by TChris

Ansar Mahmood took a break from his job delivering pizzas for Domino's to take some pictures of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains to send to his family in Pakistan. He knocked on the door of a nearby water treatment center and asked an employee to take his picture in front of the scenic view. When he returned to Domino's in Greenport that evening, the police were waiting for him.

He was handcuffed and placed in a holding area at the police station, in Hudson. There he was questioned by a stream of federal agents who had converged on this quiet city in Columbia County, a popular antiques center 109 miles north of New York City.

They wanted to know why he was interested in the water-treatment facility, what connection he had to the World Trade Center attack. Mr. Mahmood recalled explaining that he did not even know that there was a water-treatment plant.

Racial profiling? Not much doubt of that. An illegal detention? Absolutely. It isn't a crime to photograph scenery (or even public buildings), and no terrorist is going to ask someone to take his picture in front of a potential target. Mahmood was one of thousands of people swept up and detained in the wake of 9/11. Whatever unreasonable suspicions law enforcement agents may have harbored could have been dispelled by questioning Mahmood without taking him into custody.

Mahmood was working legally with the benefit of a green card, but he's still detained. Investigators who searched his apartment learned that he helped out a Pakistani couple by co-signing their apartment lease and registering their car in his name. On the questionable advice of a court-appointed lawyer, he pled guilty to "harboring illegal aliens" (even though he didn't know their visas had expired) and now faces deportation.

Activists are fighting on his behalf, and they've attracted some impressive supporters, including Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and Patrick Leahy of Vermont. This is a fight they -- and Mahmood -- deserve to win.