G
going to the US? watch out!
Guest
LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US
BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.
By Linda Solomon
Published: April 23, 2007
TheTyee.ca
Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to
the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in
his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give
him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the
U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old
friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled
"Andrew Feldmar."
The psychotherapist's world was about to turn upside down.
Born in Hungary to Jewish parents as the Nazis were rising to power,
Feldmar was hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust when he was
three years old, after his parents were condemned to Auschwitz.
Miraculously, his parents both returned alive and in 1945 Hungary was
liberated by the Russian army. Feldmar escaped from communist Hungary
in 1956 when he was 16 and immigrated to Canada. He has been married
to Meredith Feldmar, an artist, for 37 years, and they live in
Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. They have two children, Soma, 33,
who lives in Denver, and Marcel, 36, a resident of L.A. Highly
respected in his field, Feldmar has been travelling to the U.S. for
work and to see his family five or six times a year. He has worked for
the UN, in Sarajevo and in Minsk with Chernobyl victims.
The Blaine border guard explained that Feldmar had been pulled out of
the line as part of a random search. He seemed friendly, even as he
took away Feldmar's passport and car keys. While the contents of his
car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked
Feldmar what profession he was in.
When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name
into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was
engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue
of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar
had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost
forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used
hallucinogenics as a "path" to understanding self and that in certain
cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry."
Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the
border began to turn into a nightmare.
Fingerprints for FBI
He was told to sit down on a folding chair and for hours he wondered
where this was going. He checked his watch and thought hopelessly of
his friend who was about to land at the Seattle airport. Three hours
later, the official motioned him into a small, barren room with an
American flag. He was sitting on one side and Feldmar was on the
other. The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar
was being denied entry due to "narcotics" use. LSD is not a narcotic
substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard
wasn't interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from
Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for
an FBI file.
Then Feldmar disbelievingly listened as he learned that he was being
barred from ever entering the United States again. The officer told
him he could apply to the Department of Homeland Security for a
waiver, if he wished, and gave him a package, with the forms.
The border guard then escorted him to his car and made sure he did a
U-turn and went back to Canada.
'Curious. Very curious'
Feldmar attended the University of Toronto where he graduated with
honours in mathematics, physics and chemistry. He received his M.A. in
psychology from the University of Western Ontario. At University of
Western Ontario, he was under supervision with Zenon Pylyshyn, who was
from Saskatchewan and had participated, along with Abram Hoffer and
Duncan Blewett, in the first experiments with LSD-25.
"Zenon told me he had had enough strange experiences, that he had gone
about as far with LSD as he wished to go. He still had what was once
legal.... Looking back 33 years, I don't quite recall why I decided to
accept his tentative offer. I was 27 years old and thought of myself
as a rational scientist, and had no experience with delirium,
hallucination, or altered mind states. I was curious. Very curious. I
thought that, like Faust, I might make a pact with the devil in return
for esoteric knowledge."
Zenon gave him 900 micrograms of acid and the surprise of his life, he
wrote in the Janus Head article. "Following this initiation, I
traveled to many regions many times with the help of many different
substances. I took peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, cannabis, MDMA, DMT,
ketamine, nitrous oxide 5-MEO-DMT, but I kept coming back to LSD. Acid
seemed my most spacious, most helpful ally. While on it, I explored my
past, regressed to the womb, to my conception. I remembered, grieved,
and mourned many painful events. I saw how my parents would have liked
to love me, and how they didn't because they didn't know how. I
learned, on acid, to endure troubling and frightening states of mind.
This enabled me, as meditation has done, to identify with being the
witness of the workings of my mind, observing whatever was going on,
while knowing that I was simply captivated by the forms produced by my
own psyche."
After receiving his MA, Feldmar spent a semester in the U.S. at the
Johns Hopkins University's Ph.D. program in theoretical statistics. In
1969, he began Ph.D. work with Dr. Charles Osgood in psycholinguistics
at the University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana. He did further
Ph.D. studies at Simon Fraser University.
