YuMDaP.net's blog

Made any plans to travel to the USA? Well, if you don't own a valid US passport I would rethink that. The number of prominent and less prominent victims of Americas 'hospitality' is growing and growing. I will discuss recent cases and safety tips. The latter might be of interest since even if you're only passing through the US to reach another country (i.e. Brasil) you can be taken into custody by US officials.

Miami, Florida. As an employee of the European Parliamentary Group European United Left Paul-Emile Dupret has to travel alot. He serves this group as an advisor on foreign policy. On sunday, the 18th of July the Belgian and other parliamentarians were on their way back from a meeting of the São Paulo Forum in Nicaragua. The flight from Managua back home to Madrid had a 1 hour scheduled transit stop in Miami, which is pretty usual for such flights. Sad it is that what happened there seems to be pretty usual, too, these days.

Since US airports have no transit areas for international flights (as in Europe) passengers have to go through the customs as if they were traveling to the US. At this point certain visas and stamps in Dupret's passport made a brave customs officer frown. In his duty as a EP employee he had to travel to countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Venezuela, Columbia and Equador. This seemed a little strange for the mindful officer and even though Dupret explained his parliamentary work requires him to go to these countries he was seperated from his delegation and taken into custody.

"I was interrogated for more than 6 hours" he tells the German magazine Telepolis. "I assume they knew all along I was a human rights activist for many years," he conjectured. They asked him whether he met personally with Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. They asked him alot of questions over and over when they finally told him he could forget about coming back to the US without authorization and put him in a cell to wait for his deportation. There he sat for eighteen hours more. All the time the room was brightly illuminated and a TV set was running at maximum volume.

Those methods have been condemned in Afghanistan and Iraq (because of all the torture reports) but still seem to be customary for US customs. The exact same procedure had to be endured by Peter Nowak, a free journalist, and his colleague Jens Klinker (Indymedia article). One of them had an Iraqi visa in his passport provoking the same reaction as in Dupret's case. They were told they had no rights and the customs officers had the say. Their interrogation took more than 8 hours and involved stupid accusations as the membership in the RAF (Red Army Fraction), a terrorist organisation which seized to exist in the 70s of the last century.

Now stamps or visas are not the only problems you might face when going to the US of A. Especially if you have a scientific background there is a good chance you might have violated US laws in your home country already (depending on what you work on). So happened to a university professor who developes and distributes a live linux CD (run Linux without installation). Some Software on this CD contained cryptographic algorithms which fall under the US export restrictions for munition. These may be exported to European countries but not to countries like North-Korea or Iran (and the rest of 'Axis of Evil'-gang). The country of the professor doesn't have such export restrictions so he just put the CD download on his site (and several mirrors in Europe). This got him arrested by the FBI.

There's a whole lot more reports of normal tourists treated like criminals who just wanted to visit the US for their holidays, more than I could ever mention here. People kept in custody without any obvious reason, so you can never be on the save side when traveling to the USA.

So how can we prevent these un-democratic acts against freedom to happen (to us)? Pretty easy, most countries (democratic) allow you to get a second (blank) passport. It should be enough to explain your fears or call the incompatibility of some visas to attention. In case of a possible violation of US laws there's only one piece of advice:

DO NOT GO!

cheers
Matthias