America's Apartheid Detention Program

[QuietStorm]

Just west of the Hudson, looking hard at lower Manhattan's now achingly blinded skyline, is that stretch of metropolitan New Jersey tourism experts call America's "Gateway". Named to remind us of New Jersey's historic role as launching point for immigrant journeys westward into the heart and hinterlands of the nation, it also highlights Lady Liberty's famous welcome, for only hundreds of feet from this shoreline, on her own little island, stands our world-famous symbol of safe-haven and deliverance.

The mockery here can now be felt not just by newcomers but by many of those who'd begun the process of settling long before the 9/11 attacks. And yet few Americans are aware of this further irony: how inexorably "Gateway New Jersey" has become "Dungeon" or better, "Bastille New Jersey" for those the government has deemed politically undesireable or threatening.

snip

As of this writing, not one has had a credible terrorism-related rap laid on him. Until recently, it was possible to say that only a handful had even been charged with anything. I suspect that if we generalized from the few we know something about to the entire cohort (is it 1200? 2000? 5000? 10,000?), we wouldn't be far off. It would certainly be as mad a mix of men as any who ever stumbled into a government net or suddenly found themselves trapped in it, running the gamut from boys to men to old men, from the hapless to the reckless and feckless, from retail workers to intellectuals, taxi drivers to computer programmers to the serially unemployed, from illegal immigrants and petty criminals to students and minor visa violators.

http://counterpunch.org/alaya08162003.html