Legal options expensive
Feldmar was determined, in the months after the aborted border
crossing, to turn things around. He was particularly determined
because the idea of not being able to visit his children at their
homes was unthinkable.
He contacted the U.S. Consul in Vancouver to protest and was again
told to apply for a waiver. When he consulted Seattle attorney Bob
Free at MacDonald, Hoague and Bayless about going through this
process, he learned that for $3,500 (U.S.) plus incidentals, he'd have
a 90 per cent chance to get the waiver, but it would probably be just
for a year, and the procedure would have to be initiated again, any
time he wished to cross the border. Each time, he would have to
produce a statement saying that he had been "rehabilitated."
He looked into filing suit against the U.S. government for wrongdoing
but gave up the idea when he learned that a legal battle with U.S.
Customs would cost his life's savings and, with the balance of power
tipped so extremely in the government's favor, he would almost surely
lose.
Again, he appealed to the U.S. Consulate. The consulate wouldn't
return his phone calls, but in this e-mail message to Feldmar, the
consulate explained its position.
"Both our countries have very similar regulations regarding issuance
of visas for citizens who have violated the law. The issue here is not
the writing of an article, but the taking of controlled substances. I
hear from American citizens all the time who have decades-old DUI
convictions who are barred from entry into Canada and who must apply
for waivers. Same thing here. Waiver is the only way."
Ensnared by Section IV
"Admitted drug use is admitted drug use," says Mike Milne, spokesman
for U.S. border and protection, based in Seattle. Milne said he could
not comment specifically on the Feldmar case, due to privacy issues,
but he quoted from the U.S. Immigration Law Handbook section which
refers to "general classes of aliens ineligible to receive visas and
ineligible for admissions" to help shed light on the clauses that may
have ensnared the Vancouver psychotherapist.
"Persons with AIDS, tuberculosis, infectious diseases are
inadmissible," Milne said. And then there is Section IV. "Anyone who
is determined to be a drug abuser or user is inadmissible. A crime
involving moral turpitude is inadmissible and one of those areas is a
violation of controlled substances."
If there's no criminal record, as in Feldmar's case?
Not necessarily the criterion, Milne said. You can still be considered
dangerous.
'More diligent and vigilant'
"The level of scrutiny at our nation's borders have definitely gone up
since the 9-11 disaster and we are more diligent and vigilant in
checking people's identities and criminal histories at our nation's
borders."
Milne goes on, "There are three main areas that we have employed since
9-11 to better secure our borders. First is the number of officers we
have working at our borders. We've doubled the numbers at the border.
We've combined officers from Homeland Security and border protection.
We brought in the officers from immigration and naturalization
service, the department of agriculture and U.S. border patrol. By
combining the expertise of those disparate border agencies into a
single agency under a single management with the single purpose of
protecting the U.S. against terrorism and other related offences, it
created a more effective border agency. It created a more secure
border.
"The second thing would be our information systems, our watch list
systems are better shared within the U.S. government and between
governments, between information sharing agreements, through Interpol,
through terrorist watch list sharing internationally, we have better
access for our front line officers to query information systems up to
and including public based systems, including the Internet. Third, we
have better infrastructure at our entries. We have cameras in some of
our more remote points of entry, gates, lighting, to make them more
secure. We do more checks at the borders. It depends on what level of
alert we're at. At certain alert levels we do 100 per cent identity
checks."
War on drugs meets war on terror
Eugene Oscapella is an Ottawa lawyer, who lectures on drug policy
issues in the department of criminology at the University of Ottawa.
He also works as a policy advisor to a range of government agencies
and departments, including the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of
Canada. Oscapella sees the American security system upgrades and the
potential uses alarming.
"This is about the marriage of the war on drugs and the war on terror,
and the blind, bureaucratic mindset it encourages. Government
surveillance in the name of the war on drugs and the war on terror is
in danger of making us all open books to zealous governments. As
someone mentioned at a privacy conference I attended in London, U.K.,
several months ago, all the tools for an authoritarian state are now
in place; it's just that we haven't yet adopted authoritarian methods.
