NEWSTERRORISM

McCarthy had his “communists” and Long Island Congressman Peter King has his “radical muslims,” or as his subconscious would likely put it, “all them non-white brown people.” His proposed panel before the House Committee on Homeland Security under the guise of stopping of terrorism, “Radicalization of Muslim-Americans,” is nothing more than unbridled bigotry packaged nicely with official stamps of approval and quiet whispers of nodded agreement from the nation’s most virulent racists. This certainly isn’t King’s first attempt to spread fear of Muslim-Americans.

And, most ironically (and dangerously), it threatens to do the opposite of what it says it’s doing — those hearings will not make us a safer country or stop terrorism. They will alienate our greatest allies in the fight against radical/violent religiosity. Has Mr. King forgotten that it was a Muslim-American who thwarted a bomb attack in Times Square? That it’s Muslim-Americans who consistently work with the government to identify and weed out extremists within their communities (48 out of 120 times in fact)?

No doubt it would be useful to identify potential future-terrorists, but that’s as complicated a matter as having guessed a disturbed teenager in Tucson would obtain a firearm legally and open fire at a supermarket meet-and-greet. Mr. King would do well to turn his stereotyping of an overwhelmingly peaceful community into a complex analysis of all extremism that threatens our country … including anti-Muslim violence that has been on a rise.

At a time when Muslim Americans in communities across the country are feeling abused by federal law enforcement, Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, wants to know why they aren’t more cooperative with those who are targeting them.

King, the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is planning to hold controversial hearings on the supposed radicalization of Muslims in American communities. The hearings, which are expected to take place sometime in February, have been likened by activists to a “witch hunt” and to the infamous hearings held by Sen. Joe McCarthy to ferret out secret communists in the 1950s.

“You can definitely say overall the hearings are seen with great apprehension, suspicion and distaste — sometimes sorrow,” said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an expert on Islam and Islamic law at UCLA, in a recent interview with Politico. “These hearings have a history of stigmatizing whole groups of people.”

According to Politico, possible witnesses may include two critics of Islam popular in right-wing circles that have made “creeping radicalism” and alleged jihad in America a cause célèbre: Dutch critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali and M. Zuhfi Jassar. Law enforcement officials and people with “the real life experience of coming from the Muslim community” will also be included, said King.

But activists within the Muslim community are loudly denouncing the hearings, fearing that Muslims are being targeted for political show – a dangerous game for which an entire swath of people is being singled out on the basis of religion.

Hard to imagine a worse fate than being wrongly imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. But as if being wrongfully detained in the U.S.'s offshore human-rights loophole isn't enough, the U.S. Military is now "freeing" former terrorist suspects back to countries where there is clear danger to their lives.

Thousands of U.S. citizens have protested the mere existence of the Guantanamo detention center (most recently, in my beloved home town of San Francisco). But these forced deportations take Guantanamo's human rights abuses to a whole new level. As with any deportation, a detainee has the right to protest that the country of repatriation is not safe. The 1994 Convention Against Torture is a legal safeguard that protects any forcible return to a country with a proven track record for abuse that may affect the safety of the prisoner in question.

Yet since Obama's inauguration (remember when he promised to shut Guantanamo down?), two freed Guantanamo detainees have been forcibly transferred to Algeria on separate occasions, despite their avid protests that their lives would be at risk once they touched down on Algerian soil. Mohammed, the most recent prisoner to be sentenced home, was awaiting the Supreme Court's ruling on his appeal for a safe third country transfer when he was loaded onto a plane and sent to Algeria anyway.

What can it mean when a citizen of the United States, living abroad, can be detained with the cooperation of American officials, and -- without a warrant, without charge, without explanation -- be allegedly beaten, tortured and then put on a no-fly list so that he cannot return to the U.S. even he wanted to?

Civil liberties groups and Muslim-American activists are saying that's the case with 19-year-old Gulet Mohamed, a Somali-American who has been living in Yemen and Kuwait since March 2009, and is now barred from re-entering America. And activists say he's not the first, indicating that the rights Americans enjoy may be more tenuous than we think.

In fact, the ACLU is suing the U.S. government on behalf of 10 citizens and legal permanent residents (three of them U.S. military veterans), some of whom are living abroad, but are now on the amorphous no-fly list, which, according to The Washington Post's latest estimate, is about 4,000 individuals long. According to the ACLU, the individuals stranded include one American in Mexico, another in Columbia and four in Yemen.

According to the lawsuit, the individuals have no idea how they got on the list, nor have they been given the opportunity to appeal or redress the situation -- they just cannot fly.

You're much more likely to die as result of a train crash on the public transit system in the nation's capital than you are a terrorist attack – nine people died in a June 2009 crash due to what federal inspectors call Metro's “anemic safety culture,” while no one has been killed as a result of terrorism.

But, banking on the assumption that the public values easily bypassed security theater more than having competent train operators and fully functional safety equipment, Metro officials have decided to sink their limited resources into random, liberty-eviscerating bag checks.

“Passenger security and safety is our top priority here at Metro,” claimed Michael Taborn, chief of the Metro Transit Police, in a YouTube video announcing the move in December. “To help ensure that our customers, employees and facilities are provided with the highest level of security, we're seeking your support as we move forward to implement random inspections of items carried into the Metro system.”

At a packed meeting Monday night meeting of the Metro Riders' Advisory Council (RAC), however, the public response was overwhelming: no, thank you – we rather like our rights.

