Bush Policies Push Racial Profiling - Report
/Bush administration policies have "facilitated" racial profiling
despite the president's vow to eliminate the practice, says the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights in a report that was finished but not
publicly discussed until after this month's presidential election.
Following the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the
Pentagon, "Arab Americans and Muslims increasingly became targets of
law enforcement scrutiny," says the report. "Law enforcement officials'
underlying prejudices and presumptions of guilt tainted routine
security procedures. Profiling criteria came to include ethnicity,
national origin and religion à heightened scrutiny and harassment at
airports (and) selective enforcement of visa regulations," it adds.
"Arab Americans and Muslims complained that airline personnel and
airport security denied them access to aircraft and subjected them to
unwarranted searches and harassment. In some instances, airport
security removed individuals from planes because members of the crew or
passengers did not 'feel safe'," says the report, posted on the
commission's website in September. "On a larger scale, profiling
resulted in detentions, forced registration, and extensive monitoring
of persons of Middle Eastern descent," adds the document, which is
critical of a number of federal agencies, principally the Department of
Justice (DOJ), which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). [more]
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