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Article & Essay: Protecting America from Foreign Writers
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Prominent foreign writers were stopped
at U.S. borders, even imprisoned, and then deported because of the
Homeland Security and Patriot Acts.
By Frederick Sweet
 Foreign
journalists and novelists have been turned away from U.S. borders by an
increasingly repressive American government bureaucracy. Since January
2001, and particularly since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.,
our ideologically driven president, George W. Bush, has led his
attorney general John Ashcroft and a too-willing Republican-dominated
Congress to deny members of the foreign press freedom of entry into
America.
Indeed, the word has gotten around “old” and “new” Europe that America
is no longer the land of the free. In the practical sense, Bush and his
accomplices achieved what Al Qaeda’s terrorists, Osama bin Laden, and
yes, even that overblown bogeyman, Saddam Hussein, could never have
dreamt of: sucking the freedom out of America. Bush has accomplished
this by spreading fear and passing one law after another restricting
personal freedom in the false promise of increasing the security of
America’s homeland.
For example, one week before I left Budapest to visit Rome, two
Hungarian college-aged youths told me they’d be afraid to visit
America. In the 1970s, their parents had jumped at the chance to leave
from behind the Iron Curtain to visit “America.” But things have
changed. The youths didn’t like the idea of having to be
“fingerprinted, photographed and documented like criminals” by the U.S.
State Department. Bush’s U.S. has come to be regarded as a police
state.
Now, all over Rome there are anti-Bush posters and stickers on walls
and kiosks. Also, draped from windows in rich and poor neighborhoods
alike are colorful flags emblazoned with the simple, one-word message “Pace
[Peace],” to protest Bush’s war on Iraq. The United States has replaced
the warlike Soviet Union as the nation to be most feared.
Last week, on July 13th, I paid two Euros (about $2.50) for a copy of the twenty-page Herald Tribune (International Edition) in Rome, Italy. Catching my eye was the headline, “Keeping America Safe from Foreign Writers.”
British Journalist Harassed, Detained, Deported
Veteran British journalist Elena Lappin, who works for The Guardian, reported in the July 13th Tribune how she had been stopped and then held in an American prison after landing at the Los Angeles International Airport last May.
Lappin had been accustomed to flashing her press credentials and
British passport at LAX as she raced to her assignment from England.
Lappin was unaware that now foreign journalists are required to obtain
special “I” [information] visas to visit the U.S. But she certainly
hadn’t expected to be questioned harshly and then imprisoned for 36
hours before being deported. Lappin writes that other innocent,
prominent foreign writers have shared her fate because of America’s new
so-called Homeland Security laws.
By the U.S. requiring foreign journalists and writers to obtain an “I”
visa (or an official waiver), America is now in the same league with
Iran, North Korea, and Cuba. In these police states, the regimes treat
reporters and independent writers as dangerous subversives,
disseminators of uncomfortable truths. In stark contrast, American
journalists working abroad in free countries are not monitored, as are
their counterparts in today’s U.S.
The Bush administration accelerated these restrictions in June 2003.
Lappin reports that the State Department cabled its diplomatic and
consular posts, urging them to note the “increasing number” of
journalists being denied entry into the U.S. “Aliens coming to practice
journalism are not eligible on the visa waver program or a business
visa.” Journalists who try to do so “are subject to removal
[deportation].”
This approach is that of a police state enforcing its repressive,
ideology-driven laws, an approach common in North Korea, Cuba, Iran,
and earlier (if not still) in Iraq. Overseas, no doubt the U.S.
embassies and consulates represent their informational notices
describing the restrictive policy as a means of letting visa applicants
know of the new rules so that later on they can avoid detention and
expulsion at LAX or New York’s Kennedy Airport.
Novelist Gets Bum’s Rush from U.S.
The British novelist Ian McEwan was denied entry into Seattle several
months ago where 2,500 of his fans had assembled to hear him speak. He
had tried to reach Seattle through Canada after his visit there. But
U.S. immigration officials at the Vancouver Canadian airport turned him
back. They explained that McEwan’s $5,000 speaker’s fee was too high
for him to have his visa waiver approved in the new program.
