NYT: "Questions, Bitterness and Exile for Queens Girl in Terror Case"

Slumped at the edge of the bed she would have to share with four relatives that night, the 16-year-old girl from Queens looked stunned.

On the hot, dusty road from the airport, she had watched rickshaws surge past women sweeping the streets, bone-thin in their bright saris. Now, in a language she barely understood, unfamiliar aunts and uncles lamented her fate: to be forced to leave the United States, her home since kindergarten, because the F.B.I. had mysteriously identified her as a potential suicide bomber.

'I feel like I'm on a different planet,' the girl, Tashnuba Hayder, said. 'It just hit me. How everything happened - it's like, 'Oh, my God.'

Why the hell aren't Americans outraged at this? The government has refused to discuss Tashnuba's case and has forbidden anyone involved to discuss it. If this girl was such a threat, then let's hear about it. And if she wasn't (as seems very likely), the government has ruined yet another family's lives in its witch hunt.

Of course, the safest policy for a secretive government in a complacent culture is simple to play it mum. Eventually even those of us who have heard about Tashnuba will get bored and move onto the next news story; all the government needs to do is keep its mouth shut and it'll get away with whatever it wants to do.

The culture of secrecy the Bush administration nurtures is the key to all its other misdeeds - because it resists any and all attempts to gain information for the public, because it fights at all costs any measure of government transparancy, it is able to operate with impunity and simply stonewall when it is challenged. As long as it can keep Americans afraid and convinced that such secrecy is the only thing that is keeping them safe, the administration has it made. And we're dumb or apathetic enough to believe that line of crap instead of demanding the information we're entitled to.

Absolutely disgusting.