From South African daily The Independent:
SA scholar ‘barred because of his views’See also here.September 26 2007 at 01:46AM
By Jason Szep
Boston - A South African scholar was barred from the United States because of his criticism of US policy in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay prisoner camp, a civil rights group said in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.
Accusing the Bush administration of stifling academic debate by routinely denying visas to critics, the American Civil Liberties Union filed the federal suit on behalf of four groups that invited Adam Habib, a Muslim, to speak in the United States.
The lawsuit charges the government’s decision to revoke Habib’s visa last year forced him to turn down speaking engagements, thereby violating the First Amendment rights of US citizens who could not hear his views.
Habib, a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, was detained for seven hours and interrogated about his political views and associations when he arrived in New York in October 2006 for meetings with organisations such as the World Bank, the ACLU said in its complaint.
He was eventually escorted by armed guards to an airplane and deported back to South Africa, according to the 29-page complaint, which names Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff as defendants.
“Professor Habib’s exclusion is part of a larger pattern,” said Melissa Goodman, an ACLU lawyer.
“Over the past few years, numerous foreign scholars, human rights activists, and writers - all vocal critics of US policy - have been barred from the US without explanation or on unspecified national security grounds,” she said in a statement.
This behaviour by the Bush administration is not that surprising.
After all, when Mr Habib and most South Africans were suffering under apartheid, members of the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney, considered another present critic of the Iraq war, Nelson Mandela, a ‘communist terrorist‘.
“In a recent book John Mueller, an American academic, notes that the number of his fellow-countrymen killed by terrorists since 1960 ‘is about the same as the number killed over the same period by accident-causing deer‘”.