But in the area of drugs, maybe we have."
'Ominous omen'
Feldmar was in the process of considering whether to apply for a
waiver when he sought help from Ethan Nadlemann, director of the Drug
Policy Alliance in New York, whose financial backer is another
Hungarian, George Soros.
Nadlemann was outraged. "Nobel Peace prize winners, some of the great
scientists and writers in the world have experimented with LSD in
their time. We know people are being pulled out of lines and racially
profiled as part of the war against terrorism. But this is a different
kind of travesty, banning someone because they used a substance in
another country thirty years ago," he said.
In February he wrote Feldmar, "Not that it helps much, but I just want
you to know that I have not forgotten you or your situation. I feel
frustrated vis a vis the media, and on other avenues, but I am not
forgetting. I really think this situation is absurd, and an ominous
omen of things to come."
When Feldmar was barred from entering the U.S., he joined the ranks of
other intellectuals and artists. Pop singer Cat Stevens was turned
back from the U.S. in 2004, after being detained. Bolivian human
rights leader and lawyer, Leonida Zurita Vargas was prevented from
entering in February of 2006. She was planning to be in the U.S. as
part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and
human rights. The tour would have taken her to Vermont, Harvard,
Stanford and Washington D.C., but she never got beyond the airport
check-in at Santa Cruz, Bolivia where she was informed her ten-year
visa had been revoked because of alleged links to terrorist activity.
'Ideological exclusion provision'
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios
entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy
International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the
National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a
paper at a conference titled "How Class Works" at the State University
of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S.
officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and
affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him
about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political
party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a
candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios's visa, issued in 1996, was
set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed
entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate
in academic meetings.
The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy
of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN
American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of
the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars.
They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had
his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the
Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position
at the University of Notre Dame. It's a suit that attempts to prevent
the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that
led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan
scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well
as numerous scholars from Cuba.
In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to
learn more about the government's use of the Patriot Act ideological
exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came
to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the
U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was
nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow
musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and
the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.
Cut off from friends
Nine months after being turned back at the border, Feldmar has
concluded that his banishment is permanent. The waiver process is
exhausting, costly and demeaning. The David and Goliath aspect of the
situation is too daunting.
This is devastating to his family and friends. "My father was doing
nothing wrong, illegal, suspicious, or at all deviant in any way, when
he was trying to visit the U.S.," his daughter, Soma, an instructor at
a Denver college, says. "In terms of family it really sucks. "
It's hard for his friend, Alphonso Lingis, a professor of philosophy
at Pennsylvania State University. "I'm deeply pained by the prospect
of no longer being able to welcome him in the United States," Lingis
said. "The notion that he and his work could harm anyone is
preposterous. He's a victim of scandalous bureaucratic incompetence by
the United States officials involved in this matter."
'Alchemist's dictum'
When Feldmar looks back on what has happened, he concludes that he was
operating out of a sense of safety that has become dated in the last
six years, since 9-11. His real mistake was to write about his drug
experiences and post this on the web, even in a respected journal like
Janus Head. He acknowledges that he had not considered posting on the
Internet the risk that it turned out to be. So many of his generation
share his experience in experimenting with drugs, after all. He
believed it was safe to communicate about the past from the depth of
retrospection and that this would be a useful grain of personal wisdom
to share with others. He now warns his friends to think twice before
they post anything about their personal lives on the web.
"I didn't heed the ancient Alchemists' dictum, 'Do, dare, and be
silent,'" Feldmar says. "And yet, the experience of being treated as
undesirable was shocking. The helplessness, the utter uselessness of
trying to be seen as I know myself and as I am known generally by
those I care about and who care about me, the reduction of me to an
undesirable offender, was truly frightening. I became aware of the
fragility of my identity, the brittleness of a way of life.
"Memories of having been the object of the objectifying gaze crowd
into my mind. I have been seen and labeled as a Jew, as a Communist,
as a D. P. (Displaced Person), as a student, as a patient, a man, a
Hungarian, a refugee, an
BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.
