Stop the Next War Now by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577317401
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CODEPINK cofounder Gael Murphy with Palestinian women protesting the Israeli wall.

Photo by Medea Benjamin

By Monday I had met with U.S. representative Jim McDermott of Seattle and presented a plan for a statewide campaign that included political advocacy, direct community support, education and training, and public awareness and media relations. By Tuesday, Representative Jim McDermott, myself, and others held a press conference with the governor, the mayor of Seattle, the county council, the chief of police, and the chief of schools, and we launched the Hate-Free Zone Campaign of Washington.

We started out thinking we’d focus on hate crimes by individuals against individuals, but we soon discovered an enormous need to oppose government actions targeting immigrant communities of color. Immigrant communities are—in some deep, dark way—becoming an endangered species.

Since 9/11, we have seen the federal government arrest or detain massive numbers of immigrants from the Middle East, often holding detainees without declaring any charges whatsoever. Once in custody, immigrants find themselves vulnerable to deportation on the grounds of minor visa infractions (such as not reporting a change of address within ten days of moving), not to mention being subject to the humiliation that comes from their captors’ misunderstanding of their religion or culture. One day, as I was leaving a detention center, I saw a Sikh man with a towel wrapped around his head as a turban. He was trying to communicate with a guard who was demanding he remove it. I explained to the officer that taking off this towel went against the man’s religion. In Sikhism, I explained, you must always keep your hair covered. I then talked to the director of the detention center and explained the situation. He eventually agreed to let the man keep his turban. For a Sikh man, having your turban taken off is not unlike having your pants removed and being forced to expose your penis. That’s what the officials had tried to do to him.

It is very difficult to know the scope of the post-9/11 detentions, raids, and arrests because the U.S. government has consistently maintained that revealing such information is a threat to national security. Now all federal agencies can claim blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act and refuse to provide information.

The lack of information about exactly what these agencies are doing makes it difficult to police the authorities—and to know the difference between legitimate law-enforcement activities and unscrupulous abuses of power. At one community meeting, a Somali man said he’d been getting calls from a man who claimed to be from the FBI and who asked prying questions about his family members. In another case, a man also claiming to be from the FBI arrived at someone’s home and asked to listen to the answering machine. I myself received a call from someone who said he was with the Department of Defense, but when I called the Department of Defense, no one had heard of him.

And it’s not only the federal government we have to worry about—the increased authority of local cops is also a cause for concern.

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