Homeland Security targeting sixteen-year olds?
Yet another reason why students asked to write about current events should refuse: sixteen-year-old Tashnuba Hayder was forced to “return to Bangladesh”--a country she hasn’t seen since age 5 and whose language she doesn’t know--partially because a tutor asked her to write about Homeland Security.
The tutor, Asmaa Samad, recalled the essay as innocuous: “It said nothing derogative, nothing unpatriotic.” Tashnuba said agents seized on one part. “I wrote, ‘I feel like Muslims are being targeted, they’re being outcasted more.‘“
When she wrote that, she still believed that in America she had the freedom to write such things. But that phrase turned out to be more true than she or her tutor realized.
“Homeland Security” is quickly becoming the farce that Transportation Security has become: they spend more time and money on lots of little pointless actions because that’s easy and safe and it makes for more work and more job security.
Kicking Tashnuba Hayder out of the United States has made no one safer. It only highlights how right Tashnuba was--and others are--when they complain about the dangerous profiling of minorities.
- Questions, Bitterness and Exile for Queens Girl in Terror Case
- “A government psychiatrist concluded that she was neither suicidal nor homicidal, and recommended her release.”
- Airport Security’s Grand Illusion
- “This mass ceremonial sacrifice of toenail clippers on the altar of security comes at an extraordinarily high price. The annual budget of the federal Transportation Security Administration hovers around $5.5 billion--just about the same price as the entire FBI--a figure that doesn’t include the cost of wasted time.”
- No American ‘Gulag’
- “This country should be held to a higher standard based on its own Constitution, laws and traditions. We cannot fulfill our responsibilities as the world's only superpower without being perceived as a moral authority. Despite the risks posed by terrorism, the United States cannot indefinitely detain people considered dangerous without appropriate safeguards for their conditions of detention and periodic review of their status.”
More Homeland Security
- How many businesses want fewer customers?
- Homeland security trolls highlight one of the biggest problems with government services. Alienating customers doesn’t mean going out of business.
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
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