The Bush administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to refurbish America's badly battered image abroad. Cancel the contracts. It's not going to work and Elena Lappin is one reason why.Lappin, a British citizen, arrived at Los Angeles airport and in short order was searched and interrogated, jailed in a small barren cell, allowed minimum food and drink -- and 26 hours later deported.
The experience might have gone unremarked, but Lappin, as it happens, is a journalist and wrote about her rude and inexcusable treatment at length in the July 4th New York Times Book Review and at even greater length and damning detail in the July 5th issue of the prestigious British paper The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk).
Her account makes instructive reading, not least for showing what taxpayers are getting for their money. Eight guards were assigned to three detainees. "Their job was indescribably boring, they were overstaffed with nothing to do, and so making sure I didn't extract a pen or my mobile phone from my luggage must have seemed a welcome break."Lappin had come here on a freelance assignment for The Guardian with no visa, as journalists from the 27 visa waiver countries have long done, expecting to be automatically allowed in for 90 days.
But Homeland Security has revived a long disused relic of the McCarthy era, a special I-visa for journalists that entails, upon application overseas, being grilled by U.S. consular officials about whom the journalist plans to talk to and what he plans to write. Few other countries require those visas, and those that do tend to be unsavory Third World dictatorships.
Sadly, Lappin is not alone. Reporters from Australia, France, Germany and the Netherlands have also been collared on arrival and summarily deported. And these are our friends.
These I-visas need to be abolished for the visa-waiver nations and their journalists welcomed at the airport. We want foreign journalists to cover the presidential campaign. We want them to see that American democracy is robust and thriving and that we have not become the pinched police state that so many foreigners suspect.
Lappin is no anti-American polemicist. She has lived in this country, is married to an American and is the mother of an American.
She writes: "In the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the U.S. lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties."
