Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans, along with members of some other ethnic groups, are therefore understandably alarmed that the Department of Justice may soon have the tools to bring them under investigation without any proof of wrongdoing. ... [They] have already suffered from being profiled in a de facto sense. Unsurprisingly, to have that injustice become policy concerns them. The protests would be even louder if so many in the community were not afraid to speak up and draw attention to themselves ...
That’s Juan Cole in his Thursday Salon smackdown of the FBI’s proposed new system for profiling Muslims and Arab-Americans.
As SusanG pointed out yesterday, no less a personage than U.S. Attorney General Mike Mukasey says that merely having a particular national origin or ethnicity will not be grounds for investigating anyone under the profiling system. Because, the A.G. says, the administration believes in constitutional guarantees, or rather, what he actually said was, "we value the Constitution." Uh-huh. Value it for the same reason my parents used to value mail-order catalogs in the outhouse.
In Congress, I suspect, there is a cohort that would fund cattle cars and barbed wire if the administration made the request. So no way a little old profiling proposal would set them atwitch. But the minority of members in the Senate and House who really do value the Constitution – enough to actually show some spine about it, I mean – ought to be pointing out, loudly, that this latest proposal is all part of the total package of torture, rendition, secret prisons, warrantless wiretapping, government snooping into the records of activists and dissidents, national security letters, denial of habeas corpus, ad nauseam.
As Cole points out, there is plenty of reason to be suspicious. What the FBI engaged in in the case of six Florida men was entrapment. The bureau operated just short of being an agent provocateur. So now, with its long history of ignoring constitutional guarantees and worse crimes, the FBI is going to be given more latitude so that it won’t have to step over the line so much? Call me a traditionalist, but I’d prefer that government agencies continue to be forced to break the law when they violate my civil liberties. Why must everything be made so easy for them?
Airport harassment has been a staple of my family’s life since September 2001. That was the year my wife was reunited with her Libyan-raised children, abducted as toddlers in the 1980s and held in Tripoli incommunicado for 15 years. Since each of them, in turn, has come to live with us and attend college, we’ve come to expect extra attention when flying, whether alone, two at a time or all together. Each of us has been subject to extra wandings, brief interrogations in the open, longer interrogations in windowless rooms, missed flights, surly treatment. Two of us have been strip-searched. We’ve all been patted down more than once. In all, we’ve probably made some 70 air trips. Less than 10 of those times has one or more of us not been "randomly" selected for more than average scrutiny.
In the early days after September 11, we not only accepted but also understood the rationale behind this. Its true nature has long since been revealed. It has nothing to do with real security. Heavyweights who would commit or enable others to commit terrorist acts get billions in U.S. taxpayer aid. We get profiled. Yet we get nowhere near the attention that some other unfortunate Americans have. The DOJ proposal would take us further down that path.
Violating civil liberties is an old tradition in America. For instance, the FBI not only spied on dissidents, it also spurred some of them to attack each other and engaged in other actions appropriate to a police state. Once, half my life ago, some people in Congress investigated and made an effort to curtail those violations. It wasn’t a full-throated probe nor were comprehensive constraints enacted. But at least some effort was made. As we have learned to rue, these days cowardice means too many of our supposed representatives are wholly reckless instead of fearless in protecting our rights.