As you can tell from the meetups I will be attending, I’ll be doing a fair amount of flying in the next month (not as much as Vinod, but nobody flies as much as 3V). You can see why I read the following news story with some trepidation [via BoingBoing]:

No, that’s not me but we all look alike 🙂

Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it. The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

“Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong,” said one federal air marshal. [Link]

Luckily, I’m not flying through Vegas, which is where this system is in place. It seems that what happens in Vegas stays … in homeland security databases. And even things that don’t happen at all make it there too.

I have no information about whether or not similar quotas systems have been implemented in other airports. In Vegas at least, top management issued a memo in July 2004 saying:

“Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month”… A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, “There may come an occasion when you just don’t see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I’m sure that if you are looking for it, you’ll see something.” [Link]

An SDR is a “Surveillance Detection Report,” a secret government document with some very serious consequences.

What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR? “That could have serious impact … They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious,” [Link]

Hmmmm … imagine you’re a Marshal, under serious pressure to say you observed something fishy. Who do you think you’d write up? A white grandmother? A congressional staffer? Or a swarthy young male with a beard, even if he’s really handsome ?

Continue reading →

I’ve been trying to make sense of the progress of the Mumbai blasts investigation, and it’s not easy going. The latest news is the arrest of a local Mumbai man named Tanvir Ansari. Ansari is a traditional Muslim healer who practices ‘Unani’ healing in Mumbai. The Mumbai Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) claims he went to Pakistan in 2004, where he received training in bomb-making. He also has a criminal record — for an earlier arrest for possessing an AK-47 from some years ago.

Ansari’s arrest has led to the arrest of two associates, Suhail Sheikh and Jameer Ahmed. Like Ansari, Jameer Ahmed seems pretty unassuming: he owns a key shop in Mumbai city. Suhail Sheikh lives in Pune; I haven’t been able to find out what he does for a living.

Last week, the arrest of a man in Kenya is looking a little confusing. The man arrested there is not Said Abdul Karim (‘Tunda’), but a British national of Nigerian descent named Ismoila Olatunde Rufai. Rufai is still wanted by Kenyan police on suspicion of involvement with terrorism, but he’s not the person the Indian government was looking for. ‘Tunda’ worked for Dawood Ibrahim, and is known to have lost a hand from a bomb-making accident. Ismoila Rufai has no connection to ‘D’, and has both hands intact.

The three men arrested earlier have similarly complex identities (one of them had even worked as a police informer!). Two are Bihari villagers, and one lives in Navi Mumbai (New Bombay). Though one of the three has stated that he received training at an LeT camp in Pakistan, police are suggesting their main contacts are in Nepal and Bangladesh, and only “indirectly” in Pakistan. (This last point is somewhat vague in the news reports I’ve read.)

For columnist Rudroneel Ghosh at India Enews, the pattern of arrests thus far just doesn’t add up, which could mean one of two things: Continue reading →

Fewer than 300 Sri Lankan domestic workers have made it out of Lebanon so far, and the effort seems stalled at this point:

Sri LankaÂ’s Lebanon ambassador M.A. Farrok admitted in a BBCÂ’s Sinhala language service interview that the steady dispatch of war refugees to Sri Lanka has broken down after the first batch has been flown home.

He said after sending nearly 300 people home monetary difficulties faced by an international organization in sending them home, prior engagements of Sri Lankan Airline planes for different jobs and difficulty of reaching Southern areas of Lebanon have all contributed to the break down of dispatching refugees to Sri Lanka.

Several hundred women have taken refuge at the Sri Lankan embassy. Some of the women don’t have valid papers, either because they overstayed their contracts or because they couldn’t get their documents back from their employers. Some employers refuse to release their workers, while others have fled leaving them high and dry:

Terrified Sri Lankan maids who spoke to Gulf News from their embassy in Beirut said they had no alternative but to run away from their sponsors’ houses.

A few among them said they had been left behind by their sponsors, who were either on vacation or had fled the country.

“The Lebanese family for whom I used to work fled leaving me behind. I asked them to help me get out of the country as well but they just gave me $75 (Dh275) and asked me to get in touch with my embassy. I am scared. I want to go back to Sri Lanka where I have a four-year-old daughter and a husband. I am unable to keep in touch with them. The last time I spoke to them was eight days ago,” said Jayanti Gunasekara.

