When this article started out in October of 2005 we had hoped to continue the series with a report on the Lodi California Muslim South Asian Community and how it was handling the arrest and deportation of several of its members as a result of initial terrorism charges.

Instead of concentrating on this one report, we've decided to list a few example cases of recent abuses and link to articles with more details. What ties these cases together are individuals that live in fear and people being tagged as guilty by association. Although we cannot vouch for the innocence of every person in these stories, under the American system of justice we must assume that they are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

This February 19, 2006 will mark the 64th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. Order 9066 led to the internment without due process of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent. Although the following cases do not approach the scale of past atrocities, we hope that on this anniversary you please read these articles and not turn a blind eye to what is happening to our neighbors. The first step to preventing atrocities like the World War II Internment and McCarthy era witch-hunts is by staying informed. Do not bury your heads in the ground and assume these things can never happen to you. Ignorance only makes it more likely that it will.

Lodi Terrorist Story and the Effects on the Community
In the wake Terrorist investigations in Lodi California, the South Asian Muslim community is torn apart with groups pointing fingers at one another leading to some of the initial suspects being deported rather than facing terrorism charges.
Pacific News Service - Oct. 19, 2005

Dr. Nadeem Hassan Accused of Being a Member of an Organization With Questionable Ties to Terrorism
Dr. Nadeem Hassan and family had been given permission to go on the Hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, but when they tried to return to the United States, they were not allowed back in on the basis of Dr. Hassan's association with a group labeled as a terrorist organization.
Muslim American Society Freedom - Jan. 19, 2006
MSNBC/East Valley Tribune - Jan. 21, 2006
Daily Times of Pakistan - Jan. 21, 2006

Munir Mario Rashed - Teen Questioned by the FBI
Someone reported Muslim high school teen Munir Mario Rashed to the FBI because he had the initials "PLO" on his notebook. A disturbing side note to this story is the racist message left by Dr. Evil (yes that's the name the message writer uses) on the article's bulletin board. When you read this article, please scroll down to the feedback messages left by web readers to find the Dr. Evil message.
The Progressive - December 23, 2005
Daily Times of Pakistan - Dec. 27, 2005

George Mason Student Busted for Anti-Recruiting
Tariq Khan, a junior at George Mason University in Virginia and an Air Force veteran at 27, was protesting against military recruitment on campus. He was violently taken away and had hateful onlookers urging for him to be abused during his arrest.
The Progressive - October 13, 2005
Postscript - George Mason University urged that the charges be dropped and Tariq Khan is now free of all charges.
George Mason Urges No Prosecution of Anti-Recruiter
The Progressive - October 21, 2005
Virginia Drops Charges Against Tariq Khan
The Progressive - November 14, 2005

Kurdish American Ibrahim Parlak Accused of being a Terrorist
Ibrahim Parlak was granted political asylum back in 1992 for belonging to a Kurdish separatist group. That group has now been classified as a terrorist group. When he applied to become an American citizen, he was arrested and later released, but is fighting deportation. Sen. Carl Levin and Rep. Fred Upton have introduced a bill on 12/13/05 in congress to grant Ibrahim permanent U.S. residency.
The Free Ibrahim Website
Transcript of an ABC Nightline broadcast - June 8, 2005

Victim of the No-Fly List
Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral candidate, had initial trouble getting on a plane to go to her homeland of Malaysia for a conference. Apparently her name was on the no-fly list. Eventually she was allowed to fly to Malaysia. When she tried to return from Malaysia to finish her doctorate, she was told the U.S. Embassy had pulled her visa. She still has not returned.
Mercury News - Feb. 5, 2006
CBS 13 in Sacramento, CA - Feb. 5, 2006
KESQ ABC 3 News in Palm Desert, CA

To read more articles of McCarthy like abuses go to McCarthyism Watch.

The New McCarthyism: Repeating History in the War on Terrorism
By David Cole[*]

…The Cold War did most of its damage by targeting people not for their speech, but for their associations. Similarly, while many argue that we have avoided the mistakes of the past in this crisis, it would be more accurate to say that we have adapted the mistakes of the past, substituting new forms of political repression for old ones.

Today's war on terrorism has already demonstrated our government's remarkable ability to evolve its tactics in ways that allow it simultaneously to repeat history and to insist that it is not repeating history. We have not, it is true, interned people solely for their race, but we have detained approximately two thousand people, mostly through administrative rather than criminal procedures, and largely because of their ethnic identity.[4] In addition, we have subjected Arab and Muslim noncitizens to discriminatory deportation, registration, fingerprinting, visa processing, and interviews based on little more than their country of origin.[5] We have not, it is true, made it a crime to be a member of a terrorist group, but we have made guilt by association the linchpin of the war's strategy, penalizing people under criminal and immigration laws for providing "material support" to politically selected "terrorist" groups, without regard to whether an individual's support was intended to further or in fact furthered any terrorist activity.

