Jill Serjeant

Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday, December 18^th, after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed and behind bars.

Shocked and frustrated Islamic and immigrant groups estimate that more than 500 people have been arrested in Los Angeles, neighboring Orange County and San Diego in the past three days under a new nationwide anti-terrorism program. Some unconfirmed reports put the figure as high as 1,000. The arrests sparked a demonstration of hundreds of Iranians outside a Los Angeles immigration office. The protesters carried banners saying “What’s next? Concentration camps?” and “What happened to liberty and justice?”

A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service said no numbers of people arrested would be made public. A justice Department spokesman could not be reached for comment.

The head of the southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union compared the arrests to the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during the Second World War. “I think it is shocking what is happening. It is reminiscent of what happened in the past with the internment of Japanese Americans. We are getting a lot of telephone calls from people. We are hearing that people went down wanting to cooperate and then they were detained,” said Ramona Ripston, the ACLU’s executive director.

JAILS OVERFLOWING

One activist said local jails were so overcrowded that the immigrants could be sent to Arizona, where they could face weeks or months in prisons awaiting hearings before immigration judges or deportation. “It is a shock. You don’t expect this to happen. It is really putting fright and apprehension in the community. People who come from these countries – this is what they expect from their government. Not from America,” said Sabiha Khan of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

The arrests were part of a post Sept. 11 program that requires all males over 16 from a list of 20 Arab or Middle East countries, who do not have permanent resident status in the United States, to register with U.S. immigration authorities. Monday was the deadline for men from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan. News of the mass arrests came first in southern California, which is home to more than 600,000 Iranian exiles and their families.

Officials declined to give figures for those arrested or for the numbers of people who turned up to register, be fingerprinted and have their photographs taken. “We are not releasing any numbers,” said Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) spokesman Francisco Arcaute.

CALLS FOR HELP

Islamic groups and the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said they had been swamped with calls for help.

INS spokesman Arcaute said those arrested had violated immigration laws, overstayed their visas, or were wanted for crimes. The program was prompted by concern about the lack of records on tourists, students and other visitors to the United States after the Sept. 11 hijack plane attacks on New York and Washington.

Islamic community leaders said many of the detainees had been living, working and paying taxes in the United States for five or ten years, and had families here. “Terrorists most likely wouldn’t come to the INS to register. It is really a bad way to go about it. They are being treated as criminals and that really goes against American ideals of fairness, and justice and democracy,” Khan said.

The Iranian protesters said many of those detained were victims of official delays in processing visa and green card requests.

“My father, they just took him in,” one young man told reporters. “They’ve been treating him like an animal. They put him in a room with, like, 50 other people and no bed or anything.” Khan said one of those in jail was a doctor, who was being sponsored for U.S. citizenship when his sponsor died. One Syrian man said he went to register in Orange county with a dozen friends. He was the only one to come out of the INS office. “All my friends are inside right now,” M.M. Trapici, 45, told reporters. “I have to visit the family for each one today. Most of them have small kids.”

FOR LEGAL ASSISTANCE

Immigration Attorneys

413-732 3320

413-549 2002

202-244 2990, www.adc.org

Lawyer Referral Service (immigration) 800-954 0254, www.aila.org; click “Need a Lawyer

State Bar Association

866-627 7577

National Lawyers Guild National Immigration Project 617-227 9727

www.nationalimmigrationproject.org

2. A Missile Coverup at MIT?

James Carroll

(For Subscribers in other lands who may not know of MIT, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology located in Cambridge Massachusetts: it is certainly one of the most renowned universities for advanced science studies in the in the United States. It has fostered untold numbers of Nobel Prize Laureates over the years. Its reputation in the sciences has always been of the highest.)

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Last month the United States Air Force general in charge of developing the missile defense system (“star wars”) declared that the elusive technology had finally proven itself. “We no longer need to experiment, to demonstrate, or prevaricate,” Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish said. “We need to get on with this.”

