What's happening in America? A slide into fascism...

national | miscellaneous | news report Saturday December 21, 2002 20:27 by bad

things getting bad in the states.

Mass arrests in California spark protests
http://csmonitor.com/2002/1220/dailyUpdate.html

The Justice Department was scrambling Thursday to explain why INS agents arrested hundreds of men who voluntarily arrived at INS offices in Southern California this week to register under Attorney General John Ashcroft's plan to document all men in the US who come from several countries in the Middle East. Media around the world carried stories of how the men, some as young as 16, were handcuffed, shackled, and (according to their laywers) hosed down, before being placed in jail cells.

Most of those arrested were Iranian whose familes had fled to the US after the 1979 overthrow of the Shah, including members of the Iranian Jewish and Christian communities, according to The Independent. Thousands of Iranian-Americans then protested in front of INS offices in Southern California. The Guardian reports they waved placards which read "What's next? Concentration camps?", "Detain Terrorists not Innocent Immigrants", and "Free our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons."

"If you were a terrorist, would you show up to be fingerprinted? Only law-abiding people are showing up. This is nuts. These people have been here for ages; these are not criminals," said Babak Sotoodesh, an immigrant from Iran who is an attorney and president of the Alliance of Iranian Americans, an advocacy group.

The INS says the entire episode has been overblown by the media and that most of those detained are out on bail. The Boston Globe reports that any who showed up to register were in the country illegally because their visas had expired, according to Jorge Martinez, a spokesman for the Justice Department. "We're talking about individuals who have violated the law," he said. "I can't believe we've become a country where violating the law doesn't matter." The INS said their agents are required to arrest anyone for any sort of violation, regardless of the circumstances. The INS position was backed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

"INS has a duty and an obligation to the community at large to apprehend and deport people who break the law," said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "How many times have we seen over the last couple years where people who should have been detained by the INS were freed and then went on to kill people?"

But the LA Times (which called the INS's handling of the situation a "bust") and the Globe pointed out that many of the minor violations for which the men were arrested were caused by INS backlogs and not anything the men had done illegally. "Given the proven incompetence of the INS with paperwork, the complaints sound feasible," said an editorial in the LA Times. The INS has said that once the men provide proof that they've filed all the right paper work, they won't be bothered any more.

Men from another 13 nations, mostly from the Middle East (including Saudi Arabia) and North Africa, have been ordered to appear and register next month. Immigration experts now fear that many will stay away for fear of similiar arrests.

And in a move that soon might lead to the monitoring of all Americans, the New York Times reports that the "Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users."

An official with a major data services company who has been briefed on several aspects of the government's plans said it was hard to see how such capabilities could be provided to government without the potential for real-time monitoring, even of individuals. "Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring," the official said. The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet."