I'm having a hard time figuring out what exactly to say about this. Are we really this close to a fascist state?
On the front page of the NYT is this story about a 16 year old Muslim girl ID'd in a chat room, picked up by the FBI from her home in Queens, NY, sent to a maximum-security juvenile detention center in Berks County, PA and after days of interrogation deported with her mother, sister and baby brother to Bangladesh.
Read it and weep. We live in what is looking more and more like a police state.
Here's an excerpt:
DHAKA, Bangladesh - Slumped at the edge of the bed she would have to share with four relatives that night, the 16-year-old girl from Queens {was}be forced to leave the United States, her home since kindergarten, because the F.B.I. had mysteriously identified her as a potential suicide bomber. ...After nearly seven weeks in detention, she was released on the condition that she leave the country immediately. Only immigration charges were brought against her.
More below the fold...
, the government framed this case as purely an immigration matter.
When a dozen federal agents plucked the girl from her home in a dawn raid on March 24, they cited only the expiration of her mother's immigration papers, telling the family that Tashnuba would probably be returned the next day.
Instead, after two weeks of frantic inquiries by her parents, The New York Times learned that Tashnuba was one of two girls being held, officially on their parents' immigration violations, but actually for questioning by F.B.I.'s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
..
the F.B.I. asserted that the girls presented "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." The document cited no evidence.
on March 4, when she knocked at the Hayder family's door, Ms. Younis and her partner did not reveal that they were F.B.I. agents, said Tashnuba's mother, Ishrat Jahan Hayder. They claimed to be from a youth center, following up on the police report filed five months earlier when the girl tried to elope. Mrs. Hayder readily sent the woman upstairs to her daughter's bedroom. "I trusted her," she said.
From the moment she walked in, as Tashnuba tells it, Ms. Younis started paging through her papers. "She was like, 'Can I look at this?' Not waiting for an answer."
Three weeks later -Ms. Younis wrote a secret declaration about Tashnuba, [and] - immigration agents raided the house.
As an immigration matter, that was highly unusual; there was no active proceeding against her mother or father, whose separate, long-pending applications for political asylum had lapsed without action in the late 1990's.
At day's end, the girls were driven to a maximum-security juvenile detention center in rural among delinquent girls accused of drug crimes and assaults. Tashnuba was required to wear a sweat suit, march at attention and submit to strip-searches,
A government psychiatrist concluded that she was neither suicidal nor homicidal, and recommended her release.
But the agents, Tashnuba said, kept "trying to link me to the psychological state." They zeroed in on the single artificial rose in her bedroom (her little sister's); a psychology course (required by her correspondence program), and an essay she wrote about the Department of Homeland Security (assigned as a writing evaluation by her tutor).Tashnuba said agents seized on one part. "I wrote, 'I feel like Muslims are being targeted, they're being outcasted more.'"