According to Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, detention and handcuffing of journalists is simply the product of following regulations. Once someone is rejected, the airline that brought them is required to return them, and in some cases flights are not available for 24 hours. "If they have to be transported to another location, then procedure requires that they be restrained," Strassberger said. "It's unfortunate because I know every time you hear about one of those things you cringe, but you do have that concern for officer safety."

Strassberger denied that the law requiring special journalist visas -- called "I visas" -- had lain dormant, but nevertheless acknowledged that it is being more vigorously enforced, because, he said, "quite honestly, 9/11. It goes back to after the terrorist attack, the inspections process, the inspectors, the customs and border protection officers are just being a little more thorough, a little more careful about who's coming in."

Reporters Without Borders, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the International Press Institute have all raised a hue and cry, which prompted U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Robert C. Bonner to issue an advisory on May 20 allowing individual immigration officials to let "nonthreatening" reporters into the country without a visa -- once. "We are an open society and we want people to feel welcome here," Bonner said, apparently without any irony.

But as Goldberg, ASNE's lawyer, pointed out, the underlying problems remain unsolved. What happens if a foreign reporter who's had his or her one waiver needs to get into the U.S. to cover a breaking news event, like a real terrorist attack? "Another problem is that it opens the door to content review," Goldberg said. Added Dalglish: "Once you start putting an immigration officer at an airport in charge of who in the world is entitled to be a journalist and who isn't, that's on the path to defining who's an American journalist."

The other unanswered question is: Whose idea was it to crack down on the supposed menace of invading foreign media hordes. "The Bush administration doesn't like the press?" Goldberg asked rhetorically. "That's the best I can come up with, frankly. They've been reluctant for almost four years now to give information out to the press. They don't deal with the press on a level playing field. They've made life hard on other civil liberties. I can't imagine them bending over backward to help the press."

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