I protest.

Thuggery.

Last December, it was an Australian. Last month, it was a reporter from the Guardian: American homeland security. Again, a journalist without an "I-Visa" was arrested, held, treated inhumanely and finally deported, all because she was honest when she told the Customs agent who she was and why she was here.

You know, if I were a British terrorist trying to sneak into the United States, of course I would, first, pretend to be a journalist, second, forget to bring my "I-Visa" and, third, tell the Customs agent this.

If there are any foreign journalists reading this who want to avoid this particular problem, it's simple: Lie. You're a tourist visiting LA for the weather. Hell, them them you're coming to visit me! I only live about twenty minutes from the airport. But whatever you do, don't tell them you're a journalist. Oh, and fuck their god-damned "I-Visa."

The United States has joined the exalted ranks of countries like Cuba, North Korea and Iran in requiring special visas for journalists.

Yeah, you gotta watch those foreign journalists. They might actually write about what they see. Well, this woman did.

… For the first time, I raised my voice: "How dare you touch my private things?"

"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

How dare she "treat an American officer with disrespect?" Maybe because he was treating her with disrespect. She was charged, tried and found guilty without ever having a chance to defend herself. She was deported and now has a criminal record in the United States. All for telling the truth that she was here, as a journalist, to interview someone.

Though my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, "conceptually related", at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong". American bloggers and journalists would later see my experience as reflecting the current malaise in the country. Dennis Roddy wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our enemies are now more important to us than our friends ... Much of the obsession with homeland security seems to turn on the idea of the world infecting the US."

Indeed. Unfortunately, systematic harassment of foreign journalists is in the same realm as using torture as a matter of course. When did we become Iraq?

As documented by Reporters Without Borders and by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Asne) in letters to Colin Powell and Tom Ridge, cases such as mine are part of a systemic policy of harassing media representatives from 27 friendly countries whose citizens - not journalists! - can travel to the US without a visa, for 90 days. According to Asne, this policy "could lead to a degradation of the atmosphere of mutual trust that has traditionally been extended professional journalists in these nations". Asne requested that the state department put pressure on customs and immigration to "repair the injustice that has been visited upon our colleagues". Someone must have listened, because the press office at the department of homeland security recently issued a memo announcing that, although the I-visa is still needed (and I've just received mine), new guidelines now give the "Port Directors leeway when it comes to allowing journalists to enter the US who are clearly no threat to our security". Well, fine, but doesn't that imply some journalists are a threat?

(Emphasis mine.) Of course it does. Remember, those journalists might not be as tame and quiet-like as our homegrown variety. They might actually report the truth.

Maybe we are. During my surreal interlude at LAX, I told the officer taking my fingerprints that I would be writing about it all. "No doubt," he snorted. "And anything you'll write won't be the truth."

Oh, really? As opposed to what, Fox News?

It is time, and past time, that this kind of crap was stopped. In the meantime, though, there's always the way of civil disobedience. It's simple: Lie. While I have a firm and unshakable belief in the value of honesty, in this particular case, the only right thing is for foreign journalists coming into the US to lie about their intentions. If they can come in as citizens, then that's what they should do, and deny those petty tyrants their victims.

(Found via Natasha at Pacific Views, Torture and Humiliation.)