Several months earlier, McEwan had been invited to lunch by British
Prime Minister Tony Blair at Number 10 Downing Street. This had been at
the request of first lady Laura Bush, a great fan of the novelist,
while the Bushes visited England last fall. Now detained by U.S.
Immigration in Vancouver, McEwan contacted his admirers in Washington.
With the influence of members of Congress, lawyers, diplomats, and
journalists, the Immigration officials relented and allowed McEwan’s
travel to Seattle.
Luckily for McEwan, his conflict with U.S. Immigration happened on
Canadian soil, sparing him a 36-hour detention, then deportation, had
he first been stopped in Seattle. Later, McEwan told journalists that
U.S. Immigration officials had told him, “We don’t want to let you in;
we don’t think you should come in. But you have powerful allies [in
Washington] and we don’t like the publicity.”
Later that day, McEwan began his nearly cancelled talk in Seattle by
wryly thanking the Department of Homeland Security “for protecting the
American public from British novelists.”
Lappin reported that today McEwan says, “I think what has happened is
that this department [of Homeland Security] has been spawned in short
order and is pumped up with a mission. But the people on the ground
have not been properly informed about the legislation by Washington,
and tend to make up the rules on the spot. It suggests the same gung-ho
carelessness that typified the post-invasion effort in Iraq. I’m not
immune to the argument that you need Homeland Security to counter
terrorists; America has a lot of enemies, more now than ever. But this
sort of thing increases its isolation.”
Resurrecting McCarthyism
The problems that British journalist Lappin and novelist McEwan
recently ran into have their origins in the McCarthy era. The so-called
“I” visa is derived from the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act.
Once, Senator Pat McCarran boasted that his act was an effective screen
against Communist subversives. Yet opposition to this purportedly
anti-Communist law had been fierce. It had been called “an affront to
the American people” by the National Council of Churches, and President
Harry S. Truman, who vetoed the act but was overridden by Congress,
said that this national-origins quota system was reminiscent of the
Nazi master-race philosophy.
In 1991, The New York Times reported that the State
Department “maintains a list of hundreds of thousands of aliens who are
considered to have dangerous beliefs or intentions and ought to be kept
out of the country.”
Much of the McCarran-Walter Act was revived post-9/11 by the U.S
Patriot Act. Anti-terrorism measures are now grotesquely placed in a
bizarre ideological context with anti-Communist laws that had supported
the control and removal of undesirable aliens in the McCarthy era.
With the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union,
dissident writers seemed to have disappeared from the public sphere.
But now the Bush administration has made journalists like Lappin into
the new subversives, even though they don’t promote ideological or
other agendas.
In the name of protecting Americans from terrorists, Bush, Dick Cheney,
John Ashcroft, and Congress have taken away many American freedoms. An
example of this suppression is the closing of U.S. borders to foreign
writers, as had been done during the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
“Security” Breach
In closing, I must report an overseas breach in security. Everyone who
travels by air in America knows that after passing through airport
security in the U.S., passengers are immersed in a plastic,
weapons-free pre-boarding zone. At snack bars or in airplanes from Los
Angeles to St. Louis, and from Chicago to New York, all eating utensils
are plastic. Why is that? Because officials decided that the 9/11
terrorists used box cutters to overpower the crew of the hijacked
airplanes.
To prevent such a thing from ever happening again, Americans now dine
with plastic. But not so in the more level headed “old” and “new”
Europe. From Holland to Italy to Hungary, in ubiquitous Sbarros pizza
joints and fancy dining lounges and fast food outlets all over the
place--and even on airplanes--Europeans dine with perfectly normal stainless steel
knives, forks, and spoons. These weapons of mass destruction are freely
available to anyone--after passing through airport security, often
within several yards of the boarding docks.
Be that as it may, not a single terrorist attack has originated from
European airports either before or after 9/11. Moreover, with the
liberalization of international travel within the expanded European
Union, “foreign” journalists and writers speedily pass through passport
checkpoints, unlike in the increasingly freedom-starved America.
How free or secure is Bush’s America?
Frederick Sweet
is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email
your comments to Fred@interventionmag.com
Posted Monday, July 19, 2004
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