The “War on Terror” was launched in September 2001 by hijackers. Not by hijackers of airplanes but by hijackers of the most powerful country in the world, who have since defiled every worthy principle it stands for. It was in October that I first began working on the project that was to become Life or Liberty, after I heard that Muslim immigrants were being rounded up without charges.
The name “Life or Liberty” speaks to the recurring bargain the U.S. government makes with its citizens each time it wants to exploit our fear of a foreign threat: “Though our Declaration of Independence defined life and liberty as fundamental rights in a true democracy, because of this terrible enemy we now face, you’re going to have to give up your liberty so we can protect your life.” Life or liberty.
The Turkmen v. Ashcroft ruling is occasion for me to revisit the whole purpose of my three-year project. This ruling has been overshadowed in the news, by other casualties of the “War on Terror”: the suicides at Guantanamo and the latest events in Iraq. These are international fronts of this war. The captives in Guantanamo were captured overseas.
Let’s revisit what’s happened within the United States in what I’ll call the domestic front of the “War on Terror”:
The “9/11 Detainees”
A reported 1,200 South Asian and Arab non-citizens were arrested in the first three weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Despite Attorney General’s referring to these detainees repeatedly as “suspected terrorists,” none were charged with a terrorism-related crime. Instead, they were held on the basis of immigration violations, though many were held for weeks before any legal basis for their detentions were found. As has been established in an Inspector General’s report on the detainees, they were rounded up in a very haphazard way, often on the basis of tips called in by people clearly in a racist panic: “There are too many Muslims in the store next door.” The eight plaintiffs in Turkmen v. Ashcroft were from this group.
Ali Yaghi, husband of Shokriea Yaghi, subject of my 2002 short Life or Liberty, was also a “9/11 Detainee.” He was held for many weeks before any immigration charges were brought against him. Shokriea fought for her husband’s release for ten months while taking care of their children. Then, without warning, she received a package of Ali’s belongings in the mail. After frantically trying to find out what happened to him for several days, she was finally informed that her husband had been deported back to his native Jordan. It was at this point that I first interviewed her and got her story.
Absconder Apprehension Initiative
In January 2002, John Ashcroft’s Justice department issued a memo which outlined a plan to methodically arrest and interrogate about 6,000 Arab and South Asian countries “absconders” — non-citizens who had not complied with deportation orders.
What’s wrong with this?
In many cases, the “absconders” were not aware that they were living under a deportation order. And the task forces making these arrest were ordered to interrogate these people about terrorism simply because they were from predominantly Muslim countries.
This is exactly the same principle behind the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II — that being from a particular country makes you a legitimate suspect for an act committed by nationals of that country.
One of the men arrested under the Absconder Apprehension Initiative was Farouk Abdel-Muhti, a Palestinian who had lived in the U.S. for nearly thirty years. On April 26, 2002, Farouk was arrested at the apartment where he was living with his 26-year-old son Tarek.
Another illegal aspect of the domestic terror war comes up here. When I interviewed Farouk in Passaic County Jail in December of 2002, he had been imprisoned for more than six months. But according to Zadvydas vs. Davis, a 2001 Supreme Court decision, an “illegal alien” cannot be detained indefinitely, because the sole basis for immigrant detention is to insure that the alien can be deported.
Even among the people who say they’re disturbed about this domestic war on Muslim immigrants, I’ve found a lot of misinformation about exactly why it’s happening. The majority think that the Patriot Act has made this possible. Actually, the Patriot Act has almost no bearing on the thousands of detentions and deportations of South Asian and Arab non-citizens that have taken place.
It’s one thing to have antipathy towards the Bush administration, or to have the general idea that Muslims have been arrested and imprisoned without cause, but another to understand what has made it legally possible.
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/legal/september_11th/docs/TurkmenOpinion_61506.pdf
This is the policy that ultimately took Farouk Abdel-Muhti’s life.
I’m not the only one to make this link:
Manzanar Redux by David Cole
