Are Human Rights Violations Becoming More Difficult to Hide? – Columbia University

Posted: October 3, 2021 at 2:00 am

Jaffer also reminded participants that in the weeks after 9/11, the U.S. government rounded up hundreds of immigrants, most of them Arab or South Asian, almost all of them Muslim, falsely intimating to the public that they were connected in some way to the attacks. In the months and years that followed, the courts granted the government new authorities, creating national security exceptions to important human rights protections. All of us should have been quicker to recognize that those were not national security exceptionsthat they were effectively Muslim exceptions, he said.

Part of the challenge at the time, suggested Elisa Massimino, former president and CEO of Human Rights First, was that following the attacks the government deliberately hid its true agenda. She recalled a visit to the Justice Department shortly after 9/11 to discuss with officials those individuals being rounded up: We were looking for some sign that there was a strategy related to national security behind any of it. We said, Surely you're not just randomly rounding up people who are Muslim or [who] seem Muslim to somebody and hoping that you're going to catch some terrorists. And that is precisely what they were doing.

But, as Massimino added: I think my navet was really that there was some level of competence inside the government on these issues. And that early meeting just completely stripped that away. There was no strategy behind that. It was just fear-driven prejudice.

ACLUs Executive Director Anthony Romero expressed similar bitterness over the governments framing of national security policies as part of the fight against terrorism in order to bypass conventions for international human rights and domestic law enforcement. The war on terror paradigm was one we fought. But I wish we had just never fallen prey to the use of it, he said. Once [we had] the full evidence of the commission of torture and the fact that [the government] had acted so unlawfully we should have impeached the bunch of them.

Added Roth: The one point where I think we made a mistake is that we allowed the discussion to be exclusively about torture, rather than ... cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. [We should have] gotten people to think about humane treatment, you know, do you want the cop in your local precinct interrogating you with these techniques?

The panelists link between national security and policing did suggest that, amid burgeoning social justice movements and intersectional awareness, a more effective response may be possible.

The context [after 9/11] was really around the surveillance of Muslim communities, argued panelist Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the 2017 Womens March and former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. [There were] a lot of moments where the movement could have initially engaged in solidarity and looking at the connections between national security and the policing apparatus in the United States, and how it impacts people of color. We could have had one big whole conversation that really could have built a lot of power.

Sarsour concluded: What I hope that we have now is this idea that we can't have these silo fights anymore. We're not going to talk about criminal justice reform without also talking about national security reform.

A. Adam Glenn is a writer/editor at the Knight First Amendment Institute.

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Are Human Rights Violations Becoming More Difficult to Hide? - Columbia University

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