, Posted: 01/04/2003 at 12:01 GMT): Making a charitable donation could find you in Camp X-Ray. Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison and Carly Fiorina, please note, you've been doing it too. As we'll explain. And you could be at risk too, dear reader: if it's the wrong charity ... at the wrong time.
Take the case of senior Intel Engineer Maher Mofied 'Mike' Hawash. Hawash has been arrested on undisclosed charges and detained. He has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but owes his loss of liberty - and constitutional rights - because he has detained as a "material witness" on the grounds of giving to a charity. Senior Intel VP Stephen McGeady - a guy with very cool timing, as we recall from the Microsoft antitrust trial - has rallied to his support:- "Americans are taught that the Constitution protects us against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and that our freedom and these constitutional liberties are what we are fighting for in Iraq and elsewhere," McGeady wrote to the Oregonian. "Yet one of our neighbors can be taken from his home or office and held without charge for weeks or months."
Think this is a particularly unique situation?
Drawing the line between asylum seekers and safety (Christian Science Monitor, April 03, 2003): At the same moment President Bush ordered troops into Iraq, he also tightened requirements on those seeking entrance into the United States. Refugees from 33 nations with possible links to the Al Qaeda terrorist organization now will automatically be held in confinement when they request asylum upon arriving in the US. [....] "It's two-faced for the administration to declare war on Iraq in the name of liberating Iraqi people and at the same time jail them when they come here escaping human rights abuses," says Wendy Young of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children in Washington. The new US approach to screening refugees from the 33 "blacklisted" countries is likely to come as a rude shock to people fleeing them. They are expecting a sympathetic ear - not months in a jail.
That was true for Ali Abbod, who asked that his real name not be used to protect his family in Iraq. Mr. Abbod expected the US would surely grant him asylum after he fled Iraq via Syria and China in the summer of 1999, arriving in Los Angeles in November. His hopes were riding on America's longtime opposition to Saddam Hussein's regime. Abbod told US officials he had been imprisoned and tortured in Iraq because of his religious beliefs. Despite a dentist's report that Abbod likely had been tortured several times, the former engineer was held in federal detention facilities near Los Angeles for 16 months before his plea for asylum was officially rejected. He was shocked by what had happened, he says. He is appealing the decision and is now living in the Los Angeles area. "When I leave China, I had other choice," says Abbod, who over the past four years has learned to speak broken English. "It's easy to me to go to Canada, easy to me to go to Europe, but I choose United States because I believe 100 percent I will get asylum." Abbod's request was rejected, say his lawyers, because the judge who heard his case did not believe his story. While Abbod's detention was unusually long, it occurred at the discretion of a federal official. Under the new policy, refugees like Abbod will face prolonged detention - without exception. Before the latest change, most detentions lasted up to six months.
From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Immigrants Brace for Backlash but Fear Alerting NYPD (Village Voice, April 2-8, 2003): ..... "Why did you place the bomb?" "What will cause it to explode?" "Where is the bomb?" These are some of the questions on a "bomb threat checklist" that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recommends mosques and other Muslim, Arab, and South Asian community organizations keep posted near their phones in the increasingly likely case that someone rings up with a threat. The idea is to keep the caller on the line as long as possible, take down a detailed description of the voice, and quite possibly save some lives. The checklist is part of a "safety kit" that CAIR began distributing to mosques and Islamic centers across the country last week as the war on Iraq began producing the "collateral damage" of hate crimes at home. Panic is running high in communities that saw murders, arson, assaults, and countless acts of violence after 9-11—and that are now hearing anti-Muslim vitriol spill out of right-wing radio as it cheers on the war. [...] over the last year and a half, immigrants from Muslim, Arab, and South Asian backgrounds have had ample reason to become wary of anyone in a uniform. First, the post-9-11 sweeps in Muslim and Arab neighborhoods that resulted in thousands of detentions and deportations seemed to contradict the president's official condemnation of hate crimes immediately following the twin tower attacks. The roundups were experienced as racial profiling of the lowest order, tearing apart families and disrupting whole communities. In a category of incidents not compiled by the FBI—"FBI/Police/INS intimidation"—CAIR counted 224 reported cases. Then came "special registration," the requirement that non-immigrant visitors from countries deemed to be of the "highest terrorism risk" report to INS offices to be photographed and fingerprinted. The program has decimated neighborhoods like Midwood, Brooklyn, which has seen hundreds of breadwinners detained because of visa violations, and hundreds more trying to flee to Canada. And now, the federal government has reported a war contingency plan to enlist the Joint Terrorism Task Force—which includes state and local police, among them the NYPD—in selectively targeting thousands of Iraqi and other immigrants for interviews and investigations. FBI officials have repeatedly stated that anyone found in immigration violation during these sweeps will be detained. "People are really afraid," says Ahmad Razvi, a co-director of the Council of Pakistan Organization, a community center in Midwood founded in the wake of 9-11. "FBI, INS, police—they've gone to businesses and homes in this neighborhood conducting raids. Why would our people trust them?"
