By Brian Bohl
On Wednesday University student Faraz ali Hameedi was apprehended by a CIA agent as he was working in the computer center. No reason or warning was provided by the federal official as he threw Hameedi to the floor, handcuffed him and escorted him out of the lab.
While the arrest was staged as part of a demonstration, the shocked expression on the faces of the other students in the room proved the unannounced exposition had achieved its desired effect.
“I’m just really shook up,” Danielle Bartucca, freshman elementary education major, said. “The whole fact that the arrest happened so rapidly without any just cause really disturbed me.”
“I thought the demonstration was very well done, Clint Paul, a junior audio and radio major, said. “It bothered me that people can be arrested like that just on the spot.”
One of the organizers of the exhibition, Dr. Cindy Bogard, associate professor of sociology, said the purpose of the demonstration was to provoke questions about the U.S. government’s detention policies, especially those pertaining to the treatment of Muslims.
“For a performance like this, it is good to have an accidental audience (whoever is there at the time) so that students who might not normally think of the issue are prompted to do so,” said Bogard. “I think it did get the attention of all the students since they immediately talked about it with other friends. That was just the effect we were looking for.”
What the alarmed students saw was a man portraying an agent quietly ask a group of female Muslim students if they knew the whereabouts of the man he would soon arrest. When the women responded they did not know where he was, the agent raised his voice and started searching on his own. The agent, portrayed by University student Michael Demetriou, eventually found and confronted the student with in question. He asked Hameedi to go outside with him, refusing to specify any reason for the detainment. Hameedi resisted and subsequently the official violently subdued him, yelling at protesting onlookers to “shut up.”
However, not all the students felt that the exhibition was a fair representation of how the government is handling the war on terror.
“I don’t think what they did was completely comparable to actual events,” said Bryan Barnes, a freshman political science major. “If they are trying to make a political statement that people from Middle Eastern decent are arrested on the spot, I don’t think that is accurate.”
Following the demonstration was a lecture on civil liberties by Michael Ratner, director of the center for Constitutional Rights. Both events were part of the University’s attempt to raise awareness on how profiling of United States citizens in the name of national security can undermine Constitutional rights.