Bush Policies Push Racial Profiling - Report

Bush administration policies have "facilitated" racial profiling despite the president's vow to eliminate the practice, says the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in a report that was finished but not publicly discussed until after this month's presidential election. Following the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, "Arab Americans and Muslims increasingly became targets of law enforcement scrutiny," says the report. "Law enforcement officials' underlying prejudices and presumptions of guilt tainted routine security procedures. Profiling criteria came to include ethnicity, national origin and religion à heightened scrutiny and harassment at airports (and) selective enforcement of visa regulations," it adds. "Arab Americans and Muslims complained that airline personnel and airport security denied them access to aircraft and subjected them to unwarranted searches and harassment. In some instances, airport security removed individuals from planes because members of the crew or passengers did not 'feel safe'," says the report, posted on the commission's website in September. "On a larger scale, profiling resulted in detentions, forced registration, and extensive monitoring of persons of Middle Eastern descent," adds the document, which is critical of a number of federal agencies, principally the Department of Justice (DOJ), which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). [more]

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