You Will Anyway: Gearing up for internment camps again?

Monday, January 6, 2020

Gearing up for internment camps again?

Activists and the Washington chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-WA) said immigration authorities detained and questioned at least 60 Iranians and Iranian-Americans over the weekend at the Peace Arch Border Crossing in Blaine, Washington. The watchdog group said some were held and questioned for at least 11 hours.

A US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesperson dismissed as "false" social media posts purporting that Iranian Americans were detained and refused entry because of their ethnic origins.

The spokesperson added that "reports that DHS/CBP has issued a related directive are also false". The spokesperson was referring to allegations made by CAIR, who cited an unnamed source at CBP, that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a national order for CBP to report and detain individuals of Iranian origin entering the country who are deemed "adversarial". CAIR said one woman, identified as a 24-year-old American medical student named Crystal, was detained for 10 hours with her family before being released.

[...]

According to CBP, wait times at the Blaine facility were on average two hours on Saturday evening, but some travellers had to wait up to four hours due to an increased number of people trying to go through the port of entry and reduced staffing during the holiday season.
alJazeera

Don't let us inconvenience your vacation.

Citing individuals she spoke with and assisted, Katebi said the questions asked of those of Iranian origin had nothing to do with immigration.

"They were asked [about] specific organisations, and political factions in Iran and their affiliations with them or their views on them or groups that they never even heard of," Katebi said the individuals she assisted said. She also said they were asked about their college majors.

[...]

CBP said: "Based on the current threat environment, CBP is operating with an enhanced posture at its ports of entry to safeguard our national security and protect the America people while simultaneously protecting the civil rights and liberties of everyone."

Sounds like "civil rights and liberties" might mean something different to the thought police, I mean CBP.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee said on Twitter that his office is "closely tracking reports that Iranian Americans, including US citizens and lawful permanent residents, have been detained.'' He urged anyone affected to contact his office.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.