Frightening things are afoot. That much we all kno…
Frightening things are afoot. That much we all know, but it seems to me that the whole 9/11 thing has caused a lot of people to believe they are justified in just turning off their brains so that other can do their thinking for them. My good friend Clar, who is responsible for international student affairs at a large US university, described what is going on at her school. Here are some excerpts from what she told me:
“It’s so scary here right now. There have been leaks in the press that the government is compiling a list of all “suspected terrorist sympathizers”, and it includes a University Pres. who gave a speech urging “peaceful solutions, and to not give in to hate.”
“The most recent student (of several) to be picked up was taken from work, he was not allowed a phone call. for 4 days, he was in INS lockup (a wing of a state pen.) and his roommates, family, all thuoght he’d been mugged and killed. local police finally found him. INS didn’t notify them, either. he was just taken.”
“I should not have expected that we would have learned anything from the past…… I’m waiting for the interrment camps to start up. At first, I
thought that I’d be out of a job since it looked like they were gonna ban internaitonals, now it is clear that I’m going to be made a tool of the witch
hunt. The INS came to my office and requisitoned lists of students from “certain countries”.
“The U.S. Patriot Act has **REPEALED** the Buckley AMendment (protecting student records), and it has NO TIME LIMIT. It doesn’t say that these freedoms are suspended “for the duration of the war”, it’s forever. And nobody complained. anyone who questioned it was slammed in the media. They’ve loosened the rules protecting the privacy of phone calls. I don’t know about e-mail and snail mail. they are setting up military tribunals.”
“If it’s an analogy that helps, the things that our students were picked up for – they were paperwork errors and minor violations. the kind of things that before the U.S. Patriot Act was passed were settled by filling out a form, paying a $120 fee to the INS and waiting 6 months for a response from the regional office. Now they’re being picked up and put in jail. The student I told you about had let his grades slip and was on academic probation. that means he was not enrolled for a semester. the normal procedure is to file a form called an I-539 and attach proof that he got back in school the following semester, pay a $120 fee and get a letter to put in his file saying that he’s back in INS good graces. Instead, he was jailed, and released on $3,000 bond. He’s hired an attourney, and he’ll have to go before an INS court this spring.”
“It’s like being a taxpayer, and all the previous years you’ve filed, if you make a calculation error, the IRS sends you a letter telling you to fix your
return, with a grace period in which to do it, and then one year, the exact same error lands you in jail, with no warning. scary.”
As I said, frightening stuff.
