Music Scholar Barred From U.S., but No One Will Tell Her Why

I'm a worrier.

I worry about nuclear attacks. I worry about arsenic in my drinking water. I worry about global warming. I even worry about zombies sometimes. Right now I'm worried that my government is going to trump up charges and imprison me. I'm a liberal, and I'm given to occasional hysterics. Secret gestapo bullshit will do that to me, though.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport in August last year and, without explanation, told that she was no longer allowed to enter the United States. Ms. Ghuman’s descent into the bureaucratic netherworld began on Aug. 8, 2006, when she and Mr. Flight returned to San Francisco from a research trip to Britain. Armed immigration officers met them at the airplane door and escorted Ms. Ghuman away. In a written account of the next eight hours that she prepared for her lawyer, Ms. Ghuman said that officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks. A redacted government report about the episode obtained by her lawyer under the Freedom of Information Act erroneously described her as “Hispanic.”