The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has filed suit against the city to keep police from searching the bags of passengers entering the subway. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, claims the two-week old policy violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection and prohibitions against unlawful searches and seizures—while doing almost nothing to shield the city from terrorism.

From AP, Aug. 3:

2 NY Officials Back Terror Check Profiling
Middle Easterners should be targeted for searches on city subways, two elected officials said, contending that police have been wasting time with random checks in efforts to prevent terrorism in the transit system.

How depressing. The lead op-ed piece in today's New York Times (picked up by several papers around the country, such as the Houston Chronicle) is an open and abject call—not only for surrendering our privacy rights in the name of "security," which nearly everybody seems to take for granted—but for racial profiling. Utterly terrifying how quickly these ideas are being legitimized.

US Indymedia has posted a short story on the July 22 vigil held at New York City's federal building to mark the one-year anniversary of the passing of Farouk Abdel-Muhti. That was the same spot where Farouk's friends and supporters had gathered weekly to demand his release during the two years the local Palestinian spokesman and activist was illegally held by federal immigration authorities. Farouk had been released in April 2004 following a long legal struggle and activist campaign. Here is what Indymedia wrote up on the memorial, but go to their website for photos:

Well, the (supposedly) final design for the "Freedom Tower" that is to rise where the World Trade Center stood has been unveiled after a long, tortuous process. And the design, a brutalist product of politics and paranoia without even a whiff of human spirit, renders the tower's name more Orwellian than ever. Such a ghastly construction can only be understood in the context of the new anti-terrorist police state; indeed, this is probably the first major public building explicitly designed under the direct influence, and with the veto power, of a city police department.

The latest sorry debacle over the slow and tempestuous redevelopment of New York's Ground Zero concerns plans for an International Freedom Center on the site. Survivors groups are protesting that the museum will not be exclusively dedicated to the 9-11 disaster, but will also feature material on Nazi and Soviet tyranny, American slavery and the Native American genocide. As one survivor at a "Take Back the Memorial" protest at Ground Zero told Bloomberg news June 20, "Instead of being immersed in 9-11, we'll be discussing world politics."

Freedom's on the march. That's why a South Asian man gets detained by the police for taking photos on the streets of New York. Gotta love the irony. Thanks to the Independent Press Association's Voices That Must Be Heard, "the best of New York's ethnic and immigrant press," for passing this along.

Four years after scores of rescue workers were injured in the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center, the federal government plans to rescind $125 million that was allocated to help them, and many of those who requested compensation are finding their claims being disputed at 10 times the rate that typical workers face.