In short, just as we did in the McCarthy era, we have offset the decline of traditional forms of repression with the development of new forms of repression. A historical comparison reveals not so much a repudiation as an evolution of political repression.

I do not mean to suggest that the Cold War and today's war on terrorism are in all respects identical. History never repeats itself in that literal a sense. For one thing, fear of ideas played a much larger role in the Cold War. Our concerns today stem more from the fear of catastrophic violence made possible by weapons of mass destruction and an enemy that appears immune to deterrence. We who witnessed the World Trade Center towers burn and fall will never forget the horrors of that day. But it is too easy in hindsight to minimize the threat that the nation felt during the Cold War. Then, we were threatened not by a terrorist gang of a few thousand men but by the second largest superpower in the world. Now we speculate about whether the enemy has access to weapons of mass destruction. Then, we knew that there were thousands of nuclear bombs trained on our cities. Many of us have nightmares of terrorist attacks today, but at least as many had nightmares then of a nuclear Armageddon.[6] In short, both periods unquestionably were times of mass fear.

As John Lord O'Brian argued in the midst of the Cold War, great fear inevitably produces calls for "preventive" law enforcement; we seek not merely to punish perpetrators after the fact but to prevent the next disaster from occurring.[7] Attorney General John Ashcroft has proudly proclaimed the "preventive" features of his campaign against terrorism.[8] But preventive justice and criminal law are not an easy mix; the fact that the criminal sanction requires the commission of a crime and insists on a strong presumption of innocence until guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt makes the criminal law an unwieldy mechanism for prevention. Prevention is not of course impossible to achieve through the criminal process. In theory, deterrence operates to prevent crimes, although deterrence is not very realistic when perpetrators are willing to sacrifice their own lives. And the crimes of conspiracy and attempts mean that we do not have to wait for the bomb to explode before arresting individuals and invoking criminal sanctions. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman is currently serving multiple life sentences for his role in planning to bomb the tunnels and bridges around Manhattan-the bombs never went off, yet we were able to prosecute the planners on conspiracy charges and incarcerate them for the rest of their lives.[9]

Still, the criminal process, with its rights to counsel, confrontation of adverse witnesses, public trial, and the presumption of innocence, undoubtedly makes preventive law enforcement more difficult. Accordingly, in times of fear, government often looks for ways to engage in prevention without being subject to the rigors of the criminal process. This Essay will argue that the government has invoked two methods in particular in virtually every time of fear. The first, discussed in Part I, involves a substantive expansion of the terms of responsibility. Authorities target individuals not for what they do or have done but based on predictions about what they might do. These predictions often rely on the individuals' skin color, nationality, or political and religious associations. The second method, the subject of Part II, is procedural-the government invokes administrative

processes to control, precisely so that it can avoid the guarantees associated with the criminal process. In hindsight, these responses are virtually always considered mistakes. They invite excesses and abuses, as many innocents suffer without any evident gain in security. And most significantly, they compromise our most basic principles-commitments to equal treatment, political freedoms, individualized justice, and the rule of law.

In the current war on terrorism, just as in prior times of fear, our government has adopted both substantive and procedural shortcuts toward the end of preventive justice. While it has altered slightly the tactics of prevention to avoid literally repeating history, in its basic approach the government today is replaying the mistakes of the past. All we have learned from history is how to mask the repetition, not how to avoid the mistakes.

I. A Rose by Any Other Name-Subversive Speech, Guilt by Association, and Material Support

II. The Course of Least Resistance-Substituting Administrative Process for Criminal Justice

Conclusion
Those who claim that the United States has avoided the mistakes of the past in its current war on terrorism have failed to look beneath the surface. While it is true that the scope of the wrongs done during World War I, World War II, or the Cold War has not yet been equaled, we are only in the initial stages of a war likely to be as permanent as the war on drugs or the war on crime. And when one looks not at the quantity but at the quality of our response, it is clear that we have resurrected the very techniques that got us into trouble in the past-namely, expanding the substantive definitions of wrongdoing to encompass otherwise innocent political activity, relying on group identity rather than individual conduct for suspicion, and adopting administrative measures to avoid the safeguards associated with the criminal process.

