Reappeared

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In April, Abhi posted about two high school girls in New York whom the FBI and Homeland Security jailed on suspicion of being aspiring suicide bombers. The girls were held under Orwellian secrecy, but the case seemed dubious from the start:

“Nobody here believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers,” the [FBI] official added… “We’re not spun up about this case,” said a Homeland Security Department source. [NY Daily News]

After six weeks virtually incommunicado in detention, one girl was released, and the other is being deported to Bangladesh:

… after holding the girls for six weeks in a Pennsylvania detention center, the government has quietly released one and is allowing the other to leave the country with her family… Many questions remain unanswered in a case that has been marked from the start by secrecy, including closed hearings, sealed FBI declarations, and orders barring attorneys from disclosing government information. [NYT, reprinted in Kansas City Star]

So that’s what happens under the USA FASCIST Act if you’re a 16-year-old Muslim girl who writes a school essay about Islam. Like Guantánamo Bay, you can be jailed without charges for life, and nobody will confirm that you exist. The same behavior by King George III sparked the American Revolution; the same behavior by Cuba, North Korea and Iran lands them on our various axes of evil.

Now what happens if you’re a bug-eyed, swastika-festooned, non-Muslim murderer with a criminal assault record, and you show up at the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw, slashing weapons and body armor?

You get served coffee and let into the U.S.

Have a nice day!

Gregory Allan Despres was supposed to be going to jail the morning folks spotted him hitchhiking to the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw. His trousers were spattered with blood. Inside his backpack he had a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife and brass knuckles. He was also packing pepper spray and wearing a bullet-proof vest… Mr. Despres… has a 10-inch swastika tattooed on his lower back… Mr. Young said the U.S. customs agents appeared to be joking around… “When I come back in (to the room) they were giving him a coffee,” he said. “He got processed faster than I did.” [Ottawa Citizen]

U.S. customs agents… let him into the United States… The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres’ hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton’s kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom… On the same day Despres crossed the border, he was due in a Canadian court to be sentenced on charges he assaulted and threatened to kill Fulton’s son-in-law, Frederick Mowat, last August. [CNN]

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57 thoughts on “Reappeared”

  1. I am Hindu, it is like a 180 turn from Islam yet my Hindu brothers were “profiled” after the terrorist attack. All because of some religion that I hardly know about. I have muslim friends but imagine marrying one? NO way, and the same with them too…my friend Sara would never marry a Hindu. Thats how its been for centuries.

    . And it should be even more common.

    Girlfriend, your grandmother doesn’t represent all the people in India, what happens in India doesn’t dictate what you can or should do, and what happened “for centuries” should hardly decide who we should be with today. Unless you want to endorse everything that’s been done for hundreds of years, including restricting women from learning how to read, marrying them off at 10, not practicing safe sex even though there’s an AIDS epidemic, etc. Just meet someone nice who will treat you well and whom you love–it’s hard enough without placing arbitrary restrictions on it. All these other people are doing it. 🙂

    Anyway, I understand where you’re coming from with feeling upset about people in your community being profiled; you might want to blame the people doing the profiling (i.e. the American government) rather than the other people being profiled (i.e. people like you and me).

  2. Saurav:

    Word.

    All hail BOG! (that’s the Biracial Occupation Government — an important concept for our new century.)

    Boggishly myself, Siddhartha

  5. Gujudude, they both have to do with the allocation of law enforcement resources, the efficacy of practices like racial (and other kinds) of profiling, the effects of tactics like that on the mentalities of law enforcement officials (and subsequently their actions), and, most broadly, what happens when you get distracted from stop people from hurting other people because of your own preconceptions/biases.

    I see your point here. I still feel a little uncertain about the comparisons though. For some reason, I think the maniac walking highlights gross incompetance or “Its not my rice bowl, I won’t touch it.” The guy was walking around with bloodly clothes and a freaking chainsaw for lords sake, how can ANYBODY in their right mind NOT think something isn’t fishy?

    I guess I am getting too caught up in the gritty details of each case.

  6. Does it seem strange to anyone else that we send Cat Stevens back to London (the Peace Train guy, also nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize) basically before he even exited his plane because he is a threat to national security, but our good buddy Greg here can wander on in with his bloody clothes and chainsaw? Maybe it’s just me….