New screening methods target Muslims, critics charge
By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers
* Posted on Tuesday, March 4, 2008
WASHINGTON — In the six and a half years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal law-enforcement agencies have secretly established profiling techniques to screen immigrants based on their nationalities, protocols that critics charge encourage the unjustified targeting of Muslims.
The profiling, described in a February 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that McClatchy obtained, shows that the government has relied more heavily on nationality as an indicator of security risks than was previously known.
Federal agencies have created internal lists of countries that are of "special interest" for national security reasons, wrote the memo's author, Ted Stark, supervisory special agent with the Office of Intelligence at ICE.
So many federal agencies have created different lists that U.S. officials contemplated adopting a single one to streamline the process, Stark wrote.
The proposed list, which officials said had yet to be adopted, includes 35 countries, most with significant Muslim or Arab populations. Almost 20 percent of the world's countries — including some of the United States' key allies, such as Jordan, Turkey and Egypt — are on the list.
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