Journos, Go Home
The British Guardian reports that foreign journalists covering the U.S. will no longer be able to renew their visas without leaving the country first. Some 20,000 correspondents will now have to return to their home countries and apply for re-entry at American embassies there.
...more from SLATE
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100403/"These reporters are not enemy combatants. They are not chroniclers of scathing injustices of the Bush administration. One Australian reporter was here to interview Olivia Newton-John. (God knows, someone has to.) She reported being "body searched and groped" by immigration and customs officials".
Ten French and British journalists were here to report on last summer's Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video-game industry's annual trade show. Unless Super Mario Brothers are secretly accumulating weapons of mass destruction, this mistreatment of journalists from allied countries serves as yet another example of overzealous, unbridled discretionary excesses by government officials who still can't figure out who we're fighting in the War on Terror.
The state department says it isn't "feasible" to collect anti-terrorist information, such as fingerprints, from Washington. But the move is widely seen as hampering the ability of foreign media to cover the coming election here. And it may lead to reciprocal impediments for American journalists working abroad."
Letter to Tom Ridge
U.S. Visa FAQ's
MORE:
"What's wrong with requiring foreign journalists to have a special press visa, you ask? Why shouldn't they have to show that they are here for good and benign reasons? Well, for one thing, we don't require most tourists from these friendly nations to obtain visas. Indeed, some of the reporters locked up and deported from LAX had already been allowed through immigration as tourists and were only nabbed later when they or their colleagues copped to being journalists. Singling out reporters for greater scrutiny than ordinary sightseers suggests there is something uniquely dangerous about journalism. As Lappin points out in her piece on her ordeal, only countries like Cuba, Syria, Iran, and North Korea demand that reporters have special visas. As James Michie, the public affairs officer at the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, told me this afternoon, this happens in other countries, too; another journalist reported to him that she was frequently treated this way in Yugoslavia. America: Striving to be more like Yugoslavia each day."
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