Posted on: Thursday, December 4, 2003

EDITORIAL
Anti-Muslim sweep leaves a deep stain

Not a moment too soon, the Department of Homeland Security says it is ending a controversial Justice Department program that required men from predominately Muslim countries to report for questioning, fingerprinting and photographing.

Because of its ethnic and religious specificity, it had an all-too-eerie similarity to the registration of German Jews in the 1930s. That the American program never contemplated the wretched excess of the Nazi era is hardly a defense.

The program, unveiled in June 2002 by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft as a counterterrorism initiative, is also painfully reminiscent of the internship of Americans of Japanese ancestry in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

Some 83,000 foreign men in the United States were labeled "high national security concerns" because of nationality. Almost 14,000 of them faced deportation hearings, mostly because of immigration technicalities.

The Ashcroft program sowed resentment in America and abroad, deepening suspicions among Muslims that the U.S. government is anti-Islam. But it failed to produce a single terrorism charge, and the government has produced no evidence that it made us the least bit safer.