1115.org

The good folks over at McClatchy bring us yet another dirty government secret:

In the six and a half years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal law-enforcement agencies have secretly established profiling techniques to screen immigrants based on their nationalities, protocols that critics charge encourage the unjustified targeting of Muslims.

I entirely approve. If we’re going to be dumb racists, we should at least have enough of a sense of shame about it to do it secretly.

The profiling, described in a February 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that McClatchy obtained, shows that the government has relied more heavily on nationality as an indicator of security risks than was previously known.

Federal agencies have created internal lists of countries that are of “special interest” for national security reasons, wrote the memo’s author, Ted Stark, supervisory special agent with the Office of Intelligence at ICE.

So many federal agencies have created different lists that U.S. officials contemplated adopting a single one to streamline the process, Stark wrote.

The proposed list, which officials said had yet to be adopted, includes 35 countries, most with significant Muslim or Arab populations. Almost 20 percent of the world’s countries — including some of the United States’ key allies, such as Jordan, Turkey and Egypt — are on the list.
[…]
Federal authorities wouldn’t discuss the memo or the screening methods in detail but denied singling out Muslims. When asked, some confirmed that such lists existed but wouldn’t disclose the identities of the nations.
[…]
While U.S. officials said their current special-interest country lists were based on intelligence about international terrorist networks, the proposed list doesn’t include Germany and England, where authorities have acknowledged breaking up al Qaida cells.

Just like I said, dumb racists, that’s us.

Oh, there’s also this:

Courts have upheld immigration policies that discriminate based on nationality, but generally view law enforcement profiling of U.S. citizens based on ethnicity, race or religion as unconstitutional.

It’s the old separate and equal thing. They’re separate (immigrants), we’re equal (citizens). Aren’t you proud to be an American yet?