People are now subject to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. The material witness statutes have been grossly abused. The government resists allowing detainees to see their lawyers, even when they are American citizens arrested on American soil. The government issues federal gag orders to prevent people from discussing their imprisonment and reasons wherefore. Refugees fleeing arbitrary torture and imprisonment abroad come here, only to face even more arbitrary imprisonment -- and given that most of them are sent to federal prisons and kept with career criminals, probably further torture, as well, if not quite state-administered. Immigrants are required to register and are targed for expulsion based purely on their country of origin, a type of discrimination long thought unconstitutional.
One wonders whether, in their limitless zeal to perform this task they have given themselves, this government simply does not believe that we the people are any longer entitled to the protections offered by the constitution. Or rather, one wonders precisely which people the government believes are entitled to its protections. One suspects that it would only be members of the government, and those who loudly, vociferously and oh so very publicly support its policies.
One also wonders, precisely, what it is that the government believes it is doing.
FBI jails ex-Intel worker (San Francisco Chronicle, Wedhesday, April 2, 2003): ..... Hawash was picked up by FBI agents at about 7 a.m. on March 20 as he arrived at the parking lot for his job at Intel's Hawthorne Farms office in Hillsboro, Ore., said Steven McGeady, Hawash's former boss and friend, in a telephone interview with The Chronicle on Tuesday. At about the same time, armed federal agents wearing bullet-proof vests stormed into Hawash's home and seized his computers and files, said McGeady, who spoke with Lisa Hawash about the incident. Hawash's wife and their three young children were asleep when authorities arrived at their home, McGeady said. "Lisa wasn't taken into custody, but they seized all their computers, files and left her with a grand jury subpoena," he said. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said FBI agents also have searched Hawash's cubicle and computer system at work. Although Lisa Hawash has been able to visit her husband a couple of times a week, neither of them has been told by authorities why he is being detained, McGeady said.
Arab-American held two weeks in Oregon without charges (Sacramento Bee, April 3, 2003): Dressed in flak jackets and armed with assault rifles, FBI agents surrounded Maher "Mike" Hawash in an Intel Corp. parking lot while another heavily armed FBI team swept through his suburban home.
Two weeks later, the Intel contractor sits in a federal prison in solitary confinement, strip-searched every time he leaves and re-enters his cell for an hour of exercise, his friends say. The father of three has not been charged with any crime. "They haven't even questioned him once in the entire two weeks," said Steven McGeady, a former Intel executive who was Hawash's boss. [....] Material witness laws were intended only to ensure testimony, not to hold people indefinitely, said Phil Heymann, a Harvard law professor. "It was not meant to be used this way," Heymann said, noting that the number of material witness detentions has increased since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. The Justice Department has declined requests from The Associated Press and other media to release figures on witness detentions linked to terrorism investigations. But The Washington Post interviewed defense attorneys around the nation and found at least 44 people being held by the federal government - an unprecedented number, Heymann said. "Under this interpretation, any one of us could easily be treated as a material witness - anybody who is suspected of anything, it could be the slightest of suspicion," Heymann said.
Why, if you are detaining someone as a material witness, you would hold them all this time without asking them one question -- not one single solitary question -- about what it is they are supposed to testify about.
To be sure, some states are beginning to protest government actions. However, since they are nonbinding resolutions, to date, they are protests without teeth.
How many of these choices the government has made will later be found to have been abuses of power, for which we will pay? We will pay, make no mistake. We will pay both financially -- this sort of abuse of discretion invites and demands lawsuits -- and in an increased and deserved lack of trust in the various institutions of our government. After all, it's quite clear that the Justice Department can no longer be counted on to enforce even an elementary version of "justice", whatever that might be. It's also clear that the Justice Department is serving the needs of the administration; why should we then trust the administration? Many immigrants now feel that they cannot trust either the government or the police; how long will it be before many of them start taking justice and retribution into their own hands, because they feel that there is simply no other way? How long until that spreads?
One wonders whether this government has lost sight of the concept that it may not be worth protecting the people of this society with such passion that you gut the principles on which the society itself is based. What profits us to retain the document containing the Bill of Rights if we no longer retain the rights contained therein?
Posted by iain at April 03, 2003 12:59 PMComments
very website
Posted by http://www.meki.8m.com/ at April 4, 2003 12:04 PM