By Linda Solomon
Published: April 23, 2007
TheTyee.ca
Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to
the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in
his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give
him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the
U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old
friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled
"Andrew Feldmar."
The psychotherapist's world was about to turn upside down.
Born in Hungary to Jewish parents as the Nazis were rising to power,
Feldmar was hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust when he was
three years old, after his parents were condemned to Auschwitz.
Miraculously, his parents both returned alive and in 1945 Hungary was
liberated by the Russian army. Feldmar escaped from communist Hungary
in 1956 when he was 16 and immigrated to Canada. He has been married
to Meredith Feldmar, an artist, for 37 years, and they live in
Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. They have two children, Soma, 33,
who lives in Denver, and Marcel, 36, a resident of L.A. Highly
respected in his field, Feldmar has been travelling to the U.S. for
work and to see his family five or six times a year. He has worked for
the UN, in Sarajevo and in Minsk with Chernobyl victims.
The Blaine border guard explained that Feldmar had been pulled out of
the line as part of a random search. He seemed friendly, even as he
took away Feldmar's passport and car keys. While the contents of his
car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked
Feldmar what profession he was in.
When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name
into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was
engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue
of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar
had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost
forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used
hallucinogenics as a "path" to understanding self and that in certain
cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry."
Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the
border began to turn into a nightmare.
Fingerprints for FBI
He was told to sit down on a folding chair and for hours he wondered
where this was going. He checked his watch and thought hopelessly of
his friend who was about to land at the Seattle airport. Three hours
later, the official motioned him into a small, barren room with an
American flag. He was sitting on one side and Feldmar was on the
other. The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar
was being denied entry due to "narcotics" use. LSD is not a narcotic
substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard
wasn't interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from
Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for
an FBI file.
Then Feldmar disbelievingly listened as he learned that he was being
barred from ever entering the United States again. The officer told
him he could apply to the Department of Homeland Security for a
waiver, if he wished, and gave him a package, with the forms.
The border guard then escorted him to his car and made sure he did a
U-turn and went back to Canada.
'Curious. Very curious'
Feldmar attended the University of Toronto where he graduated with
honours in mathematics, physics and chemistry. He received his M.A. in
psychology from the University of Western Ontario. At University of
Western Ontario, he was under supervision with Zenon Pylyshyn, who was
from Saskatchewan and had participated, along with Abram Hoffer and
Duncan Blewett, in the first experiments with LSD-25.
"Zenon told me he had had enough strange experiences, that he had gone
about as far with LSD as he wished to go. He still had what was once
legal.... Looking back 33 years, I don't quite recall why I decided to
accept his tentative offer. I was 27 years old and thought of myself
as a rational scientist, and had no experience with delirium,
hallucination, or altered mind states. I was curious. Very curious. I
thought that, like Faust, I might make a pact with the devil in return
for esoteric knowledge."
Zenon gave him 900 micrograms of acid and the surprise of his life, he
wrote in the Janus Head article. "Following this initiation, I
traveled to many regions many times with the help of many different
substances. I took peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, cannabis, MDMA, DMT,
ketamine, nitrous oxide 5-MEO-DMT, but I kept coming back to LSD. Acid
seemed my most spacious, most helpful ally. While on it, I explored my
past, regressed to the womb, to my conception. I remembered, grieved,
and mourned many painful events. I saw how my parents would have liked
to love me, and how they didn't because they didn't know how. I
learned, on acid, to endure troubling and frightening states of mind.
This enabled me, as meditation has done, to identify with being the
witness of the workings of my mind, observing whatever was going on,
while knowing that I was simply captivated by the forms produced by my
own psyche."
After receiving his MA, Feldmar spent a semester in the U.S. at the
Johns Hopkins University's Ph.D. program in theoretical statistics. In
1969, he began Ph.D. work with Dr. Charles Osgood in psycholinguistics
at the University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana. He did further
Ph.D. studies at Simon Fraser University.
