September 11 anniversary ruffles Arabs, Muslims Nihal Kaneira

Opinion, August 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

September 11 anniversary ruffles Arabs, Muslims

Nihal Kaneira

Gulf News, 30-08-2003

With the anniversary of September 11, 2001, approaching, Canadians and Americans are once again in a funk. The paranoia about Al Qaeda has taken over security agencies in both countries, and they are casting about for potential terrorists, raising the prospect of another harassing time for Arabs and Muslims. Many Arab and Muslim parents already live in fear for their offspring.

The security frenzy is plain to see. Al Qaida's threat last week, that "The Big One" is coming, has intelligence services scampering across the continent looking for not only terrorists but also supporters and associates who may be helping Al Qaida and other banned organisations.

Tight security is the watchword. While incoming passengers are subjected to unprecedented screening, the countries' airports, sea ports, highways, border crossings, nuclear power plants, national landmarks, state houses and even flight schools are now under round-the-clock surveillance.

Whether it is the Homeland Security Agency and the FBI in the U.S. or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service here, the concentration is on domestic security. They are leaving nothing to chance, following up on even the tiniest bit of intelligence and setting in motion the measures to prevent terrorist attacks at any cost.

That includes taking into custody Arab and Muslim young men who are only a bit suspicious and detaining them until investigations are completed. In both countries, law enforcement agencies have been provided extraordinary powers for this purpose.

Under the guise of unearthing terrorist "sleeper cells", intelligence sleuths now have complete authority to monitor individuals, Internet chat rooms, mosques, Islamic and Arab community centres, and apprehend people who raise their suspicions.

In the U.S, new guidelines issued recently by Attorney General John Ashcroft, under the two-year old Patriot Act, has given intelligence agencies so much authority, advocacy groups say it amounts to a "quantum leap" in surveillance of people, citizens and non-citizens alike, violating their privacy and civil rights.

He has lowered the threshold for them to go after individuals or groups on mere suspicion of having links with terrorist organisations. The new threshold of "reasonable suspicion" now allows them to conduct intrusive monitoring of people, detention of suspects for days without presenting them before a judge, if they have any grounds to suspect them of terrorist links. Before September 11, 2001, agencies needed specific evidence that a group or an individual was planning a terrorist attack to open a criminal inquiry.

The reason behind this is the government contention that people with apparent connections to Al Qaida have settled easily into American society by obtaining jobs or enrolling in universities, and even marrying and starting families in the U.S.

Canadian agencies profess to be far less aggressive and have far less powers. But the rounding-up of scores of Muslim young men in the Toronto area last week says otherwise.

In a series of early morning raids, anti-terrorism agents arrested 19 men - 18 Pakistanis and one Indian national, some of whom have come from Gulf countries - for no apparent security threat than some suspicion that they may have been planning something sinister, something similar to September 11.

Canadian Muslims disagree. Even the lawyers representing some of the men say they are being held on "flimsy" evidence and that they will eventually be exonerated. But in the current heightened security environment, suspicion is all that the anti-terrorism agents need to arrest and detain people.

All 19 men have been incarcerated for nearly two weeks without even one being charged. The agencies insist on detaining them, claiming they violated immigration regulations through behaviour regarded as suspicious.

Federal officials, however, have tried to play down the arrests, saying there is currently no known threat to national security related to the investigation of the youth. But at the same time, it is national security that has been invoked to hold the men in custody.

Many of them are students in Canada who shared apartments in groups of four or five. The document says that one of the Pakistanis under arrest has taken three years to do a one-year flight-school course, and that during one of his flights, he had taken a path over a nuclear-power plant in the Toronto suburb of Pickering. Another in custody is being accused of casing the CN Tower in downtown Toronto as a target. The tower is the world's tallest free standing structure.

Two others are in custody allegedly because intelligence officers found them taking a walk on a beach close to the nuclear power plant at 4am last April.

Canadian police and immigration officials have also linked the group to the theft of a gauge containing radioactive Cesium-137, considered a likely component of a so-called dirty bomb.

Intelligence sources also say that all the men had come to Canada from Pakistan in the past five years after obtaining visas through a business college in Ottawa. The college, identified as the Ottawa Business College, authorities say, exists only on paper.

May be there is something to the security agencies' claim that the group is an Al Qaida "sleeper cell", and that they were plotting something serious. But the lawyers representing some of the men in custody say that their story is nothing like the ominous allegations presented by intelligence officials.

"It just seems now we are pretty willing to violate human rights on almost no evidence and no one is protesting because we are all so blinded by the concern of terrorism," said David Orman, one of the lawyers.

The outraged Muslims in Toronto agree. They see the arrests as a case of blatant racial profiling, prompted by the paranoia about Al Qaida. All the young men under arrest, they point out, had come to Canada before September 11, and had been trying to better their lives by studying and getting jobs here. Some of them had even sought asylum here.

They also point out that the flight school which provided flying lessons to the Pakistani accused of flying over the Pickering nuclear facility, has debunked the allegation. The school has said that never happened.

To be sure, they have violated Canadian immigration laws by entering the country illegally. "If these men have violated the Immigration Act they should be tried openly in court, but this is mischievous," says Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

The writer can be contacted at nihal_kaneira@yahoo.com

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).