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McCain Office Mailed Threat, White Powder

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

(CBS/ AP) A threatening letter containing an unidentified white powder was received at John McCain’s campaign offices in Denver, Colorado, CBS News has learned.

A second letter sent to a McCain campaign office in New Hampshire initially was reported to contain a white substance. Authorities said that was a false alarm and there was no powder in that envelope.

At least 19 people were examined at hospitals or were quarantined outside the Colorado office while authorities tried to determine whether the powder was hazardous.

Andy Lyon of Parker South Metro Fire Rescue Authority said the return address on the envelope listed the Arapahoe Detention Center and the name of an inmate. He didn’t release the name.

Lyon said the first line of the letter used threatening language, but he refused to give any details.

McCain’s campaign had said the letter sent to the Manchester, N.H., office also contained a threatening language and white powder.

But Malcolm Wiley, a Secret Service spokesman in Colorado, said there was no powder in the New Hampshire envelope. He said he did not know about the content of the letter.

Wiley said the letter had a Denver return address, which alarmed staffers in Manchester because they had heard about the Colorado incident.

Jim Barnett, McCain’s New England campaign manager, said it’s unusual for the New Hampshire office to get a letter from Denver.

“That was really the only suspicious thing about the letter, and our national headquarters advised, out of an abundance of caution for our staff and volunteers, that we have the authorities check it out,” he said. “We did and it was deemed safe.”

A government official familiar with the investigation said the New Hampshire letter was a false alarm. The official said authorities believe the Denver letter was a hoax because it appeared to have been sent from a jail.

Both the New Hampshire and Colorado offices were evacuated.

Lyon said about 40 people were evacuated from the Colorado building, but it contains several offices and businesses, and he did not know how many people had been in the McCain office.

Seven people drove themselves to Sky Ridge Medical Center, but none showed any symptoms of exposure to a toxic substance, hospital spokeswoman Linda Watson said.

Twelve people were quarantined outside the Colorado office, including three police officers, two firefighters and seven civilians, Lyon said.

He said Park South Metro firefighters found very little powder when they arrived.

“There were maybe a couple of grains of something inside an envelope and they had to kind of work to get a sample,” he said.

Bruce Williamson of the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Department said a hazmat team was searching the building. He said authorities believe the substance was confined within the structure.

Williamson said authorities took the incident “very seriously” because the Democratic National Convention begins Monday in Denver and McCain is the presumed GOP candidate.

Postal Inspector Jo Jan Henderson said agents from her office were at the scene. FBI officials did not immediately return calls.

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Wasted Food Is Also Wasted Water

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

The world’s growing food crisis — which triggered riots and demonstrations in over 30 developing nations early this year — is being aggravated primarily by wastage and overconsumption.

IPS | “Obesity is a much bigger problem than undernourishment,” said Professor Jan Lundqvist of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

He pointed out that there are 850 million people worldwide who suffer from hunger and starvation daily compared with over 1.2 billion people who are overweight and obese, which can lead to a vast range of health problems like diabetes and heart disease.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Stockholm International Water Conference, Lundqvist told reporters Thursday that “improving water productivity and reducing the quantity of food wasted can enable us to provide a better diet for the poor and enough food for growing populations.”

A study titled “Saving Water” released here argues that while the risk of under-nourishment is reduced with an increasing supply of food — provided access is ensured — the risk of over-eating and wastage is also likely to increase when food becomes more abundant in some societies.

In the United States, as much as 30 percent of food products, worth some 48.3 billion dollars, is thrown away annually just by households alone.

“That’s like leaving the tap running and pouring 40 trillion litres of water into the garbage can — enough water to meet the household needs of 500 million people,” says the report co-authored by SIWI, along with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Sri Lanka.

The study also says that wasted food is wasted water because of the large quantum of water that goes into the cultivation and processing of food.

Professor John Anthony Allan of King’s College, London, the winner of the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize, is the author of a concept called “virtual water” where he argues that people consume water not only when they drink it or take a shower but also when they consume food products.

The virtual water concept measures water embedded in the production and trade of food and consumer products– from the field and the factory to the dinner table.

A cup of coffee, for example, accounts for about 140 litres of water that is used in growing, producing, packaging and shipping the beans.

