Michigan’s Mailing Mistake

Jeffrey G. Collins, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, sent out invitation letters on Tuesday to 566 recent immigrants from Middle Eastern nations, asking them to participate in interviews about terrorism.

“Your name has been brought to our attention,” Collins wrote in his letter, “because, among other things, you came to Michigan on a visa from a country where groups that support, advocate, or finance international terrorism.” The “other things” included the fact that the recipients were male and between the ages of 18 and 33.

While the meetings were termed ‘voluntary,’ Collins has refused to say what will happen to those who do not respond to the letter, and omitted from his mailing the fact that if any of the respondents have violated the conditions of their visas, they can be held without bond for further questioning at the discretion of investigators.

This move comes as part of the Justice Department’s effort to interview 5,000 Middle Eastern men across the nation as it pieces together information about the Sept. 11 attacks.

While we recognize that officials have been presented with a monumental challenge in tracking down an international terrorist network with ties as secret and as expansive as al-Qaeda, sending a mass mailing to the Middle Eastern community is the wrong way to approach this task.

For one thing, Collins’ approach is absurdly inefficient. No terrorist has ever been caught by politely asking him or her to call officials’ offices to schedule an appointment.

We refuse to believe that the Justice Department has no better means of investigating the attacks than blanket canvassing. This measure will be successful only in alienating and offending the Arab-American community by presuming, without any investigative efforts to determine whether such suspicion is warranted, that all Middle Eastern young men should be questioned about terrorist activities. Is the next step a letter to all Muslims?

By sending the message that a person’s nation of origin can be enough cause for interrogation, the Justice Department paints U.S. policy in a light that is antithetical to the values of inclusion that the American people hold dear. Additionally, they set a double standard for Arab-Americans. There has never been a mass mailing to the Italian immigrants to discuss the Mafia and organized crime; nor have personal invitations been sent to Colombian immigrants inviting them to discuss cocaine trafficking. Such blatant profiling would rightly ignite public furor, and it is wrong of the Justice Department to capitalize on national fear to target any ethnic group.

However, the policy could be more than merely ineffective—it could make the Justice Department’s job in investigating terrorism even more difficult. Collins’ letter may cause the Arab-American community to become more insular. By setting a blind ‘witch-hunting’ tone to the handling of the cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will offend recipients and make them less likely to respond or to cooperate with authorities.

When the FBI in September called upon speakers of Arabic to aid the U.S. government with its translation and intelligence-gathering needs, thousands of individuals signed up to help—sending a powerful message of solidarity with all Americans in our time of crisis. The way to maintain volunteers in an anti-terrorism effort is not to then serve them with a letter accusing them of being the terrorists we are working to defeat. One would hope that the Justice Department, responsible for gathering information in thousands of federal cases, would understand that principle.