LAPPIN

This is the most depressing thing I've read in a while (via Michael Froomkin). Here are the first paragraphs:

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.

After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don't suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. "What do you want?" he yelled. I said I didn't feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa.

Two points about this:

1. I don't know enough about immigration law to understand the ramifications of Section 414 of the PATRIOT Act (cited in the article). Stories of capricious immigration officials and harsh bureaucratic procedures predate the PATRIOT Act, to be sure. The sister of an acquaintance of mine was denied entry to the U.S. in the 1990s because she had kept a diary of money (less than $100, apparently) earned while babysitting as an au pair on a previous visit to the U.S.; an official went through the diary when she landed in the States and then put her on the next flight back to Europe. That's the way bureaucracies work sometimes, and it is unfortunate. But the broader point needs to be emphasized here, despite worries in the professional legal community (and others) that the PATRIOT Act could get a bad rap from civil libertarians. We have reacted to specific terrorist threats in unfortunate ways, and some -- not all -- provisions of the PATRIOT Act reflect that overreaction.


2. Lappin quotes one official as saying:
   

   "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference."

   
   This is the dark underside of the obsession with "moral equivalency" that we hear in some corners of public discourse nowadays, particularly on the right. (As a side note, I would love to see a history of this phrase. It's basically baffling to me.) The argument was prevalent in much of the discussion of Abu Ghraib: any attempt to insinuate "moral equivalency" between the U.S. and Ba'athist tyranny is bad. Therefore. . .well, therefore, the abuses in Iraq perpetrated by our men and women in and out of uniform are not as bad as the abuses perpetrated by Saddam Hussein's officials. True enough. Then what? Well, I think that we see a street-level expression of the same view in the quote above. We're not morally equivalent to Iran, so quit complaining. Was the official thinking of Zahra Kazemi? Whatever the case, the sentiment expressed in the quote is quite disturbing. The fact that we're not Iran is supposed to go some distance toward justifying harsh treatment by our officials. Not sure that I'm reading this right, but I think that the implications of the "moral equivalency" arguments do tend in that direction.

The fact that we're "at war" is not an excuse for bureaucratic abuses of the sort described in Lappin's article (with the caveat that the article has to be accurate for this criticism to apply). At some point, the excuses have to run out. And given the basically unchecked power of immigration officials at points of entry, anyone who is suspicious of unchecked power (in the good-old American tradition of such suspicion) should regard the article as plausible -- and disturbing.