Racial Profiling in the “War on Terror”: Say it Ain’t So Joe!!!!!!!

In many respects, the entire “war on terror” has been based on racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, which is no surprise to any informed observer.  “Special” registration, targeted interrogations and detentions, selective deportations, among many other steeps, have targeted Arab and Muslim noncitizens.  So, this news report is not really surprising:  since September 11, federal law-enforcement agencies have established profiling techniques to screen immigrants based on their nationalities. The profiling, described in a February 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that McClatchy obtained, shows that the government has relied more heavily on nationality as an indicator of security risks than was previously known. Federal agencies have created internal lists of countries that are of “special interest” for national security reasons, wrote the memo’s author, a supervisory special agent with the Office of Intelligence at Immigration & Customs Enforcement. So many federal agencies have created different lists that U.S. officials contemplated adopting a single one to streamline the process.

And as my friend Susan Akram (Boston U) reminds me, the U.S. government was profiling Arabs and Muslims as potential “terrorists” long before September 11.

KJ