The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) issued a statement last Thursday about the Department of Justice's aim to update the Attorney General Guidelines. MPAC reported that besides for its own organization, other groups, including the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the Arab American Institute (AAI), are concerned by developments in the drafting of the new DoJ guidelines, which hope to transform the FBI into an intelligence gathering center for the U.S. in the War on Terror. According to the article, "Terror Profiling without Evidence Considered in US," in USA Today, "The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims." MPAC quoted the President of AAI, who is worried that millions of Americans would be the targets of "arbitary and subjective ethnic and religious profiling." This might lead, therefore, to further alienation of certain religious communities, particularly Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans. The main dilemma for creating the terrorist profile is the process itself , that is, which people (and with what foundational biases) could possibly develop an effective list of traits that describe a “suspicious” person, whom the government should rightly subject to further investigation and interrogation. Excellent material and research on the topic of profiling can be found on the website of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the NYU School of Law. Two reports are particularly interesting: The first is titled, “Americans on Hold: Profiling, Citizenship, and the War on Terror” and the second, from 2006, is “Irreversible Consequences: Racial Profiling and Lethal Force in the War on Terror.”
