marginalia

Homeland Security

Torture at Abu Ghraib
Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker, May 7, 2004

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The Taguba Report
Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade
Compiled by Major General Antonio M. Taguba,
Deputy Commanding General Support,
Coalition Forces Land Component Command

Completed in February and not intended for public release. Details abuses more horrific even than those in the horrific photographs we by now have all seen.

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The Third Geneva Convention
Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

The Fourth Geneva Convention
Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War

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Cases Citing Arabs Rise
International Herald Tribune, 22-23 November 2003.

Prosecutions of Arab and Muslim Americans in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb with a large concentration of Arab citizens, have shot up since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the Detroit News reported. The number of people with Arab or Muslim names charged with legal violations, from assault to failure to cut weeds, has jumped 9.3 percent since the attacks, the paper said Thursday. Its analysis of 100,000 district court records also found that charges against those without such names had dropped by 6.7 percent.

U.S. Tech Boom Relied on Imported Experts
Decline in Migration Worries Analysts
James Glanz, International Herald Tribune, 22-23 November 2003
Reprinted from the New York Times, 21 November 2003

The dependence on foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States soared in the 1990’s, raising questions about how the nation will sustain its technology-driven economy as competition for brainpower increases worldwide, the National Science Board said.

The board, a federal advisory body established by Congress, said this week that it had also found a large drop in the number of successful visa applications from foreign scientists, suggesting that the United States no longer dominates the global marketplace for technical talent as it once did.

“As the jobs grew in the United States, we relied more heavily on students from abroad,” said Joseph Miller Jr., senior vice president and chief technology officer at Corning, a maker of fiber-optic cable, and chairman of the task force that produced the board’s report on the findings. “All of this causes great concern for us, for the future of our science and engineering work force.”

From 1990 to 2000, the board reported, the percentage of foreign-born workers in science and engineering with doctoral degrees in the United States leaped to 38 percent, from 24 percent. Compiled by the National Science Foundation, which the board oversees, the statistics are not yet available beyond 2000.

But by analyzing figures provided by the Office of Immigration Statistics, the board found that from 2001 to 2002, the number of temporary worker visas issued for jobs in science and technology plummeted by 55 percent, to 74,000 from 166,000.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, successful visa applications in all categories have fallen, said Stuart Patt, a spokesman for the Consular Affairs Bureau of the State Department, from 10 million in the 2001 fiscal year to 6.5 million in the 2003 fiscal year. Heightened security fears and marketing efforts by other countries for international tourist dollars may have contributed to the overall drop, Patt said.

Many American scientists have complained that it has been harder for their foreign colleagues to come to the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. Patt confirmed that the State Department had brought foreign scientists and engineers under greater scrutiny. (more)