Legal options expensive
Feldmar was determined, in the months after the aborted border
crossing, to turn things around. He was particularly determined
because the idea of not being able to visit his children at their
homes was unthinkable.
He contacted the U.S. Consul in Vancouver to protest and was again
told to apply for a waiver. When he consulted Seattle attorney Bob
Free at MacDonald, Hoague and Bayless about going through this
process, he learned that for $3,500 (U.S.) plus incidentals, he'd have
a 90 per cent chance to get the waiver, but it would probably be just
for a year, and the procedure would have to be initiated again, any
time he wished to cross the border. Each time, he would have to
produce a statement saying that he had been "rehabilitated."
He looked into filing suit against the U.S. government for wrongdoing
but gave up the idea when he learned that a legal battle with U.S.
Customs would cost his life's savings and, with the balance of power
tipped so extremely in the government's favor, he would almost surely
lose.
Again, he appealed to the U.S. Consulate. The consulate wouldn't
return his phone calls, but in this e-mail message to Feldmar, the
consulate explained its position.
"Both our countries have very similar regulations regarding issuance
of visas for citizens who have violated the law. The issue here is not
the writing of an article, but the taking of controlled substances. I
hear from American citizens all the time who have decades-old DUI
convictions who are barred from entry into Canada and who must apply
for waivers. Same thing here. Waiver is the only way."
Ensnared by Section IV
"Admitted drug use is admitted drug use," says Mike Milne, spokesman
for U.S. border and protection, based in Seattle. Milne said he could
not comment specifically on the Feldmar case, due to privacy issues,
but he quoted from the U.S. Immigration Law Handbook section which
refers to "general classes of aliens ineligible to receive visas and
ineligible for admissions" to help shed light on the clauses that may
have ensnared the Vancouver psychotherapist.
"Persons with AIDS, tuberculosis, infectious diseases are
inadmissible," Milne said. And then there is Section IV. "Anyone who
is determined to be a drug abuser or user is inadmissible. A crime
involving moral turpitude is inadmissible and one of those areas is a
violation of controlled substances."
If there's no criminal record, as in Feldmar's case?
Not necessarily the criterion, Milne said. You can still be considered
dangerous.
'More diligent and vigilant'
"The level of scrutiny at our nation's borders have definitely gone up
since the 9-11 disaster and we are more diligent and vigilant in
checking people's identities and criminal histories at our nation's
borders."
Milne goes on, "There are three main areas that we have employed since
9-11 to better secure our borders. First is the number of officers we
have working at our borders. We've doubled the numbers at the border.
We've combined officers from Homeland Security and border protection.
We brought in the officers from immigration and naturalization
service, the department of agriculture and U.S. border patrol. By
combining the expertise of those disparate border agencies into a
single agency under a single management with the single purpose of
protecting the U.S. against terrorism and other related offences, it
created a more effective border agency. It created a more secure
border.
"The second thing would be our information systems, our watch list
systems are better shared within the U.S. government and between
governments, between information sharing agreements, through Interpol,
through terrorist watch list sharing internationally, we have better
access for our front line officers to query information systems up to
and including public based systems, including the Internet. Third, we
have better infrastructure at our entries. We have cameras in some of
our more remote points of entry, gates, lighting, to make them more
secure. We do more checks at the borders. It depends on what level of
alert we're at. At certain alert levels we do 100 per cent identity
checks."
War on drugs meets war on terror
Eugene Oscapella is an Ottawa lawyer, who lectures on drug policy
issues in the department of criminology at the University of Ottawa.
He also works as a policy advisor to a range of government agencies
and departments, including the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of
Canada. Oscapella sees the American security system upgrades and the
potential uses alarming.
"This is about the marriage of the war on drugs and the war on terror,
and the blind, bureaucratic mindset it encourages. Government
surveillance in the name of the war on drugs and the war on terror is
in danger of making us all open books to zealous governments. As
someone mentioned at a privacy conference I attended in London, U.K.,
several months ago, all the tools for an authoritarian state are now
in place; it's just that we haven't yet adopted authoritarian methods.
