Intelligence Failure

John Ashcroft is scheduled to appear before the Judiciary Committee this week. He'll be defending the administration's anti-terror techniques -- mass incarceration, mandatory interview, military tribunals and now more FBI monitoring of religious groups and politicos.

He wants to spy on us. We can only hope he comes under mounting scrutiny himself.

Public pressure helped force the Justice Department last week to release a list of the people, all unnamed, who are still being held around the country, picked up in the feds big anti-terror sweep after September 11. Of the 1200 or so arrested, 548 remain. Only about a dozen of them, it turns out, have any ties to anything that could remotely be characterized as terrorism. Mostly they are charged with minor visa infringements and traffic violations.

The full INS list is now on the internet. It runs to seventeen pages. Five hundred and forty eight people -- their countries of origin read "Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco, India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Afghanistan..."

Nameless, faceless, the vast majority have been locked up for over two months without legal representation because lawyers didn't know that they were there.

Joel Kupferman, a New York lawyer, says he only recently became aware of a Pakistani man in federal detention in Brooklyn who's been there since shortly after Sept. 11. "What's noteworthy," says Kupferman, is that his client is being held "in solitary confinement, beneath round-the-clock fluorescent lights when just down the hall, a murder suspect is free to move about." The Pakistani is accused of a visa violation.

Journalists are beginning to warm to the story of these detainees. Perhaps they feel reassured by how toughly Senate Judiciary Committee members treated Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff when he appeared in hearings last week. The hearings may have signaled to the media that investigating the Bush team's tactics is within the bounds of professional acceptability. No one wants to get the reputation as a terrorist sympathizer, after all.

But before we get too excited about the media's new found curiosity, it's worth remembering something. Nameless, faceless, silenced, presumed guilty. That's the normal condition of folks like Kupferman's client in the U.S. media.

Check out most of the papers: immigrant communities are covered so scantily, it was easy for 1200 men to disappear in a dragnet without a ripple of public concern. Invisibility can cost folks their freedom. Their lives, even.

Fifty-five-year-old Muhammed Rafiq Butt died in Kearny, New Jersey on October 23. There was barely a murmur in the media when he passed away after a month in a federal cell. The authorities waited two days even to acknowledge his death. Butt had no attorney, no visitors at the jail. He was charged with overstaying his visa and was trying to return to Pakistan, but he had no money.

If he'd gotten more attention, could Rafiq Butt have raised the ticket price home? Maybe.

Fuller coverage of all our American communities might have helped the rest of us too. Call it political correctness or call it respect for diversity, media inclusivity has never been simply a matter of being fair. It has to do with intelligence.

Remember the Los Angeles riots -- the TV footage was shot from traffic helicopters because the networks had no reporters familiar enough with South Central to cover the action from the ground.

In the middle of an uprising -- or a war for that matter -- or an FBI clamp-down -- is no time for journalists to introduce themselves for the first time to people under attack.

Closer coverage of immigrant communities could have revealed civil liberty violations earlier. It might also have turned up useful information about terror networks.