The Ambassador is keeping busy:

With roughly 400 stranded Sri Lankan women sleeping in his offices as they try to escape Lebanon, Amanul Farouque, the country’s ambassador was out yesterday morning, going from bakery to bakery to buy them bread. “This is an unusual assignment, but we are in an unusual situation,” he said wryly.

The embassy promises that it will give travel documents to all Sri Lankans regardless of legal status. But how many will be able to get to the embassy, let alone leave the country? Continue reading →

In the previous post I commented on the story of an apparent racist incident, that things are not always what they seem. On the other hand, sometimes things are very much what they seem. Today British authorities are trying to determine whether the stabbing death of an Asian man in a public housing estate after a pitched battle between whites and Asians armed with knives and baseball bats could possibly have had a racial component:

Police and community leaders in Preston, Lancashire, appealed for calm last night after 20-year-old Shezan Umarji was stabbed to death amid running battles between white and Asian youths early yesterday.

The young man was attacked outside his home in Fishwick View, on the city’s deprived Callon housing estate.

Racist abuse was involved:

Det Supt Graham Gardner, of Lancashire police, said racist abuse was used during the confrontation.

“There are racist elements to this murder. As such it has been declared as a racist murder investigation.”

But community leaders seem eager to downplay the racial dimension:

Community leaders played down any suggestion the attack may have been racially motivated but police sources said it appeared the battle was between Asian and white youths, some armed with baseball bats.

Councillor Taalib Shamsuddin denied racism was involved. ‘There were two groups. It was a hot night and there were people who were drunk. It’s as simple as that … The early indications are that this wasn’t a systematic racial issue. It was a disagreement between two guys that got out of hand.’

And this:

Ch Insp Cath Thundercloud, head of community relations for Lancashire Constabulary, insisted Preston was not troubled by racial disharmony, despite figures which placed it at the top of a chart for incidents of racial abuse. …

“We’ve got a lot of mixed races on that estate, and they live together in harmony all year long, and they’ve grown up together and they live together, so this is very rare indeed.”

In a sense they have a point: to reduce this incident to a hate crime risks diminishing the importance of other factors in play, such as poverty, joblessness, depressing housing conditions, and a generalized culture of booze and violence. Still, deploying the idea of “a lot of mixed races” “living together in harmony” seems quite a preposterous move at this time. I’d love to hear from the British massive on all this. Continue reading →

Eight weeks ago, relaying news of the harassment of a Hindu family in Wayne, NJ, our own A N N A made a prescient comment. Remarking on the verbiage of the reported written threats (“We Kill U,” “We will Fire your house,” “Watch Your Kids”) she said:

Feel free to scream at me for this, but I know desis who sound just like that, not that I’m in any way implying that it’s an inside job OR that asshat racists are usually articulate. “We will Fire your house”?

Her hunch was correct. It was an inside job. In what an email from SAJA delicately calls a “twist” in the story, it turns out that the perpetrator of six months’ worth of threatening letters and spray-painted messages was the family’s own son, now 17.

The ensuing investigation — which included DNA, fingerprint and computer analysis — brought together Wayne police, the Prosecutor’s Office, the state Division of Criminal Justice and the FBI.

Avigliano said the boy had recruited several friends to help with his campaign, which began with a series of hate letters in late January. Several teenagers have been interviewed, and more will be questioned in the next few days, the prosecutor said. Criminal charges are imminent, he said.

Reached by phone, the boy’s father said Friday that he was overwhelmed with pain as he tried to elicit answers from his son. The Record has withheld the family’s name at their request.

“My heart is breaking right now,” he said. “I can’t figure out why my son would do something like that.”

Indeed, the motive remains unclear, with police speculating only that the young man was upset at the familyÂ’s having recently moved to Wayne from another New Jersey town.

This would simply be a garden-variety family drama featuring a teenager alienated from his parents for reasons not ours to know, were it not, of course, for the ethnic and religious dimension of the threatening language, which raised the alarm of community organizations as well as the authorities:

There were also ethnic slurs — “I HATE INDIANS,” for example — and others too vulgar to print that targeted Hindus.

No doubt there are various morals to this story that people will put forward from different points of view. Suffice here to note that this is a sad story and a reminder that in all aspects of life, things are often not what they seem. Continue reading →