Progress Pond

The Tale of Tashnuba Hayder

 
The former house in Queens of the displaced Hayder family, and their new home in the crowded apartment of a grandmother in Bangladesh

The entire NYT article is here. It is well worth the read and goes into far more detail.

16 year old girl, and Queens resident Tashnuba Hayder was labeled a potential suicide bomber by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force(My God, what an ironic name), and summarily deported to Bangladesh, a country she has never known. Also deported under duress were her mother, younger sister and brother, while her father and 14 year old brother remain in hiding in America so that he might finish his education.

Of course, this was only after an extensive and intrusive round of racial and ethnic profiling, monitoring of internet activities, and even a “Junior Renditioning”:

But Tashnuba said the agents told her, “Your mom just admitted you’re not here legally and we have to take you, or else take everybody.” At immigration headquarters in Manhattan, the F.B.I. was waiting, along with the other girl, Adama Bah, a native of Guinea whom Tashnuba said she knew slightly from a Manhattan mosque. Ms. Bah was of less interest to the authorities than Tashnuba, according to the government official who reviewed F.B.I. reports.

At day’s end, the girls were driven to a maximum-security juvenile detention center in rural Berks County, Pa. Suddenly they were among delinquent girls accused of drug crimes and assaults. Tashnuba was required to wear a sweat suit, march at attention and submit to strip-searches, she said. And the questioning began in earnest.

“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.”

All of this because she had listened to a controversial islamic cleric on the internet, and worked on a school assignment about suicide.

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 story concludes, and I think accurately, that the deportation was merely a CYA move by the FBI over something that went from bad to stupid to worse…but… we’ll never really know… it’s all classified!

Well folks, here’s a little reality for you… Bottom line, psychiatrists and psychologists are pretty pathetic at predictng and only a little better at preventing suicide… especially in children and adolescents. Any reason to think that the FBI might be better at it?

Our country has suffered recently at the hands of suicide children terrorists, but they’re all home grown! If you buy into the idea that there was no racial and ethnic profiling going on here, then you better watch out that your own children don’t write about or discuss suicide(which, BTW, is felt to be one of the better strategies in prevention) lest they be hauled off and rendered at “Camp Gitmo in the Pines”.

Don’t fool yourself that law enforcement isn’t already profiling and monitoring your children and their internet activities. How soon before “suicide potential” becomes a criminal offense? How far will the FBI be willing to go to CYA with you and your child?

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