But the record of Pentagon assertions in favor of missile defense has been unreliable, to say the least. A project that is bringing tens of billions of dollars into military-industrial coffers carries an irresistible bias in its own behalf, and history shows that neither the Defense Department nor its contractors are reliable evaluators of the science and technology on which President Bush’s vaunted “shield” must stand. Leave aside for the moment the disturbing question of whether US initiatives toward missile defense will ignite a mortal new arms race with China and others. The remaining question of feasibility is grave enough. Can the nation afford $100 billion for a system that won’t work? Can the government put the lives of citizens at risk behind a shield that will not protect?

Such questions are too important to leave to the obviously biased evaluators of the Pentagon and the defense industry. That is why the scientific claims of the Missile Defense Agency and its contractors must be examined by disinterested experts in the scientific community. On such independence rests the health of the US economy, the safety of the nation, and the integrity of science itself when so much else has been corrupted. These are the stakes of a dispute that has been brewing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for more than a year.

Theodore A. Postol is a professor of science , technology, and national security policy at MIT. He earned a reputation as a debunker of the Patriot missile’s Gulf War performance and then as a skeptic of missile defense . He challenged whether the system under design could ever reliably distinguish between incoming warheads and decoys.

At particular issue was a 1997 test conducted and deemed successful by the defense contractor TRW. After that “success” was questioned by federal investigators, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory was hired to evaluate it. In 1999 Lincoln Lab affirmed TRW’s results. Soon thereafter Postol objected, challenging not only the Pentagon and its contractor – but his own university. The Government Accounting Office investigated and concluded that Postol was right in pointing out flaws in the TRW test, but Postol’s charge had gone beyond flaws to fraud. “Lincoln Lab,” he said to me over coffee recently, “covered up a program-stopping flaw in the missile defense system. A great university involved in a coverup?”

In April 2001 Postol went to MIT authorities about the matter, and then early this year he went public, raising the grave question of whether Lincoln Lab colluded in TRW’s deception. Postol argued that the “success” of the experiment depended on a match between observed phenomena and predicted phenomena. Had TRW fraudulently substituted one for the other? Had Lincoln Lab knowingly covered up that substitution? Had Lincoln Lab misled federal investigators? Had top MIT officials ignored and distorted these charges? Postol demanded an investigation. Last February, MIT launched and in-house inquiry into Postol’s charges. (The Boston Globe called for an independent investigation at that time, asking MIT “to reconsider this self-protecting institutional reflex.”)

The internal MIT inquiry into its own conduct was concluded last month, and it called for the outside investigation Postol had been demanding all along. That recommendation has now gone to MIT’s top officials, and what it will lead to remains to be seen.

Postol, for his part, has already reached a conclusion and is hoping for congressional intervention. In letters he sent in late October to Representative Howard Berman, Democrat of California, and Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, cosponsors of the False Claims Act, Postol wrote, “In effect, Lincoln verified and certified as accurate bookkeeping arithmetic when Lincoln knew that the bookkeeping practices were fraudulent.”

This might sound like a reprise of the Enron scandal when both a company and its watchdog accountants were caught lying – a corruption not only of a basic system but also of the system’s oversight mechanism. But Enron, finally, involved only money. The corruption that Postol alleges goes to the quick of scientific integrity, to the dead center of the academy’s relationship to government and, even more crucial, to the method of which future US defense strategies will be devised.

The independent investigation demanded by the courageous Postol is long overdue. His demands might seem like disloyalty to a besieged university protective of its reputation. They might seem like mere “prevarication” to a Pentagon wanting “to get on” with missile defense. But to America there is nothing esoteric about the truth, especially when falsehood, igniting an arms race, can pave the road to war.

Please note that the index of past articles is back in operation thanks to the technical expertise of my most knowledgeable and close friend Josh Rosenstock.

One only needs to click on the signature below and the index of articles will open. Then click on any article and the issue of The JvL Bi-Weekly containing that article will open. And one can download, print or forward that article or whatever. All the very best, Jim (James van Luik)

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