If the past is any guide, these mistakes will come at substantial cost to the targeted communities, as many innocent persons are swept up in the government's preventive net. But the mistakes may also undermine the war on terrorism itself. Professor Oren Gross has argued that the greatest threat that terrorists pose to a democratic state is not to its physical survival, but to what one might call the survival of principle.[119] He argues that what terrorists want is to provoke the state into (over)reacting in ways that violate its own principles, thereby undermining the state's legitimacy and creating sympathy for those allied with the terrorists.[120] If that is the case, it is all the more critical as we respond to the terrorist threat that we learn from our past mistakes and adhere to the principles that distinguish us from terrorists, for we may well be playing into Al Qaeda's hands.

A little more than one year after the United States suffered one of the worst attacks on civilian life in modern history, one might expect to find widespread sympathy and support for the United States around the world. But instead, reports of anti-Americanism suggest that hostility to the United States has grown substantially since September 11.[121] No doubt much of this resentment is attributable to our unilateral foreign policy. But it likely is also due at least in part to the fact that as we insist that we are fighting a war for our freedom, we have denied those basic freedoms to many "suspicious" persons, the vast majority of whom are foreign nationals of Arab origin and/or Muslim faith. When we sacrifice the very principles that allegedly distinguish us from terrorists, and particularly when we do so in ways that appear to discriminate, we forfeit much of the war on terrorism's legitimacy.

It is understandable that in times of fear, we defer to authority and close our eyes to the wrongs perpetrated in the name of our protection. But history reveals that blind faith is wholly unwarranted. Now more than ever it is critical that we remain true to our principles. There is nothing wrong with prevention when it consists of protecting potential targets of attack or stepping up security at borders, airports, and other vulnerable points. But when prevention translates into the punishment of individuals for what we suspect they may do, rather than for what they have done, it cannot be justified in a democratic society. The safeguards of the criminal process exist for a reason, and whenever we impose punishment or deprive persons of their liberty without adhering to these safeguards, we do more harm than good. The success of the war on terrorism, and indeed of our democratic experiment, requires us to reconsider the shortcuts that we have all too swiftly and predictably adopted.

The following books are discounted for subscribers to our newsletter. The discounts on these books end March 5, 2006.

In Good Conscience
Supporting Japanese Americans During the Internment

See the article in this newsletter.

For a limited time, we are charging approximately 44% less for shipping Internet orders of this book, than if you were to order them by phone. If you ordered In Good Conscience by phone, you would pay $8 for book rate shipping and $4 for each additional copy.

View Additional Information
ORDER -- Item #3373, Price $26.95 Paperback
ORDER -- Item #3374, Price $39.95 Hardback

The Year of the Dog

This book chronicles a year of the life of a Taiwanese American girl named Pacy. It's the lunar year of the Dog and Pacy is told that it is a good year for friendship, family, and self-discovery. Follow along as Pacy's year of discovery leads her to a new friendship, learning about her family and culture, and her ultimate talent in life.

This novel by picture book author Grace Lin will inspire young readers to go on their own journey of discovery in this current year of the Dog.

View Additional Information
ORDER -- Item #3377, Price $14.99

The Have a Good Day Cafe

Mike's parents' food stand business takes a turn for the worse when competing vendors move to their corner of the park. Learn how Mike and his grandmother, who has come from Korea to live with his family, find delicious ways to help the family business. You'll learn the names for a plethora of Korean dishes from this story and its glossary.

View Additional Information
ORDER -- Item #3375, Price $16.95

The Colonel and the Pacifist
Karl R. Bendetsen, Perry H. Saito,
And the Incarceration of Japanese Americans
During World War II

Klancy Clark de Nevers biography of Karl Bendetsen and Perry Saito gives us two interesting perspectives of the Japanese American World War II internment and post internment experience. Bendetsen, Saito, and the author de Nevers all came from the same town of Aberdeen, Washington. While Bendesten and Saito starting from the same place, their lives would go in directions and intersect at historic crossroads. Bendetsen played a key role in the creation of the executive order (9066) that would ultimately send Perry Saito to Tule Lake internment camp.

The Colonel and the Pacifist gives us these two personal perspectives while exploring the larger issues of racism, civil rights, and national security during times of war.

View Additional Information
ORDER -- Item #3286, Retailed Price $21.95

Red is a Dragon
A Book of Colors

Follow along with this delightful rhyming picture book as the main character discovers a rainbow of colors in the Chinese American world around her. Readers will see a variety of Lunar New Year appropriate things such as red firecrackers and dragons, to yellow incense sticks, and white noodles.

View Additional Information
ORDER -- Item #3376, Price $14.95