WASHINGTON : A large audience at the Senate Hart office building heard in hushed silence on June 4 a tearful tale of innocent immigrants who suffered harassment for no fault of theirs following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

They were speaking here at a public forum titled ‘Justice for All: Selective Enforcement in a Post-9/11 era,’ organized by the nongovernmental groups.

Asif Iqbal, a Pakistani-American who works as senior consultant for Bearing Point Inc. in Manhattan, complained of repeated discrimination at airports across the U.S. because of his name. “Every time I checked in for a flight, the airline computer terminal locks up because my name matches a name, on the No-Fly-List,” drawn up by the Transport Safety Authority.

“The INS arrested my family and me as absconders, but we are not absconders,” said Nadin Hamoui, who is from Washington. Her parents fled Syria in 1992 when she was 10.

“Our lives will come to a complete end if we were to return to Syria,” Abdel El Nashar, an Egyptian who has been a citizen of the U.S. for 20 years, said, “I have been falsely accused of a major crime and investigated by the FBI.”

Also present at the event were Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA). They pledged to stand up for such people in the overall interest of democracy.

Rep. McDermott, a leading member of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, recalled how a Sikh motel-owner in his home-state, Washington, was beaten up by one of his clients after 9/11. A Sikh taxi driver, Kulwinder Singh, met the same fate. He said he initiated the efforts to declare the state a hate crime free zone. Sen. Kennedy said, “we have to keep doing all we can to see that our borders are secure, that our immigration laws are enforced, and that law enforcement officials have the support they need. But, we must do so in ways that respect fundamental rights.”

Several participants referred to the report of the Office of the Inspector General in the Department of Justice, released on June 2, which found significant problems, “with the way the department treated the Sept. 11 detainees.”

Sen. Kennedy said the department used fear of terrorism as an excuse to arrest and detain hundreds of persons, predominantly from Arab and South Asian countries. They were not allowed to communicate with their families or their lawyers. Some were locked in for 23 hours a day, he said.

The senator said some of them had committed minor technical immigration violations, but none of them was ever charged with terrorism-related crimes. Sen. Kennedy said the selective detention and other abuses committed by the department “violated the fundamental rights and protections on which our country is founded.”

Congressman Inslee said the Justice Department, in its dealings with such people, threw overboard the presumption of innocence. Rep. Honda recalled the treatment meted out to the Japanese-Americans in the 1940s in the U.S. They were placed in concentrations camps. “We should not repeat that mistake this time.”

Earlier, Pramila Jayapal, executive director, the Hate Free Zone Campaign of Washington, whod the proceedings of the forum, said “there is a growing belief in our immigrant communities that this war is not a war on terrorism but on immigrants.”