One single hamburger accounts for an estimated 2,400 litres of water; one kilogramme of beef consumes 15,000 litres of water; a slice of white bread takes in 40 litres of water; and one kilogramme of cheese absorbs 5,000 litres of water.

“I was very surprised with the high numbers. But it catches everybody’s attention,” Allan told IPS. The figures, he said, were worked out scientifically by researchers in the Netherlands.

Asked whether there was a direct link between water and food scarcities, he said while there is a shortage of food in some parts of the world, there is also a need for twice as much food in other parts of the world.

“So, there is a distribution problem. But this also reflects the maldistribution of water,” he said.

Charlotte de Fraiture, a researcher at IWMI, says that as much as half of the water used to grow food globally may be lost or wasted.

“Curbing these losses and improving water productivity provides win-win opportunities for farmers, business, ecosystems, and the global hungry,” she said.

And an effective water-saving strategy requires that minimising food wastage is firmly placed on the political agenda, she added.

SIWI says a 50 percent reduction of losses and wastage in the production and consumption chain is a necessary and achievable goal.

Meanwhile, a report released by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) says that while each person in Britain drinks, hoses, flushes and washes their way through around 150 litres of water a day, they consume about 30 times as much in “virtual water” embedded in food, clothes and other items — the equivalent of about 58 bathtubs full of water every day.

Titled “UK Water Footprint: The impact of the UK’s food and fibre consumption on global water resources”, the study released here points out that Britain is the world’s sixth largest importer of water.

“Only 38 percent of UK’s total water use comes from its own rivers, lakes and groundwater reserves,” Stuart Orr, WWF-UK’s water footprint expert said.

The rest, he said, is taken from water bodies in many countries across the world to irrigate and process food and fibre crops that people in Britain subsequently consume.

He said that WWF is encouraging some of the largest companies in Britain to evaluate their water footprints, which assesses the amount of water a business uses both directly and indirectly through its supply chain.

According to WWF, a single tomato from Morocco takes 13 litres of water to grow, while a shirt made from cotton grown in Pakistan or Uzbekistan soaks up 2,700 litres of water.

Orr said most consumers aren’t even aware that it takes massive amounts of water to grow the food and fibres consumed — on top of what is used for drinking, washing and watering the lawn.

“Therefore, it is essential that business and government identify the areas that could potentially suffer water crises and develop solutions so the environment is not over-exploited to the point that people and wildlife lose out,” Orr added.

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Man Selling Anti-War Shirts Wins Ruling

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

PHOENIX - A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred Arizona from using a state law to prosecute an online merchant who sells shirts that list names of thousands of troops killed in Iraq.

U.S. District Judge Neil Wake did not strike down the 2007 law against selling products that use of military casualties’ names without families’ permission. But he ruled that using the law to prosecute Dan Frazier would violate the man’s First Amendment rights because his “Bush Lied - They Died” shirts are “core political speech.”

“It is impossible to separate the political from the commercial aspects of that display,” Wake wrote. “For example, the state argues that Frazier can sell his shirts without displaying the soldiers’ names. But Frazier’s product is his message, and his customers’ message.”

Arizona’s law was enacted with little debate by the Legislature, and Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas have enacted similar laws.

A spokeswoman for Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said Goddard’s office was reviewing the ruling and did not immediately know whether it would appeal.

“I always knew the Constitution was on my side,” Frazier said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lee Phillips, a Flagstaff lawyer who represented Phillips on behalf of the ACLU, said it still could be possible to use the law to prosecute a person in a case without political circumstance or motivations.

Citing First Amendment concerns, Wake last September had issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the law against Frazier while the lawsuit was pending.

The ACLU is also defending Frazier in a pending lawsuit filed against him in federal court in Tennessee by a couple whose soldier son was killed in Iraq. Robin and Michael Read of Greeneville, Tennessee, have asked that their case be expanded to cover more than 4,000 casualties and seek more than $40 billion in damages.

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UK court rules against gov’t in key Guantanamo case

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

Reuters - A British court ruled on Thursday that the government must disclose evidence to a defendant being held at Guantanamo Bay, a decision that carried with it implicit criticism of U.S. government detention policies.

In its ruling, the High Court said Britain’s Foreign Office must provide Binyam Mohamed, a British resident detained in Pakistan in 2002 and now held at Guantanamo, with information relating to his time in detention.

His lawyers say the material supports his claim to have been “extraordinarily rendered”, tortured and forced into a confession on terrorism charges.

