As a Muslim and frequent flyer, businessman Syed Maswood is used to being wrongly suspected as an Islamic terrorist. He's not used to being called a US spy.
The Connecticut nuclear engineer, whose home was raided but who never was charged in a terrorism investigation this spring, was arrested during a September business trip in the United Arab Emirates on suspicion of being a CIA and FBI informant.
He spent a night in jail before US Embassy officials won his release -- only to return to the US, where he was detained and questioned a second time by Homeland Security officials, he said.
Suspected of being a terrorist at home and a spy overseas, Maswood believes he's the victim of two forces: prejudice against Muslims in the US and distrust of Americans abroad. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, said he hasn't heard of other cases like Maswood's.
Though he has been charged with no crime, Maswood, a 41-year-old US citizen and father of three, has become accustomed to airport searches. He has spent months writing government officials, demanding to know why he is searched and held when he travels.
"We have looked into the matter and determined that you will no longer encounter any automatic special attention beyond normal probabilities, upon future returns to the United States," the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement wrote him in August. He has since carried that letter when traveling. Maswood sells radiological detection devices. He was to discuss the installation of US-mandated equipment to detect radioactive material at UAE ports.
However, when he landed in Dubai the evening of Sept. 28 his passport was flagged. He was wanted for arrest, but police would not say on what charge. He was handcuffed and taken to jail. He surrendered one of his mobile phones, but didn't tell police he had a second in his pocket.
Police searched his bag and his wallet, smiling when they found his National Republican Congressional Committee membership card.
"We found George Bush," Maswood remembers them saying.
Maswood stood in a holding cell rank with urine and excrement and surrounded by razor wire. Hiding in the bathroom, Maswood used his second mobile phone to call the US Embassy for help. The consul who took Maswood's case would not comment but e-mails from the embassy and provided by Maswood verify the events.
"They just want to get even with Americans," Maswood said. "The US has lost its moral position."
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
RSS