Apparently it doesnt pay to have dark skin in this country:



New York teenager deported to Bangladesh
FBI held girl as “suicide bomber” suspect
By Clare Hurley
28 June 2005

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Tashnuba Hayder, a 16-year-old girl from New York City’s
borough of Queens, was deported last month to Bangladesh—a
country that she does not know—after being held for
several weeks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The
FBI suspected Tashnuba, the daughter of Muslim immigrant
parents who has lived in the United States since she was
in kindergarten, of being a suicide bomber.

In a report based largely on interviews with Tashnuba and
her family, the New York Times June 17 presented chilling
details of this case of police-state intimidation and
anti-Muslim persecution. FBI agents posing as youth
counselors descended upon the girl in her bedroom last
March, rifling through Tashnuba’s diary and school papers.
The agents pounced on a diagram prepared for a home-school
assignment on religion with the word “suicide”
highlighted, claiming it was evidence of the teenager’s
interest in blowing herself up.

Tashnuba apparently came to the FBI’s attention as a
result of government spying on an Internet chat room where
speeches of Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed, a London-based
Islamic cleric, were posted. The sheik is said to
encourage support for the Iraqi insurgency and “global
jihad,” though he denies recruiting anyone to become a
suicide bomber. And Tashnuba has insisted that her
exchanges in the chat room were on other topics, such as
the nature of a utopian state under Islamic law.

Nevertheless, Tashnuba, together with another Muslim girl,
Adama Bah, native of Guinea, were hauled away to a
maximum-security juvenile detention center in rural
Pennsylvania. There, she was strip-searched and
aggressively interrogated by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task
Force for two weeks without the presence of lawyers, or
her frantic parents being informed of her whereabouts.

Adama was later released under a gag order, but Tashnuba
was freed only on the condition that she immediately leave
the US for Bangladesh. She has not been to that country
since she was a toddler, does not speak the language, and
barely knows the relatives with whom she now lives, four
to a room.

“I feel like I’m on a different planet,” the adolescent
told the Times in Dhaka. “It just hit me. How everything
happened—it’s like, ‘Oh, my God.’”

The Times describes the spirited and articulate 16-year
old showing considerable courage in her confrontation with
agent Foria Younis, a 37-year-old secular Muslim woman of
Pakistani descent described as a “gun-toting, door-kicking
member of the FBI’s counter-terrorist squad,” in a profile
by the Daily Telegraph of London.

“They tried to twist my mind,” Tashnuba said. “They had
their little tactics—start with nice questions, try to get
more severe. In the end, when I did cry they were, like,
mocking me.”

“The FBI tried to say I didn’t have a life—like, I wasn’t
the typical teenager,” Tashnuba bitterly told the Times.
“They thought I was anti-American because I didn’t want to
compromise, but in my high school ethics class we had
communists, Democrats, Republicans, Gothics—all types. In
all our classes, we were told, ‘You speak up, you give
your opinion, and you defend it.’”

The Times reports: “A government psychiatrist concluded
that she was neither suicidal nor homicidal, and
recommended her release. But the agents, Tashnuba said,
kept ‘trying to link me to the psychological state.’ They
zeroed in on the single artificial rose in her bedroom
(her little sister’s); a psychology course (required by
her correspondence program), and an essay she wrote about
the Department of Homeland Security (assigned as a writing
evaluation by her tutor).

“The tutor, Asmaa Samad, recalled the essay as innocuous:
‘It said nothing derogative, nothing unpatriotic.’
Tashnuba said agents seized on one part. ‘I wrote, ‘I feel
like Muslims are being targeted, they’re being outcasted
more.’” And she defended the right of Muslims to fight
religious persecution.

Lacking any credible evidence of terrorist activity, the
FBI instead seized on Tashnuba’s immigration status—her
parents’ application for asylum has languished for a
decade—as grounds for holding and effectively deporting
her, allowing them to bypass criminal and juvenile
proceedings.

Although the New York Times lends dubious credibility to
the FBI’s assertion that it genuinely considered Tashnuba
as an imminent threat to the security of the United
States, the case is has unraveled as quickly as most of
the FBI’s other terrorism busts.

The FBI has come up empty handed in virtually every
terrorist plot it claims to have uncovered since the
September 11, 2001 attacks. Some of the cases are wildly
improbable and, if they ever get to court, have been
thrown out. For instance, the case against four Arab
immigrants alleged to be “sleeper cell” in Dearborn,
Michigan ended in debacle in 2004. The prosecution’s key
evidence consisted of an amateur film made on a school
trip and a doodle of the Middle East.

As usual, the Times’ criticism of the FBI is focused on
mismanagement. Mike German, an agent who left the bureau a
year ago after a long career and has publicly complained
that FBI management problems impeded terror investigations
after 9/11, is quoted as saying, “If all these chat rooms
are being monitored, and we’re running down all these
people because of what they’re saying in chat rooms, then
these are resources we’re not using on real threats.”

But, as the WSWS recently pointed out, the FBI is not the
Keystone Cops, bumbling off in all the wrong directions.
The detention of Tashnuba Hayder reflects a definite
policy aimed at intimidating domestic opposition and
stoking anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant suspicions in order
to justify the arrogation of police-state powers under the
USA Patriot Act.

Just two days before the Times ran its story, the
so-called “library provision” of the Patriot Act—which
allows federal investigators access to the records of
libraries and bookstores, including Internet usage on
public computers—was blocked in the House by a vote of
238-to-187. This vote may still be overturned by
presidential veto, and rest of the Patriot Act was passed.

Additionally it was published on June 23 that both the
Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue
Service had made their records containing detailed
personal information of US citizens available to federal
terrorism investigators.

As popular opposition grows to these measures, the case of
Tashnuba Hayder is an ominous warning that techniques such
as those used in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where
prisoners—including minors—are held indefinitely as “enemy
combatants” and refused due process, can be introduced
within the United States itself.

So she is STILL in Bangladesh?....and she considers Gothics a political party?

So, did they determine whether or not she was a suicide bomber, or did they just ship her off to Bangladesh regardless?

I think they are hoping that deporting her away from her home and family to a country that she knows practically nothing about will TURN her into a suicide bomber, thus proving the validity of the program.

Ah, I see. They're smart.

I'm wondering how they can deport her and not her parents? Seems odd to allow the parents to stay but force them to ship their daughter to a strange land.

Right, because that is why she was deported, her dark skin. The New York times article states that her and her family moved back to Bangladesh, so it wasn't like she was just shipped off on an airplane all by herself as the article impies. I do think that deporting someone just because of a suspicion is way over the top, but since the FBI won't comment on the case, and the girl is the only real source of information, we really don't know their reasoning.

When a family says that they got fucked by the FBI, and the FBI remains silent ... I, personally, trust the FBI. I'm sure they had a good reason for what they did.