Lord Justice Thomas and Lord Justice Lloyd Jones said the Foreign Office had a duty to “disclose in confidence” the information Mohamed was seeking in order for his lawyers to mount a proper defence of the charges against him.

Mohamed’s legal team was buoyant after the ruling, calling it a “momentous decision” that showed the British legal system’s determination to stand up for human rights while condemning the U.S. government’s detention procedures at Guantanamo.

“Today’s judgment reflects the abhorrence of decent society at the methods employed by the United States’ government in the supposed ‘war on terror’,” said Richard Stein, a lawyer with Leigh Day & Co, the solicitors who brought the case.

“We can only hope that the foreign secretary will now reflect on this judgment and provide direct assistance to Binyam’s defence team.”

NATIONAL SECURITY

In a statement, the Foreign Office said it was considering the implications of the court’s rulings “very carefully” and said it had only not divulged the information so far because of national security reasons.

“We have never contested that Mr Mohamed’s defence lawyers should have access to information which would assist him in his defence in any trial at Guantanamo Bay,” the statement said.

“For strong reasons of national security, to which the court accepted we were entitled to give the highest weight, we could not agree to disclose this information voluntarily.”

Lawyers for Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, say the information relates to interrogations he was subjected to by Britain’s secret services while being held in Pakistan in 2002.

Following those interrogations, lawyers say Mohamed was flown by the CIA to Morocco in July 2002, where he was tortured, including having his penis cut with a razor. He was held there for 18 months, they say, and quizzed about information they argue could only have come from British questioning.

In January 2004 Mohamed was flown to Kabul and then transferred to Bagram air base. U.S. authorities deny that Mohamed was extraordinarily rendered or tortured and have only provided details of his detention in Afghanistan.

He is being tried before a U.S. military commission on terrorism charges and faces the death penalty if found guilty.

In its ruling, the High Court levelled implicit criticism at the U.S. government’s judicial procedures and suggested that basic rights that the British have held essential since the 13th century were being overlooked or set aside.

“It is a basic and long established value in any democracy that the location of those in custody is made known to the detainee’s family and those representing him,” the court said.

“To deny him this at this time would be to deny him the opportunity of timely justice in respect of the charges against him, a principle dating back to at least the time of the Magna Carta and which is so basic a part of our common law and of democratic values.” (Editing by Jon Boyle)

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Planning to E-Vote? Read This First

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

With less than three months before the presidential election, the hotly contested state, Ohio, along with others, continue to have problems with E-voting technology

By Larry Greenemeier

In their rush to avoid a repeat of the controversy that plagued the 2000 presidential election, and to meet the requirements of Congress’s hastily mandated 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), states and counties flocked to electronic voting systems they hoped would eliminate hanging chads and other flaws inherent in paper-based systems. Six years later, with another presidential election less than three months away, many e-voting systems are fraught with security glitches, and the technology has yet to prove itself as the solution voters were looking for.

Such systems could allow voters and poll workers to place multiple votes, crash the systems by loading viruses, and fake vote tallies, according to studies commissioned by the states of California and Ohio within the past year. Makers of these systems have countered that the test settings were unrealistic. But that is not helping election officials sleep better at night.

One of the reasons e-voting systems turned out to be such a failure is that the only people involved in checking these systems were the vendors, who wanted to sell their technology, and the local election officials, who were ill-equipped to understand the security issues, says David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor and founder of the Verified Voting Foundation, a nonprofit organization pushing for the implementation of voting processes that can more easily be verified and audited. “There was a certification process in place,” Dill says, “but it had very little to do with security.”

Dill is the author of Attackdog, threat modeling software that can examine more than 9,000 potential ways a voting system can be attacked, including computer hacking, ballot tampering and voter impersonation. Attackdog is part of a larger effort called A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE) , which was launched in 2005 by the National Science Foundation with $7.5 million in funding. “Nothing we do now will affect the November election,” Dill says. “We don’t know how to make secure paperless voting.”

This sentiment is echoed in many places throughout the U.S., most prominently in the hotly contested state of Ohio, where Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has commissioned a series of tests over the past year to determine whether e-voting systems are secure enough to be trusted. Based on these tests Brunner has concluded that they are not secure, a decision that Premier Election Solutions, Inc., in Allen, Tex., took exception to. Premier sued Brunner and one Ohio county board of elections in May in a move to get the courts to rule that the company had fulfilled its contractual obligations to the state.

