U.S. immigration authorities are detaining foreign correspondents on grounds they have not obtained special visas
. . .
True, there is a law stipulating a special visa for journalists, but few have ever heard of it and it is seldom enforced. No more. No one ever told the visiting journalists it had suddenly been revived.
. . .
Peter Krobath, chief editor for the Austrian movie magazine Skip, was seized and held overnight in a cold room with 45 others who landed without visas.
. . .
Six French journalists were marched across a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport in handcuffs
. . .
The International Press Institute, based in Vienna, along with the International Federation of Journalists, headquartered in Brussels, is protesting this treatment. The U.S. response? An embassy official in Vienna insisted that the government was only acting in accordance with the letter of the law.
Riverbend posted in August on the Iraqi populace’s response to chaos:
For a while, the men in certain areas began arranging ‘lookouts’. They would gather, every 6 or 7 guys, in a street, armed with Klashnikovs, and watch out for the whole area. They would stop strange cars and ask them what family they were there to visit. Hundreds of looters were caught that way- we actually felt safe for a brief period. Then the American armored cars started patrolling the safer residential areas, ordering the men off the streets- telling them that if they were seen carrying a weapon, they would be treated as criminals.
Leonard Dickins (Unruled) comments:
This quote is almost too good to be true for an anarchist. Anarchy [initially] releases criminal elements (the unorganized political means). This is opposed by the armed people, which works: “we actually felt safe”. But the state interposes; it will not permit any challenge to its monopoly, regardless of the price that the peons pay.
the swarthy Canadian menace, II
A year ago Maher Arar, a citizen of Canada, was arrested at a New York airport on his way home, and deported to Syria. I suspected he’d never be seen again, but he is now back in Canada, much the worse for wear.
Nov.15: a longer story (New York Times)
In Oklahoma, a teenager has been charged with the felony of “planning to cause serious bodily harm or death to another” because he wrote a presumably fictional script for a terrorist strike at a school. He did not show his story to anyone, nor did police searches find any of the weapons &c mentioned.
Updates: The judge dismissed the case on 2003 August 30, holding that no crime exists without evidence of intent to do the violence. Because the dismissal came more than a year after the charge, it could not be expunged; the relevant law has now been changed, effective next week (Nov.1).
Unsurprisingly, Bruce Schneier (who travels much more than I do) is also fed up at having drones demand his documents at every turn in the name of “security”.