The good news is she wasn’t abducted in the street in some third country and disappeared to a black ops site by a private company. Or waterboarded. Or made to stand on a box wearing a hood with electrodes connected to her genitals.
You just never know with these 70-year old Australian children’s writers.
I don’t like that they asked him what his religion was. Also, I don’t like that they wanted confirmation that he was a Muslim. It’s like asking the fucking pope if he is catholic.
Methinks the next competent President is going to need to (actually) drain the swamp. Clearly, it’s badly infiltrated with jackboot assholes who are letting their swastika flags fly now that Mango Mussolini has given them a green light (and even more contaminated with cowards and incompetents who let them get away with it, which is arguably worse).
Badge heavy assholes that only seem to understand respect when they don’t get as much of it as they think they deserve.
As someone who lives in a border state, I’ve crossed the northern border quite a few times. I’d go so far as to say that 99% of them were professional and courteous to me, but the assholes in that 1% really stand out, especially since we pretty much (de facto, anyway, if not de jure) lose all of our rights when we cross a border, thus being at their mercy.
We need universal freedom of movement, though we’re definitely a million miles further away from that with the right wing in charge of the country, for sure.
If I understand correctly, a semi-celebrity got the same treatment dozens of thousands of anonymous people get every single day, and so it becomes an issue?
How many semi-celebrities have complained about this kind of treatment in the past eight years?
The US gets about 75-80 million foreign visitors a year, or around 200,000 a day. Do you really think that 10% of them are subjected to 2-hour aggressive interrogations?
So why was she questioned for two hours? One of the news stories I just read said that perhaps the border control people at least thought that there was something wrong with her visa. Could that even be true? I’ve tried to read through the online explanations of whether Australians need visas to enter the U.S. and I remain confused about the requirements. In any case, this sort of questioning is rare. There’s nothing particularly exceptional about someone like her visiting the U.S. Nobody in the U.S. thinks that Australians are all terrorists. If anything, they find them to be cute. Did the border control agents demand that she put another shrimp on the barbie? Nobody thinks that children’s book authors are dangerous. What happened? Did the border control agent tell her, “Give me all the copies of your books that you have with you or I’ll send you back to Australia. I have a daughter just learning to read and I need more books for her.” Incidentally, did she mean that she’d actually been questioned for two hours? How many questions can you ask someone to fill up two hours? Did they ask, “What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favorite color?” Or did she sit in a room and wait for two hours before the border control people got around to her? Seriously, the news stories I’ve seen don’t give nearly enough detail about what happened. Of course, it’s only been one day since this incident hit the news. We need to know more about what happened.
It doesn’t take very many, if the questioner doesn’t like the answers.
“What is your name?”
“Mem Fox.”
“No, what’s your real name?”
“I already told you, it’s Mem Fox.”
“Shut up, we know you’re lying! Now tell us your real name, or we’re going to have to get tough on you.”
“Mem Fox is the only name I have. What more do you want?”