Moustafa Bayoumi | The Nation
A Poem for the Wounded City
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when we remembered the innocents who lost their lives so tragically that day. Let us also realize that the best way to honor the loss of innocent life on one day is to remember the taking of innocent life on all days, and not just here but everywhere, and to work toward a future without terrorism, war, the terror of war and the “war on terror.” “I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons,” says Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself.” My colleague Elliot Colla reminded me of this Walt Whitman poem, and it’s worth posting today:
Mannahatta
The Rites and Rights of Citizenship
On Tuesday I became a citizen of the United States. Almost ten years ago, I was granted permanent residency. Between my green card and my naturalization certificate lies the seemingly endless decade of the “war on terror.”
I was in New York on September 11, 2001, but back then I was neither a resident nor a citizen. And if you weren’t a citizen, and you had a Muslim name, you couldn’t help but think that your life was about to change for the worse. I was already teaching at Brooklyn College, on a work visa. I had come to New York in 1990 from Canada to attend graduate school at Columbia University and, when I got the job at Brooklyn College, I transferred my student visa into a work visa and applied for a green card. My immigration attorney worked in lower Manhattan, a block away from the towers, and he was among the first people I called to make sure he was fine. He was, thankfully. He was shaken up to be sure, and there was ash all over his building, he told me, but he was okay. His voice was breaking with emotion over the phone.
I remember many things about September 11, the solemnity mixing with the acrid smells in the air in particular, but also the tremulous anxiety surrounding Arabs and Muslims in the city in those days. The sweep arrests that John Ashcroft regularly announced on the airwaves in the first weeks following the attacks sent shudders through all the Arabs and Muslims I knew in the city. We would meet up regularly to trade FBI stories, which was weirdly consoling. There came a point when I realized that every Arab person I knew in New York had either been visited or knew someone who had been visited by the FBI. At that point, I was waiting for my green card to arrive, and when it did, on October 15, I felt my own personal sigh of national security relief. A green card may not carry the protections of citizenship, but it’s a far less vulnerable condition than a work visa.
Spy vs. Spy
The news about the NYPD’s spying (with the CIA’s help) continues to grow. In this report, Len Levitt, a former police-beat reporter for Newsday, describes “a trove of pages of Intelligence Division documents” that he received. Levitt writes that “the NYPD's spying operation has compiled information on 250 mosques, 12 Islamic schools, 31 Muslim Student Associations, 263 places it calls ‘ethnic hotspots,’ such as businesses and restaurants as well as 138 ‘persons of interest.’ ” My own workplace, Brooklyn College, is mentioned in the report.
The reporting on this story tends to portray the NYPD as a rogue organization and the FBI as its buttoned-up brother. But we shouldn’t forget that one of the last things Michael Mukasey did as attorney general was to create the category of “assessments” for the bureau. Prior to this, the FBI investigated people they suspected of wrongdoing. Under the new rules, no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing is needed to open an “assessment.” In two years, Eric Holder’s FBI opened 82,325 assessments of people and groups and continued only 3,315 investigations. (As the ACLU blog put it: “But all of the information about the 79,000 innocent people investigated during this two-year period can be retained by the FBI forever, despite the fact no one engaged in wrongdoing of any kind.”) The FBI is also relaxing its rules, enabling agents to recruit more informers. “Agents have asked for that power,” the New York Times reported back in June, “in part because they want the ability to use information found in a subject’s trash to put pressure on that person to assist the government in the investigation of others.”
The bad news is that, ten years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the national security state is alive and well and continues to invade the privacy of American citizens. The good news is that soon everyone will be on either the FBI or NYPD payroll and the unemployment problem will be solved.
The Long Life of Profiling, Ten Years After 9/11
The Associated Press has been doing some good investigative reporting lately. On August 24, the AP broke the news that the CIA and the NYPD are combining forces to spy on Muslims in New York City. Since the CIA is prohibited by law to collect intelligence on American citizens, this is more than newsworthy. It’s probably unconstitutional, which explains why the NYPD has, according to the report, kept these activities secret.
This is no ordinary program, nor does it seem to be merely about sharing expertise.
According to the report, the NYPD dispatches “rakers,” the NYPD term, into a “human mapping program” to monitor the daily lives of Muslim Americans in the places where ordinary living transpires, such as bookstores, cafés, bars and nightclubs, without the hint of criminal wrongdoing. The police department also employs “mosque crawlers,” who scrutinize imams and their sermons, and have gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs commonly associated with Muslim workers.
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