Brunner struck back August 6 by countersuing Premier, formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc., and maker of the touch-screen voting systems into which Ohio has invested more than $62 million since 2005. Brunner’s suit accuses Premier of, among other things, breach of contract and breach of warranty, and seeks court acknowledgement that Premier did not honor its contract. The countersuit also asks for damages of at least $25,000 against Premier for voting system malfunctions that have caused problems in at least 11 of the 44 counties using Premier’s technology during elections since 2005. “We believe that Premier’s equipment has failed to perform as required by its contracts and according to state law,” Brunner says. “We have taken this action to recover taxpayer funds spent for voting systems used in half of the state’s 88 counties.”

Brunner and Premier have locked horns several times since she took office in January 2007 over whether the company’s DRE (direct recorded election) touch-screen electronic voting technology works properly and is secure. The problem came to a head in April, when election officials in Ohio’s Butler County detected a vote count discrepancy during the primary election. The county board of elections staff determined that the Premier DRE system had malfunctioned and failed to count votes from memory cards uploaded to the system’s vote tabulation computer server, Brunner says, adding, “This is not what we bargained for.”

Suspecting problems with all of the e-voting technology that had so far cost Ohio $112 million, Brunner last year commissioned Project EVEREST, a comprehensive security review of the electronic voting technology used throughout Ohio, to identify any problems that might make elections vulnerable to tampering. During the 10-week project, teams of academic researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania and WebWise Security (a security firm formed in 2005 by faculty and students from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s security research group) examined DRE touch-screen and optical-scan voting systems from Premier, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) in Omaha, Neb., and Austin, Tex.–based Hart InterCivic as well as the software that manages these systems.

EVEREST researchers found exploitable security weaknesses in all three vendors’ systems, Brunner said in a statement when the project concluded in December. “Many of these vulnerabilities represent practical threats to the integrity of elections as they are conducted in Ohio,” she said. “We found vulnerabilities in different vendor systems that would, for example, allow voters and poll workers to place multiple votes, to infect the precinct with virus software or to corrupt previously cast votes—sometimes irrevocably.”

“None of the systems out there are even remotely adequate given the importance of the data they handle,” says Patrick McDaniel, a Penn State professor of information security who led the EVEREST testing. A lot of the attacks that McDaniel and his team tested could be carried out at a polling place or county elections office in a matter of seconds. An example: when researchers placed a piece of white tape over part of an e-voting system’s scanner, they were able to effectively block it from reading the entire ballot. In other words, a person could put the tape in a place that kept the system from counting votes for a particular candidate. The team also found that the keys to unlock Hart’s ballot box could also be used to open the ballot boxes on the Premier systems.

In a more serious attack, McDaniel found that his researchers could replace the memory card in some of the e-voting systems. “Any software you put on your card would uploaded into the system’s computer,” he says.

Premier had already responded to EVEREST’s findings as well as a similar project commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen called Top-to-Bottom Review in March by issuing a report that emphasized that the EVEREST researchers did their work with “no physical or operational security controls” and did not simulate realistic election day conditions. Premier could not be reached for comment.

The EVEREST researchers don’t dispute that. Sandy Clark, an EVEREST researcher and the computing systems manager of Princeton University’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program, said at the Last HOPE hacker’s conference held last month in New York City that she and her EVEREST colleagues “treated the project as a hack.”

At the Last HOPE conference, University of Pennsylvania researchers who led EVEREST’s analysis of ES&S e-voting technology described exploitable security vulnerabilities in almost every hardware and software component of ES&S’s touch-screen and optical-scan systems. Some of these flaws, Clark said, could allow a single voter or poll worker with bad intentions to alter countywide election results, possibly without election officials ever knowing that the results had been tampered with. “There wasn’t an attack that we tried that we weren’t able to carry out,” she added. “We learned that every current e-voting system has serious exploitable vulnerabilities.”

In addition to investing in Premier systems, Ohio has spent more than $41 million on ES&S e-voting technology and is one of 43 states that are ES&S customers.

When contacted for this story ES&S pointed to statements made earlier this year regarding EVEREST. Like Premier, ES&S’s conclusion is that anyone attempting to replicate many of EVEREST tests would need “unfettered access to the DRE unit” as well as detailed knowledge of how the system works (to wit, its communications protocol with its audit log).

