The Beacon Of Hypocrisy
By Ra Ravishankar
8 May, 2003
The Pianist, a recent film by Roman Polanski, movingly portrays the mass roundup and indiscriminate slaughter of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. The randomness in the Nazi methods was in itself a torture, for not only did it make the victims acutely aware of their helplessness and live in perpetual fear, but by leaving them a slender hope of a saner future if they silently endured what had befallen them, precluded mass mobilizations.
Purportedly in retaliation for the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942, the then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of about 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry. Amazingly enough, enslaving innocents at home while claiming to liberate Nazi occupied territories seemed a reasonable policy option then. Such hypocrisy and selective xenophobia has been a cornerstone of American policy-making, one of the latest instances being George Bush's missionary (pun intended) zeal in 'liberating' Iraq while launching a Nazi-style crackdown on Muslims in the U.S.
Anti-Muslim hysteria has certainly skyrocketed since September 11, but things were far from rosy before that. Muslims have long been under the needle of suspicion, so much so that the 1995 Oklahoma bombing was initially suspected to be the handiwork of Islamic fanatics. That the perpetrator was a white American did not deter the passage in 1996 of the draconian Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The promise of acting "tough on crime" had always been a profitable campaign option, particularly so when the Oklahoma bombing was still fresh in everyone's mind and elections only a few weeks away. These two laws permit the use of classified information to detain or deport immigrants (including long-term legal residents), expand the range of deportable offenses, and subject them to mandatory detention for relatively insignificant offenses. Worst of all, they were to apply retroactively! Not surprisingly, they have had the combined effect of increasing the number of Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) detainees from 8,500 in 1996 to nearly 16,000 in 1998 and more than 20,000 now.
One of the most egregious instances of the use of secret evidence against immigrants was in the case of the "Iraqi seven" - seven Iraqis who had been evacuated by the U.S. after a botched CIA-backed plot to overthrow Saddam Hussain. After being bought to the U.S., the INS detained them for years as national security risks. "It is inconceivable to the Iraqi people why these people are jailed," complained Ahmad Chalabi, the U.S's current favorite to head post-Saddam Iraq. When brought to light after much pressure, the secret evidence was found to be uncorroborated and filled with anti-Arab comments. Since then, every federal court that has ruled on secret evidence has held its use unconstitutional.
Amidst growing criticism, in June 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to cut $173,480 in Justice Department expenses, the estimated annual cost of a secret evidence detention. However the House failed to move beyond symbolic gestures and the "Secret Evidence Repeal Act," a bipartisan bill first introduced in 1999, continued to progress at snail's pace. In 2001, even as a modified version of this bill was gathering dust at the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, the PATRIOT Act was introduced and passed with scant debate. Suffice it to say that this monster makes the 1996 laws seem benign!
In a report released last August, Human Rights Watch found the U.S. Government to have detained (post 9/11) more than 1,200 non-citizens for several months without charges, some under solitary confinement, denied access to counsel, subjected them to coercive interrogations and secret hearings, and overridden
judicial orders to release them on bond during immigration proceedings. The reasons for raids and detention include inadequate class load, non-violent Palestinian activism, mistaken identity, and of course, no reason! The vast majority of the detainees are Muslims of Middle Eastern, South Asian or North
African descent.Human Rights Watch reports that as of July 2002, these detentions and the subsequent investigations had not yielded "any criminal indictments for crimes connected to terrorist activity." Things continued to worsen as in an exercise best described as "an extended vacation from common sense", non-immigrant males above 16 years of age from certain countries were ordered to register with the INS. Of the 25 listed countries, 24 are predominantly Muslim countries, North Korea being the sole exception. The registrants are digitally photographed, have their fingerprints taken, and are quizzed on their religious beliefs, and political (and possible terrorist) affiliations.
Last December, hundreds of people in California who sought to comply with this program were detained until mass protests forced the release of a majority of them. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that most of the detainees were waiting for approval of their green card applications, while the rest had minor visa problems caused by the INS's all-too-common bungling. For instance, the San Diego Union Tribune reported on July 27, 2002 that the INS had recently failed to process and then dumped more than 200,000 change of address forms thereby putting these more than 200,000 people at risk of wrongful arrest and deportation (for failing to report a change of address). And this March, the FBI subjected thousands of Iraqis in the U.S to "voluntary" questioning and detained a "handful" of them. Several immigrants have also been deported with expired travel documents so that they are imprisoned on arrival at their destination countries. Being stateless, those of Palestinian origin have been among the worst affected.
"Your role collapsed with the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York."This statement to Amnesty International delegates by a senior U.S.Government official is an apt indicator of the contempt and hostility thatcivil liberties groups have had to withstand. Harvard University law Professor Alan Dershowitz went a step ahead and advocated nonlethal torture, "a sterilized needle underneath the nail", for instance. Criticizing surreptitious
practitioners of torture for their hypocrisy, he suggested that the U.S employ torture "with accountability and openly", as if this excuses violating the Geneva Accords. In conditions becoming increasingly hostile, immigrants continue to be detained under conditions "more restrictive than that experienced by the general [prison] population," as Judge Scheindlin ruled.Furthermore, in spite of a state court ruling secret arrests "odious to a democracy", secret detentions continue to be the order of the day. Even amongst Muslims, the cops seem to have taken a special liking for Palestinian activists. Sami Al-Arian, formerly a tenured University of South Florida professor now detained under secret evidence, is the most recent victim. Prior to this, his brother-in-law Mazen Al Najjar had been detained under secret
evidence for three-and-a-half years and released after a federal judge ruled his detention unconstitutional. Mazen was rearrested in November 2001 and detained till August 2002 when he was deported to an undisclosed Arab country. Two Israeli lobby groups that had expressed "deep regret" over the "Secret Evidence Repeal Act", the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, must now be feeling much better!In February this year, Representative Howard Coble, also the chair of theJudiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, laidbare the racism behind the facade of immigrant law enforcement when heremarked, "some Japanese-Americans probably were intent on doing harm tous [in 1942] just as some of these Arab-Americans are probably intent on
doing harm to us." The recent detention and secret hearings of MaherHawash, a U.S. citizen of Palestinian origin working at Intel, portends agrisly picture for the near future. The egregious assaults on Immigrants' Rights don't make for a glowing comment on the U.S's commitment to human rights. For its pompous exhortations on liberty while incarcerating more than two million people at home, it is more of a "beacon of hypocrisy" than a
"beacon of liberty."