The expanded powers given to US law enforcement agencies in the “war on terror” have taken some dangerous people off American streets — but have also triggered some bizarre missteps that have raised the level of anti-Americanism among people abroad without necessarily making the homeland any safer.
Consider the following two examples:
In late March, two 16-year-old Muslim girls were arrested in New York and detained in Pennsylvania for six weeks as would-be suicide bombers who posed “an imminent threat to the security of the United States.”
But last week, the government quietly released one of the girls and allowed the other to leave the country with her family.
One of the girls is from Bangladesh, the other from Guinea. They did not know one another. They were taken into custody separately on March 24 and held at a detention center.
The Bangladeshi girl, her mother and two brothers have left the country voluntarily, according to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Her name is being withheld because she is a minor not charged with any crime.
ICE said the Guinean girl, Adama Bah, still faces removal proceedings.
ICE has insisted the girls were never accused of crimes, only administrative immigration violations.
But media reports at the time of their arrest cited a government document that said the FBI believed the girls posed “an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers.”
Beau Grosscup, professor of International Relations at California State University, said the girls’ cases “illustrate that the ‘war on terrorism’ has larger political and social goals — in these two cases to intimidate members of the Muslim community and dissident voices in opposition to the corporate agenda, among other things. Armed with the domestic and foreign policy powers handed to them in the post 9/11 frenzy, they now can invoke those broad and ill-defined powers any way they want to knowing neither the corporate media nor a cheering public will object”.
The second case seems equally strange.
A year ago next month, Hope Kurtz died of a heart attack in Buffalo, New York. Her husband, Steve, an art professor at the University of Buffalo, called 911. Police and emergency medical services responded.
What the police saw when they got to the Kurtz home, aside from Mrs. Kurtz’s body and a distraught husband, were vials, bacterial cultures, and an assortment of laboratory equipment, including a mobile DNA extracting machine used for testing food products for genetic contamination. Kurtz explained to the police that these were some of the materials for an art exhibit he and his wife had been preparing on genetic modification. The Kurtzes were founders of a group called “The Critical Art Ensemble”, a collective of “tactical media” protest and performance artists.
The police didn’t buy his story. They called the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). A HAZMAT team carried out testing. Erie County health officials declared the Kurtz home a potential health risk and sealed it for two days while a state lab examined the bacterial cultures found inside.
They confiscated Mrs. Kurtz’s body, and Prof. Kurtz’s computer, notebooks, and art supplies. They cordoned off part of the street, quarantined the Kurtz home, and took Prof. Kurtz to a hotel, where the FBI questioned him for two days.
Officials eventually made it known that there was no danger to public health, and Kurtz was allowed to move back to his home.
But federal authorities obviously thought something in the Kurtz home was illegal, because prosecutors subsequently convened a grand jury, with Kurtz as its target. But instead of bioterrorism, he was indicted for mail and wire fraud, charges normally used against those defrauding others of money or property, as in telemarketing schemes.
Also indicted was Robert Ferrell, head of the Department of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health, who allegedly helped Kurtz obtain $256 worth of bacteria for one of Kurtz’s art projects.
This week in Buffalo, New York, a judge heard motions to dismiss the federal criminal case against Kurtz, whose attorney argued that a dangerous precedent would be set by “exalting” into a federal criminal case of wire and mail fraud what is customarily a minor, civil contract issue — the purchase of the bacterium Serratia marcescens by scientist Ferrell for use in Kurtz’s artwork.
Kurtz’s lawyer further argued that the FBI intentionally misled a judge into issuing the original search warrant.
The judge was told of Kurtz’s possession of a photograph of an exploded car with Arabic writing beside it, but not of the photograph’s context: An invitation to a museum art show. The original warrant called for the seizure of anything with Arabic writing.
Even if the judge grants the dismissal motion, Kurtz’s lawyer says it is certain that the prosecution will appeal the decision.
No trial date has yet been set. But while the case is pending, FBI agents have been talking with people connected with Kurtz — museum curators in Massachusetts and the state of Washington, colleagues in New York and California, and current students at Buffalo. The Justice Department declines to comment on the case. Brian Foley, a law professor who teaches criminal procedure at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Florida, told IPS, “The Kurtz case violates at least the spirit of our constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Police are not supposed to be able to come into our homes and rummage around. Once they realized it wasn’t, any rummaging into Kurtz’s life should have stopped. To pull out charges of mail and wire fraud is overreaching to say the least.”
It’s a pity that taxpayer resources are being used to pursue prosecutions that, in any other than America’s current paranoid environment, would be considered frivolous.
