Refugees Detained at U.S. Airports, Prompting Legal Challenges
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Having been detained by CBP several times I can see the smug look on this officers face. Like, "It's not my policy but I'm happy to do my job."
You see, this is the biggest problem that no one is talking about. Sure, these policies (mass surveillance, unlawful detention, violation of human rights) are handed down by edict by a powerful faction at the top of the food chain, but they are enforced by every day people. People against people, that's what this is about. Its our friends, our colleagues, and neighbors that are doing this. People, the people who have these jobs, have the moral right to resist these policies. They must fight their supervisors or they must resign if they cannot fight. We as a society have to agree that we won't mindlessly follow such ignorant leaders.
Do you know why we still hunt down Nazi's 80 years later? Because "I'm just doing what I'm told" isn't a good excuse.
> Do you know why we still hunt down Nazi's 80 years later?
is actually a thing. There are still warrants out; Nazis (without the "Neo" part) are still arrested and convicted from time to time. Although I suspect this will come to an end soon, since people tend to die of old age now. Iirc some of the more recent trials ended with a conviction to incarceration, but no actual incarceration due to old age / medical issues.
As they often say, libertarians didn't defeat Nazism.
There are interesting approaches to reducing government size from left-liberterains(Libertarian socialist and Anarchists) but they are not mainstream in the US, which has shifted so far right over the last few decades that Eisenhower would in many policy matters be considered a far-left unelectable today.
Small government just means making the parts of the government that actually help the people smaller, according to these people.
Wrong. Corporations are the one of most sensitive organisation types. Stop giving them money, see how soon and peacfully they die. Remind me a state that has given its power peacefully ?
Market always tend toword decentralisation. More so in AnCap one.
I've called a corporation and asked for transparency and data so I can see what they're actually doing. They oddly didn't return my call.
I've called a corporation and told them how I want them to represent my interests. They oddly didn't return my call.
I've complained corporations have no reason to do things which are good for me, the consumer or employee, and all the reasons to do things that are bad for me. By design. Not because of corruption or because of malicious actors who fail to do their jobs. My complaints fell on deaf ears.
Telling someone to call the president isn't exactly related when its the person's legal defense asking to speak with a supervisor who can help.
IIRC, the percentage of people who resisted against the nazi here in France if only by quitting their jobs was around ~5%. This makes this kind of resistance highly inefficient when there are millions people willing to do the dirty job which thanks to government propaganda is considered moral and right anyway by most. The only way is to remove the people on top sending those orders (not easy) and by trying to avoid anyone from having so much power at the top in the first place (easier). The only way to do this is to distribute the use of force among society and not give the monopoly of force to one single entity as we tend to do.
This is completely insane. Not only is it a blatant violation of human rights and our treaties regarding refugees, but this is going to be a major blow to our national security. The promise of American citizenship is one of the major driving factors for informants and interpreters around the world that help our armed forces. Trump seems hellbent on making life miserable for anyone tasked with actually protecting our country.
If we'd keep our noses out of nation building where it's none of our business we'd need a whole lot less of these people. Let that be a lesson to us the next time a fool president wants to invade a new Iraq.
Maybe this is the silver lining in all this mess created by this far-right administration
I'd like to see you call the Kurdish interpreters I served with in Iraq traitors. Do you actually have any idea what you're talking about, or just spouting nonsense? These people are fighting for their lives against terrorists, too. And at much greater risk than we did.
I mean seriously, barring refugees on Holocaust Rememberance day, and then only describing those killed as "victims", seems like it should be a very, very dark SNL skit.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/01/28/trump-refugee-...
The tl:dr is that interpreters are already vetted to an extreme degree before they can receive visas under the SIV program, and that this order may in fact cost lives.
America used to have a neutral stance like Switzerland towards foreign affairs, but in the last half century we increasingly evolved into a world police.
Remember that before we entered WWII, we knew about Germany's injustices towards its neighbors but we kept our noses out of it––until they bombed Pearl Harbor.
We used to have a solemn regard towards a nation's sovereignty. That needs to return to America.
Trump's immigration executive order is the first step towards minding our own business and building up our nation via industry & innovation by American citizens.
Somebody does something (an act of terrorism). Instead of fixing the issue at its core, a politician will, instead, do something that is completely unrelated, random and inefficient but that looks like he is doing real work (banning muslims from entry).
A terrorist going on a killing spree is not different than a destabilized white American 30-something going on a killing spree. Both are destabilized (mentally) but for different reasons.