But in the area of drugs, maybe we have."
'Ominous omen'
Feldmar was in the process of considering whether to apply for a
waiver when he sought help from Ethan Nadlemann, director of the Drug
Policy Alliance in New York, whose financial backer is another
Hungarian, George Soros.
Nadlemann was outraged. "Nobel Peace prize winners, some of the great
scientists and writers in the world have experimented with LSD in
their time. We know people are being pulled out of lines and racially
profiled as part of the war against terrorism. But this is a different
kind of travesty, banning someone because they used a substance in
another country thirty years ago," he said.
In February he wrote Feldmar, "Not that it helps much, but I just want
you to know that I have not forgotten you or your situation. I feel
frustrated vis a vis the media, and on other avenues, but I am not
forgetting. I really think this situation is absurd, and an ominous
omen of things to come."
When Feldmar was barred from entering the U.S., he joined the ranks of
other intellectuals and artists. Pop singer Cat Stevens was turned
back from the U.S. in 2004, after being detained. Bolivian human
rights leader and lawyer, Leonida Zurita Vargas was prevented from
entering in February of 2006. She was planning to be in the U.S. as
part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and
human rights. The tour would have taken her to Vermont, Harvard,
Stanford and Washington D.C., but she never got beyond the airport
check-in at Santa Cruz, Bolivia where she was informed her ten-year
visa had been revoked because of alleged links to terrorist activity.
'Ideological exclusion provision'
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios
entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy
International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the
National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a
paper at a conference titled "How Class Works" at the State University
of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S.
officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and
affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him
about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political
party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a
candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios's visa, issued in 1996, was
set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed
entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate
in academic meetings.
The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy
of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN
American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of
the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars.
They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had
his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the
Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position
at the University of Notre Dame. It's a suit that attempts to prevent
the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that
led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan
scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well
as numerous scholars from Cuba.
In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to
learn more about the government's use of the Patriot Act ideological
exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came
to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the
U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was
nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow
musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and
the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.
Cut off from friends
Nine months after being turned back at the border, Feldmar has
concluded that his banishment is permanent. The waiver process is
exhausting, costly and demeaning. The David and Goliath aspect of the
situation is too daunting.
This is devastating to his family and friends. "My father was doing
nothing wrong, illegal, suspicious, or at all deviant in any way, when
he was trying to visit the U.S.," his daughter, Soma, an instructor at
a Denver college, says. "In terms of family it really sucks. "
It's hard for his friend, Alphonso Lingis, a professor of philosophy
at Pennsylvania State University. "I'm deeply pained by the prospect
of no longer being able to welcome him in the United States," Lingis
said. "The notion that he and his work could harm anyone is
preposterous. He's a victim of scandalous bureaucratic incompetence by
the United States officials involved in this matter."
'Alchemist's dictum'
When Feldmar looks back on what has happened, he concludes that he was
operating out of a sense of safety that has become dated in the last
six years, since 9-11. His real mistake was to write about his drug
experiences and post this on the web, even in a respected journal like
Janus Head. He acknowledges that he had not considered posting on the
Internet the risk that it turned out to be. So many of his generation
share his experience in experimenting with drugs, after all. He
believed it was safe to communicate about the past from the depth of
retrospection and that this would be a useful grain of personal wisdom
to share with others. He now warns his friends to think twice before
they post anything about their personal lives on the web.
"I didn't heed the ancient Alchemists' dictum, 'Do, dare, and be
silent,'" Feldmar says. "And yet, the experience of being treated as
undesirable was shocking. The helplessness, the utter uselessness of
trying to be seen as I know myself and as I am known generally by
those I care about and who care about me, the reduction of me to an
undesirable offender, was truly frightening. I became aware of the
fragility of my identity, the brittleness of a way of life.
"Memories of having been the object of the objectifying gaze crowd
into my mind. I have been seen and labeled as a Jew, as a Communist,
as a D. P. (Displaced Person), as a student, as a patient, a man, a
Hungarian, a refugee, an
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