A 9/11 lesson: Don't photograph the water

[JoFerret]

Talk about over-reaching, over-reacting fear -driven petty minded abuse of power....
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/nyregion/06hudson.html

HUDSON, N.Y. - On a cloudless autumn day three years ago, Ansar Mahmood, a pizza deliveryman for a Domino's near here, took a few hours off from work to snap pictures of the Hudson River amid the foliage, to send home to his family in Pakistan.....That moment marked the end of Mr. Mahmood's brief American dream, as he stumbled into a vortex of fear, politics and deportation proceedings.

The official-looking buildings turned out to be a water-treatment plant for the city of Hudson. The crisp afternoon fell exactly four weeks after Sept. 11....

And Mr. Mahmood - .... - was suddenly from the wrong part of the world.

Any notion that Mr. Mahmood was tied to terrorism quickly evaporated .... But he was soon charged with helping Pakistani friends whose visas had expired, an offense that led to his detention and pending deportation.

With his arrest, Mr. Mahmood became part of the wave of Arab and Muslim aliens and citizens who were detained for questioning in the two months after Sept. 11. A United States Department of Justice report estimates that 1,200 people were rounded up, but advocates for the detainees say the number was much higher. Like Mr. Mahmood, many were then prosecuted for immigration violations or past crimes.

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