Practicalmadness

This is an outrage: a Canadian woman of Indian descent, while changing planes at O'Hare while traveling from India to Toronto, was tossed head-first into a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare when INS officers decided that her Canadian passport was a fake.

They threatened to give her the old Indefinite Detainment, but instead chose the slow water torture:

Instead of jailing her on Jan. 27, an INS officer cut the front page of Cruz's passport and filled each page with "expedited removal" stamps, rendering it useless. She was photographed, fingerprinted, barred from re-entering the U.S. for five years and immediately "removed."

Not to Toronto, but to India, where she had just spent several weeks visiting her parents. It took four days, and help from Canadian officials in Dubai and a Kuwaiti Airlines pilot, to get her back home.

I want you to fully appreciate the world we live in now: customs agents, INS officers and TSA security guards are being told on a daily basis that terrorists are lurking around every corner, and that they are the first line of defense.

They are being told that the slightest suspicion is proof enough to take the most extreme action, all in the name of defending the homeland.

Each of these men and women are just doing their job, trying to be good soldiers so they'll be looked upon favorably at their next performance review, to hopefully get a raise or a promotion.

Imagine that these people are working at 7-Eleven. They don't think that the signatures on your ID and your credit card slip match. They refuse to accept the transaction. You cannot have your Big Gulp. You are inconvenienced. You're pissed off. The clerk, however, is just trying to do his job to the best of his ability. It's an admirable ambition. Come on -- can you say that about yourself?

However, what if he hadn't just refused to serve you? What if he had seized your credit card and threatened to ruin your credit rating, just because your identification didn't seem 100% legit to a man who's at the end of one too many twelve-hour days?

Our homeland security forces mean well, and ultimately they are protecting us. For that we should applaud them, because they're part of...well, they're part of some kind of solution. But in the unilateralist -- dare I say totalitarian? -- culture creeping through our government right now, we're trusting Very Important Decisions and the futures of many ordinary people to the judgement of a field agent who's spent one too many fourteen-hour days at Orange Alert.

They are being encouraged to suspect anyone who fits a certain profile -- considering not only national origin, but ethnicity -- of being the Enemy, and are furthermore encouraged to act on these slim suspicions to the extent of their surprisingly considerable power.

The next international incident will not begin with an assassination or at a summit meeting. It will begin with a federal worker who didn't have time to stop at Starbucks before work.