Despite their differences, Ohio and Premier are stuck with each other for the 2008 presidential election. “With the election being less than three months away, the counties will be using the technology they have,” Brunner says. To head off any potential problems, Ohio counties using touch-screen voting systems are being required to print a hard copy of at least a portion of electronically cast votes, which will provide an audit trail. Voters will also be offered the option of filling out paper ballots that can be read by optical scanners and registered in a database.

E-voting systems have to be completely redesigned with security in mind, McDaniel says. In the short term, this means adding more thorough vote-auditing capabilities so that discrepancies can be investigated. “The elections systems should have the same quality, the same reliability, the same testing and the same certification requirements as financial systems,” he says. “If the systems used by banks, which have to report to the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], had this level of quality, no one would put their money in the bank.”

Looking beyond November, Brunner says that she wants Ohio to rely more on optical-scan technology. “Later on,” she adds, “there may be a place for touch-screen (systems).”

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At JFK Airport, Denying Basic Rights Is Just Another Day at the Office

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

I was recently stopped by Homeland Security as I was returning from a trip to Syria. What I saw in the hours that followed shocked and disturbed me.

AlterNet | I arrived at JFK Airport two weeks ago after a short vacation to Syria and presented my American passport for re-entry to the United States. After 28 hours of traveling, I had settled into a hazy awareness that this was the last, most familiar leg of a long journey. I exchanged friendly words with the Homeland Security official who was recording my name in his computer. He scrolled through my passport, and when his thumb rested on my Syrian visa, he paused. Jerking toward the door of his glass-enclosed booth, he slid my passport into a dingy green plastic folder and walked down the hallway, motioning for me to follow with a flick of his wrist. Where was he taking me, I asked him. “You’ll find out,” he said.

We got to an enclosed holding area in the arrivals section of the airport. He shoved the folder into my hand and gestured toward four sets of Homeland Security guards sitting at large desks. Attached to each desk were metal poles capped with red, white and blue siren lights. I approached two guards carrying weapons and wearing uniforms similar to New York City police officers, but they shook their heads, laughed and said, “Over there,” pointing in the direction of four overflowing holding pens. I approached different desks until I found an official who nodded and shoved my green folder in a crowded metal file holder. When I asked him why I was there, he glared at me, took a sip from his water bottle, bit into a sandwich, and began to dig between his molars with his forefinger. I found a seat next to a man who looked about my age — in his late 20s — and waited.

Omar (not his real name) finished his fifth year in biomedical engineering at City College in June. He had just arrived from Beirut, where he visited his family and was waiting to go home to the apartment he shared with his brother in Harlem. Despite his near-perfect English and designer jeans, Omar looked scared. He rubbed his hands and rocked softly in his seat. He had been waiting for hours already, and, as he pointed out, a number of people — some sick, elderly, pregnant or holding sobbing babies — had too. There were approximately 70 people detained in our cordoned-off section: All were Arab (with the exception of me and the friend I traveled with), and almost all had arrived from Dubai, Amman or Damascus. Many were U.S. citizens.

We were in the front row, sitting a few feet from two guards’ desks. They sneered at each bewildered arrival, told jokes in whispers, swiveled in their office chairs and greeted passing guards who stopped to talk — guards who had a habit of looping their fingers into their holsters. One asked his friend how many nationalities were represented in the room. “About 20. Some of everything today.”

No one who had been detained knew precisely why they were there. A few people were led into private rooms; others were questioned out in the open at desks a few feet from the crowd and then allowed to pass through customs. Some were sent to another section of the holding area with large computer screens and cameras, and then brought back. The uninformed consensus among the detainees was that some people would be fingerprinted, have their irises scanned and be sent back to the countries from which they had disembarked, regardless of citizenship status; others would be fingerprinted and allowed to stay; and the unlucky ones would be detained indefinitely and moved to a more permanent facility.

There was one British tourist in the group. Paul (also not his real name) was traveling with three friends who had passed through customs soon after their plane landed and were waiting for him on the other side of the metal barrier; he suspected he had been detained because of his dark skin. When he asked if he could go to the bathroom, one of the guards said, “I wouldn’t.” “What if someone has to?” I asked. “They will just have to hold it,” the guard responded with a smile. Paul began to cry. I watched as he, over the course of four hours, went from feeling exuberant about his trip to New York to despising the entire country. “I speak the Queen’s English,” he said to me. “I’m third-generation British. I came to America because I’ve always wanted to come here, and now they’ve got me so scared that all I want to do is go home. We’re paying for your stupid war anyway.”

