That Feeling Of Being Under Suspicion

[Kire]

That Feeling
Of Being
Under Suspicion
What of "profiling" as an anti-terrorism forensic tool?

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, July 29, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

After the terrorist bombings in London, and the revelations that many of the perpetrators were of Pakistani origin, I find that I am--for the first time in my life--part of a "group" that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual "profile," and the fit is most disconcerting.

The fact that I am neither Muslim nor Pakistani is irrelevant: Who except the most absurdly expert physiognomist or anthropologist could tell from my face that I am not an Ali, or a Mohammed, or a Hassan; that my ancestors are all from deepest South India; and that my line has worshipped not Allah but Lord Shiva--mightiest deity of the Hindu pantheon--for 2,000 years? I will be mistaken for Muslim at some point--just as earlier this week in Manhattan five young men were pulled off a sightseeing bus and handcuffed by police on suspicion that they might have been Islamist terrorists. Their names, published in the papers, revealed that they were in fact all Sikhs and Hindus--something few could have established by simply looking at them. (The Sikhs here were short-haired and unturbanned.)

What we had in this incident--what we must get used to--is a not irrational sequence: alarm, provoked by a belief that someone in the vicinity could do everyone around him great harm, followed instinctively by actions in which the niceties of social intercourse, the judgmental taboos that have been drilled into us, are set aside in the interest of self-preservation.

Terrorism has had many effects on society, and the foremost among them are philosophical, or spiritual. We are now called upon to adjust the way we live and think, and to do so we must also adjust the bandwidth of our tolerance. By this I don't mean that we must be less tolerant of others but that some among us must learn to tolerate--or put up with--hardships, inconvenience or a new set of presumptions, given the all-consuming nature of the threat we face, in which "the profiled" and "the profilers" alike are targets.

In evaluating the moral fitness of "profiling," I should stress that we are identifying people for scrutiny, not punishment. Recall the fate of Cinna the poet, in the Bard's "Julius Caesar," who is killed by a mob that believes him, because of his name, to be Cinna the conspirator. When scrutiny becomes stigma, and stigma leads to victimization, a clear jump to evil has occurred. This has not happened in America, and must not.

More: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007032

[pox americana]

1. good article.

The war on terror is just another name for colonialism.

[philb]

2. British, U.S. lied about justification for pre-war Iraq airstrikes

British, U.S. lied about justification for pre-war Iraq airstrikes
Michael Smith


Special to RAW STORY. Michael Smith writes for the London Sunday Times. He broke the Downing Street Memo story.

Britain and America’s reasons for stepping up bombing of Iraq in the ten months leading up to the war in Iraq was a sham, official figures released by the British Ministry of Defense show.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Geoff Hoon, his UK counterpart, said the stepped-up attacks by U.S. and Royal Air Force aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were a response to increased attacks by Iraqi air defences.

The minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s Iraq war cabinet on July 23, 2003, leaked to the London Sunday Times, record Hoon as saying “the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.”

[philb]

3. Witness say bombs were under the trains

And there is agreement that the alleged bombers weren't suicide bombers. So where does that leave us? What happened?


http://nineeleven.co.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=248#248

04Aug05: 03:10: Bristol, UK

Did July 7 bombs explode *under* trains?

by Adrian Connock and Tony Gosling

Victims of two of the three London tube explosions say the bombs
went off under the trains. Their eyewitness accounts appear to
contradict the theory that suicide bombers were responsible for killing 39
passengers on London's tube network that day.

The Guardian's Mark Honigsbaum spoke to several eye witnesses to
the Edgware Road tube bomb on July 7th. He reported "an explosion this
morning under the carriage of the train", and went on, "some
passengers described how tiles, the covers on the floor of the train, suddenly
flew up, raised up". Victims also told him the train "had been
derailed by this explosion", again suggesting the bomb was under the
carriage. A man caught by the blast was reported to have "very, very bad
injuries to his legs".

Bruce Lait, injured by the Aldgate East tube bomb was interviewed
on the 11th July by a reporter from the Cambridge Evening News. Mr
Lait explained that as he was being led to safety, "The policeman
said 'mind that hole, that's where the bomb was'. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don't remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag".

The 7th July bombs were followed, exactly two weeks later, by
failed copycat attacks. This morning, exactly another two weeks on, London's commuters will be hoping the third cell that police warned of on
Sunday, is not preparing to attack again.

http://www.officialconfusion.com

ENDS
(C) This article may be reproduced by commercial and non-commercial
media but only complete including bylines and the web address at
the bottom.

LINKS:

Cambridge Evening News story
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/region_wide/2005/07/11/83e33146-09af-4421-b2f4-1779a86926f9.lpf

Mark Honigsbaum story
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1524554,00.html

Mark Honigsbaum audio
http://www.officialconfusion.com/Audio/honigbaum7705.mp3
http://stream.guardian.co.uk:7080/ramgen/sysaudio/Guardian/audio/2005/07/07/honisbaum/070705.ra



lot of reliable sources and links below, and coverage of this shocking development, shocking in its implications. If true, why would executors of a "training exercise" put bombs under trains, except as an intimidation of world populations, as such? But the testimony and allegations are too new to really assess all that the stories imply. VIP information:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/end_media_censorship/message/850