The people at Homeland Security have really gone over the line, not only in the criteria of who is a threat, but in their treatment of persons against whom nothing has been proven. I read about this this morning and was totally flabbergasted. I know they are a bunch of fascists, but this is just too much. If this woman is a terrorist, then so is Laura Bush.
more below
This is her background..
She was born in Wales. Her mother is a British homemaker, and her father, an emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Wales, was born in India to a Sikh family and moved to Britain in the 1960s. A redacted government report about the episode obtained by her lawyer under the Freedom of Information Act erroneously described her as "Hispanic."
She is a musicologist who is an expert on Edward Elgar, the British composer who wrote "Pomp and Circumstance" among other things. She plays the piano and the violin and teaches at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Or at least she used to teach there. She was detained, questioned for hours and treated in what MUST be an illegal manner..
Ms. Ghuman said that officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks.
Destroying government documents such as the visa is illegal. So is defacing a passport, be it US or from another country.
Then there were the threats..
Held incommunicado in a room in the airport, she was groped during a body search, she said, and was warned that if she moved, she would be considered to be attacking her armed female searcher. After questioning her for hours, the officers told her that she had been ruled inadmissible, she said, and threatened to transfer her to a detention center in Santa Clara, Calif., unless she left on a flight to London that night.
Meanwhile, her fiancee called the British Consulate, who tried to get through to the officials, but were unable to.
Ms. Ghuman said her demands to speak to the British consul were rebuffed.
"They told me I was nobody, I was nowhere and I had no rights," she said. "For the first time, I understood what the deprivation of liberty means."
She got on the plane back to England, and is now in Wales, on unpaid leave from Mills College, and no one who has enquired, including her representative in Parliament, members of Congress including Sen. Durbin, have been able to find out why this happened to a scholar who has NO ties to anything in the Middle East.
So, in the name of the American people, in the name of national security, an innocent woman has been deprived of her livelihood, her students are deprived of her teaching, and her reputation besmirched by having her name on a list that designates her a terrorist threat.
I have already sent emails and I do hope that every Kossack who reads this will also send emails of outrage to their Representatives and Senators.