Everyone is assumed innocent until proven guilty in America, unless, as photojournalist Kathleen Foster pointed out in a screening of her documentary ‘Point of Attack’ at Boston University College of Communication Tuesday night, you happen to look like a terrorist.
Foster’s documentary chronicles the plight of Muslim, Pakistani and South Asian immigrants who have experienced the racial profiling policies used by the federal government after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It centers on the racial profiling of a few out of the 5,000 cases of Middle Eastern-American men who were detained and deported after 9/11.
Out of that 5,000, not one of them was found guilty of terrorist activity, according to Foster’s documentary.
‘I lived in Brooklyn, and on Sept. 11, I was in a local church that was filled with people congregated to comfort each other,’ Foster told an audience of about 15 people. ‘We were concerned because there was already anti-Muslim rhetoric on the radio. No one knew what had happened, but it seemed like something was building up.’
In the documentary, Pakistani-American citizen Faisal Ulvie said the Patriot Act allowed government officials to arrest and jail him-without reading him his Miranda rights- despite his repeated denial that he had no information about 9/11.
‘ ‘I lost my friends and my cousins,’ Ulvie said of his loved ones that turned away from him because of his arrest. ‘But who am I supposed to turn to?’
The documentary also followed the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s special registration process for immigrants, which meant long lines, interrogation and fingerprinting and missing lunch and dinner.
‘You are not going to be allowed an attorney there,’ an INS official told immigrants who were waiting in line, according to the documentary.
All the detainees featured in the film said no government officials ever told them what would happen to them. Their families repeatedly tried to locate their loved ones or any sort of evidence to redeem them but said the detainees were held for months, given hearings that carried on longer than a year.
‘What people don’t realize is that right now, this kind of thing is still going on,’ Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union Director of Education Nancy Murray said. ‘They [the government officials] have a network of fusion centers with giant computers that do pattern analyses looking for terrorists in the U.S. There are also surveillance cameras everywhere, including Brookline and Cambridge.’
Vijay Shah, a Harvard Law School employee and Cambridge resident who attended the screening, said he knows how horrible racial profiling feels.
‘I was pulled out of an anti-war march while wandering around the perimeter of the 2004 Democratic National Convention because I had a full beard at the time,’ Shah said.
BU ACLU President Ryan Menezes said he found the INS official’s speech to the immigrants shocking.
‘That was the most shameless action of the INS in the documentary,’ Menezes, a College of Communication senior and former Daily Free Press reporter, said. ‘Is that even pretending to be legal?’
Foster urged BU students to be active against what she sees as the continued imperialistic goals of the American government.
‘The lives of so many people were totally destroyed by the government’s actions in 9/11,’ Foster told The Daily Free Press. ‘Since then, millions have died in the war in Iraq and thousands in Afghanistan. I think everyone here should join the anti-war movement. We need to do something to stop this war that is accelerating.’
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
