Is That All There Is?

When U.S. agents arrested eight Los Angeles-area immigrants in January and accused them of being Palestinian terrorists, government spokesmen said their case was strong but had to be kept secret because of national security. Since then the government has started explaining its case publicly--and the more we learn, the weaker it sounds.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has charged the eight immigrants--a Kenyan woman and seven Palestinian men who entered the United States on Jordanian passports--with violating a controversial section of U.S. immigration law. It excludes from the United States aliens who are affiliated with any group that advocates world communism, or who themselves advocate it “through any written or printed publications.” The organization that the immigrants are charged with being members of is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Popular Front was responsible for several terrorist actions in the Middle East in the 1970s, and, while it has been quiescent lately, it still bears close scrutiny by U.S. security services. But the immigrants detained in Los Angeles deny that they are members of the Popular Front. And now government investigators who prepared the deportation case against them are saying that the eight committed no violent acts, and are not even suspected of having planned any violence.

So what was their crime? It appears, according to a recent report by Times staff writer Ronald L. Soble, that the most overt act that the detainees committed while under government surveillance was going to Los Angeles International Airport to pick up shipments of Popular Front propaganda that had been air-freighted from the Middle East. If the government has no more to go on than that, the case may well prove to be another travesty resulting from the overzealous application of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952.

We have expressed serious doubts about the validity of that law, enacted at the height of the postwar anti-communist hysteria, many times before. Americans may find many theories or ideas distasteful, like those advocating revolution or racial hatred. But distasteful ideas, in and of themselves, should not disqualify any person from exercising the right to express them peacefully. And that includes the right to express them within the borders of the United States. It is beginning to sound as if the eight immigrants were guilty of no more than having political opinions that some government agents did not like. If that is all there is to this case, the government had no reason to detain them, much less deport them.