Most people would not care because it doesn't affect their bottom line. Banning muslims isn't an issue for your average American family, even if it doesn't stop terrorism.
Either way... It doesn't sound like the two individuals in the article are actual persecuted refugees. The article doesn't elaborate on that. We're just expected to assume that. But we're told what amazing humans they are and how much they helped the US. That sounds more like a dishing out of green card favors in return for services.
Seems like you'd be in favor of banning peanuts and their related products, as well as guns, considering how many accidental deaths occur from both each year. And of course, who could forget the dreaded and somehow still legal dihydrogen monoxoide...
> It doesn't sound like the two individuals in the article are actual persecuted refugees. The article doesn't elaborate on that. We're just expected to assume that. But we're told what amazing humans they are and how much they helped the US. That sounds more like a dishing out of green card favors in return for services.
Generally speaking, it's implicit that their lives are at risk because they helped the United States, a country that tends not to get much love in the Middle East.
Yes it does...
*The filing said he [Darweesh] had been directly targeted twice while working for the United States Military."
But yeah my bad I did miss that part of the article.
It's quite likely to cost lives, since it also applies to refugees and asylum seekers. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it results in at least one suicide over the next few months.
"Something must be done.
This is something.
Therefore we must do it.
But doing the wrong thing is worse than
doing nothing."
These orders should not be followed. Nuremberg defense doesn't hold up.
Small Government is a nice, and good, idea, but history shows us that neither surveillance apparatus (pl.) nor secret police (pl.) relinquish power, ever, within existing in the same continuum of legitimation (ie. state). There has been no previous instance where either were reduced; they only grow until chopped off entirely.
It's an infestation of the state. There is only one - proven - cure. (And I think it's naïve to assume that those who built and grow these structures are not aware of this)
You're right though, the biggest problem is all the people cheering this on. I read "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and this seems to be escalating even faster.
Is there a book or article that I can read about this point?
I'd really appreciate it if you could show me a few examples.
Wikipedia has a list of historical secret police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historical_secret_poli...
--
Current examples that are still alive and well could be the various GCC states, but especially Saudi Arabia there; the UK and the US to some degree each (both are obviously full-blown surveillance states at the very least; and it can be reasonably argued that (divisions of) the FBI and some other agencies qualify as a secret police) in the western hemisphere; Russia.
The last time anti-intellectual forces that praised authoritarian figures, promised to take the country back to a more glorious time and zoned in on people of a particular religion, we called it a word stronger than 'Nationalism'.
Christian refugees from these nations are allowed, only Muslims aren't. This is the definition of religious discrimination. This will go down as a dark day in US history, I only hope that it's the lowest point and things don't get worse. But that might be an unrealistically optimistic outlook.
Regardless of the geopolitical situations, it is fair to say that USA is rapidly reaching a point where it can no longer lay a claim on those principles. And I am not claiming that this happened on Nov 8, 2016. This has been happening steadily since the beginning of this century (Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay etc.). And simultaneously it comes at a point where the long term sustainability of its other important contribution (free-market capitalism) is brought to question.
We are really living in an inflection point in history (Like end of European imperialism, fall of communism etc.)
The curve of progress according to one faction, which it turns out has a lot less popular support than it thought.
I think it of as more as an over-correction, an exploitation of the flaws in the system which unfortunately will bring more bloodshed and suffering to get through before getting replaced.
I'm concerned that this will be the trend many places in society now.
Unfortunately, Congresspeople on both sides seem to have lacked a spine for the better part of a decade.
Presumably it will be slurped real time into some NSA data center. Thanks to that thing Obama did in the 11th hour, it will then be streamed back to local law enforcement for data mining.
He has to start small. CBP already operates in the constitution free "border zone". It's a perfect way to normalize larger scale unlawful detentions in the public eye and set legal precedents.
Put another way, Oakland and San Francisco airports are almost certainly illeglly detaining innocent people that are in the country legally right now. If the feds started by pulling people with visas and green cards from desks in Silicon Valley or SF there would be riots in the streets.
I am talking about two groups of people within 50 miles of each other, which (until the executive order) had the same legal status.
This is not OK, and it is naive to think it is poorly planned. (I hope you're right though, and trump tweets an apology/release order this weekend.)
So are members of the US government. They did nothing at all to provoke this reaction from the authorities. Some of them even actively "kept their heads down".
If people do nothing about this now, where will it end?