Anonymous wrote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59466-2001Oct14.html

(People with Arabic-sounding names being detained with little or no court supervision) Can you think of any better way to push people into hating the US? What if the IRA were suspected of committing a terrorist act in the US? Would people with Irish-sounding names be locked up in max cells with no access to lawyers on the _chance_ that they might know something? I normally attribute acts like this to incompetence rather than malice, but this is really pushing it. Could someone be ensuring there'd always be a supply of terrorists in the US to cause a continuing crisis? -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel 617-670-3793 "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato

On Tuesday, October 16, 2001, at 09:30 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 12:24:28PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:

...

I normally attribute acts like this to incompetence rather than malice, but this is really pushing it. Could someone be ensuring there'd always

It might not be malice or incompetence but simple vindictiveness. The WashPost article reports this is happening in NYC, where there's no lack of angry police and government prosecutors around. Not saying this kind of secret detention is right, of course, but if you're looking for explanations...

They have every right to be angry. However, they have no right to sweep the streets and arrest 500-600 persons and throw them in a hole for 5 weeks. Arab students who merely lived in the same garden apartment complexes in San Diego as one of the hijackers were arrested, not charged, thrown in a small cell, and are being held for some kind of grand jury investigation. What ever happened to "taking a statement" and releasing them if there is no evidence they were complicit? Fear that they'll leave their student lives in San Diego and fly back home? (Probably a good bet for some fraction of the 500, some fraction who will be so radicalized by their treatment that they sign on to participate in a vengeance act.). Due process has been thrown out the prison windows (oops, there aren't any...) in this one. Amerika is shown to be a nation of angry cops, not a nation of laws. The next suspect held indefinitely in a stinking jail cell on "material witness" grounds could be me, you, or any of us. --Tim May --Tim May "Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"