Given that New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani ran a whole failed presidential campaign on his supposed war on terror-fighting credentials – he was in office when 9/11 happened, or so I've heard -- one might reasonably wonder: why is the former GOP candidate flying to Paris and publicly praising the Mujahhideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian exile group that worked side-by-side with Saddam Hussein and killed civilians and U.S. military personnel alike?

The question isn't actually all that hard to answer. While, sure, the MEK might be designated a terrorist group by the State Department, it is rabidly opposed to the current Iranian government – so much so that the group fled Iran in the 1980s and sought refuge in Iraq, where it worked on behalf of the Iraqi dictator to stage suicide attacks against their own countrymen. So while terrorists, they're useful terrorists when it comes to furthering U.S. policy goals for the Middle East, or at least that's the thinking.

Led by Maryam Rajavi, the self-appointed “President Elect” of Iran (you think the 2009 Iranian election was rigged...), the group combines a strange personality cult with a mishmash of Marxist doctrine. And like the Afghan mujahadeen before it – those lovely folks who later formed the Taliban and al-Qaeda – there are plenty of high-profile U.S. politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, willing to lend the group their support.

The FBI on Tuesday added four more names to the list of antiwar activists subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury as part of an investigation into whether members of the peace movement provided “material support” for terrorism.

In all, 23 people have been subpoenaed since September 24, when the FBI raided the offices and homes of prominent activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. None has been charged with a crime. Several have also refused to testify in what they say is a witch hunt aimed more at intimidating those who dare speak out against U.S. foreign policy than uncovering actual ties to terrorists.

And they're probably right.

Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this past June, the definition of “material support” for terrorism is now so broad as to include any sort of “advice” to a State Department-designated terrorist group, even if that advice is “stop engaging in terrorism and embrace nonviolence.” Former President Jimmy Carter and groups such as the ACLU and Human Rights Watch have spoken out against the ruling.

Because the definition is so broad, though, it provides the perfect legal basis for the government to go after those opposed to its policies abroad. And as the Bush administration ably demonstrated, there are plenty of people in government who would be all too happy to equate opposition to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen – just to name a few – as de facto support for terrorism.

If you watch cable news, well, geez, stop. But if hearing Wolf Blitzer churn Pentagon press releases into news reports is your sort of thing, then you might be under the impression that all this recent WikiLeaks stuff is simultaneously 1) *yawn* much ado about nothing and 2) the greatest national security threat ev-er -- even bigger than the threat of gays openly serving in the military.

What you might have missed, though, amid all the hubbub over tawdry gossip and the drone of respectable American journalists decrying the fact their government wasn't better able to keep information from them, was that the thousands of leaked State Department cables provide clear evidence of official wrongdoing – wrongdoing that the political establishment would much rather soon forget than acknowledge.

One cable in particular “reveals a sad reality about the tangled web woven by the Bush administration when it decided to engage in torture,” says the group Human Rights First, “and highlights how President Obama has kept the U.S. ensnared in that legacy.”

Guantanamo Bay is a disgrace, a festering sore on the U.S.'s human rights record where 174 men, some imprisoned since they were children, are locked away in cages for crimes the government admits in some cases it has no evidence they committed. Yet closing it -- that is, fulfilling a key and oft-repeated campaign promise -- might cause some in Congress to say mean things about the president and maybe even hurt Barack Obama's reelection campaign in 2012, so courageously anonymous White House officials are now setting the record straight: the prison camp at Gitmo ain't going anywhere.

As for all that rhetoric about needing to close the prison camp in order to begin restoring the U.S.'s image abroad? It was just that: rhetoric, useful at the time to win over liberals and progressives angered over the Bush administration's cavalier disregard for international law, but now seen as burdensome in today's political environment. And so like that, the pledge is dropped.

Indeed, quoted in The Washington Post over the weekend, a top Obama administration official was as clear as could be: "Gitmo is going to remain open for the foreseeable future." Just as with the previous administration, closing the prison camp is ostensibly a long-term goal. But just as under President Bush -- whose Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, Obama personally asked to stay on -- it's not a goal the White House is willing to spend any political capital actually achieving, suggesting that perhaps it's not a real goal at all.

Yet as you can almost hear David Axelod saying, what'cha gonna do about it -- vote Republican?

Warning: The Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) is looking for terrorists that carry bombs and other deadly weapons in their vagina and anal passage.

TSA is in the process of implementing new pat-down procedures at checkpoints nationwide, better known as "show us your body or we'll feel you up." Essentially, the new policy is to do a thorough touch-and-feel intrusive search of anyone who does not want a full body-scan.

Just last week, TSA agents at Baltimore airport warned an airline passenger that they would start doing "crotchal searches" at airports. "We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance," the agent explained, identifying resistance as testicles. Testicular-fondling is now part of our national security apparatus and TSA agents can sexually assault people who need to get on commercial airplanes.

Everyday Americans are already feeling the effects of this new policy. After her underwire bra set off an alarm, CNN's Rosemary Fitzpatrick admitted that she was reduced to tears when subjected to the new pat down. "I felt helpless, I felt violated, and I felt humiliated," she said.

Here's the clincher. TSA blogger Bob tells us that all airline travelers can ask for a grope, I mean, pat-down, in a private room because that is somehow supposed to make the gross invasion of privacy so much better.