To be powerless and mocked at the same time makes one feel ashamed, which leads quickly to rage. Within a few hours of my arrival, I saw at least 10 people denied the right to use the bathroom or buy food and water. I watched my traveling companion duck under a barrier, run to the bathroom and slip back into the holding section — which, of course, someone of another ethnicity in a state of panic would be very reluctant to do. The United States is good at naming enemies, but apparently we are even better at making them, especially of individuals. I don’t know if it’s worse for national security — and more embarrassing for Americans — that this is the first experience tourists have of our country, or that some U.S. citizens get treated this way upon entering their own country.

The guard who had been picking his molars for hours quietly mispronounced the names of people whose turn it was to be questioned, muttering each surname three times and then moving on. When he called Omar from City College to his desk, I moved closer to hear the interview. “Where did you go?” the officer asked. “What is your address in the United States? Is your brother here illegally? Do you support Hezbollah? What do you think of Hezbollah in general? How do you pay for your life here? How many people live with you? Are you sure it’s just you and your brother? Who are your friends?” Omar answered respectfully and emphatically; he was then asked to wait by the side of the desk, from which he was ushered toward one of the rooms.

After four hours, I finally demanded to speak to the guards’ supervisor, and he was called down. I asked if the detainees could file a formal complaint. He said there were complaint forms (which, in English and Spanish, direct one to the Department of Homeland Security’s Web site, where one must enter extensive personal information in order to file a “Trip Summary”) but initially refused to hand them out or to give me his telephone number. “The Department of Homeland Security is understaffed, underfunded, and I have men here who are doing 14-hour days.” He tried to intimidate me when I wrote down his name — “So, you’re writing down our names. Well, we have more on you” — and asked me questions about my address and my profession in front of the rest of the people detained. I pointed out a few of the families who had missed their flights and had been waiting seven hours. His voice barely controlled, his lip curled into a smirk, he explained slowly, condescendingly, that they need only go to the ticket counter at Jet Blue and reschedule so they could fly out in an hour. One mother responded with what he must have already known: Jet Blue goes to most destinations only once or twice a day and her whole family would have to sleep in the airport.

A large crowd began to gather. Everyone wanted to voice complaints. I explained to the supervisor that his guards had been making people afraid. He flipped through the green files, tossing the American passports to the front of the pile. “You should have gone first, before these people. American citizens first — that’s how it should be.” In the face of dozens of requests and questions, he turned and left.

The guards processed me then, ignoring the order of arrivals, if there ever had been one. They refused to distribute more complaint forms or call the supervisor back down at the request of Arab families. One officer threatened, “I’m talking politely to you now. If you don’t sit down, I won’t be talking politely to you anymore.” One announced that because “the American girl” had gotten angry, the families would have to wait a few more hours. “The supervisor is not coming back.”

I reassured my Homeland Security interrogator that I did not make any connections with Hezbollah or with anyone I knew to be associated with such an organization. I am not a member of any terrorist group. In fact, my visit to Syria had been so apolitical and touristy that I felt an embarrassing affinity with the pastel-shirted families waiting by the Air France baggage carousels in the distance, whom I knew I would eventually join.

As I walked out of the enclosure, some people thanked me, squeezing my arm and putting their hands on my shoulders. It was shocking that briefly standing up to someone overseeing an abuse of civil rights — in JFK airport, in the United States, where we supposedly have laws and a democratic judicial system — could be perceived as heroic. I had nothing to lose, but the other people being detained had everything to lose.

In the past five years I have worked for human rights and refugee advocacy organizations in Serbia, Russia and Croatia, including the International Rescue Committee and USAID. I have traveled to many different places, some supposedly repressive, and have never seen people treated with the kind of animosity that Homeland Security showed that night. In Syria, border control officers were stern but polite. At other borders there have been bureaucracies to contend with — excruciating for both Americans and other foreign nationals. I’ve met Russian officials with dead, suspicious looks in their eyes and arms tired from stamping so many visas, but in America, the Homeland Security officials I encountered were very much alive — like vultures waiting to eat.

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