George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949 and could not have imagined that his fiction would become fact a mere 20 years after 1984. How awesome to have your coinage become household words with almost exact corollaries in 2004: Thought Police, read US government, Big Brother read Homeland Security.

The CIA and FBI were catnapping whilst the terrorists plotted right under their noses and now insulted and self-righteous the government machinery has overstepped its mandate. Should you dare to photograph Chesapeake Bay or a famous building and especially if your color is a slightly darker shade of pale, the clanging of a jail cell door might become uncomfortably familiar.

Someone in Virginia is reading your email and key words in phone conversations would get you a government-sanctioned eavesdropper as well. This sounds outlandish, but creepier yet is that this is stranger than fiction. A Pakistani-American was the mayor of a small Pennsylvania town and was reported by the neighbors for suspicious activity when he was observed dumping water in his backyard. The FBI rang no doorbells, just broke down the door, held his nightgown-attired wife to gunpoint, confiscated the Cipro they found, convinced that they were onto anthrax and put the man through a grand jury trial. They were only cooking biryani, a South Asian dish, said he and the Cipro was for his wife’s urinary infection.

Demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Boston were held near the subway tracks behind barbed wire. One shudders to think of the fate of demonstrators outside the Fort-Knox-security-appointed Madison Square Gardens will be like when the Republican National Convention is held, for it appears that protestors from all over the nation are heading towards New York City.

And Pakistani-Americans beware: do not get any bruises prior to traveling and if you do have one, please postpone your visit, for you shall be disrobed by airport security for your bruises may well have originated while you trained at Al-Qaeda training camps. This is only for Pakistani-American citizens, permanent residents and visitors from Pakistan. Why Pakistanis are being targeted is a good question particularly since Musharraf is the handmaiden that took the oath of allegiance at a 3 a.m. phone call from Colin Powell. Had he played hard to get, perhaps his countrymen would not suffer so.

The Patriot Act appears to be the only legislation that America is operating under. All constitutional amendments appear to be in abeyance. To think that the day has dawned when one feels safer speaking one’s mind in Pakistan rather than small town America stubbornly sticks in the throat. And you make this heroic gulp for you know you must push this reality down, digest and absorb, for it is here to stay.

Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote the Gulag Archipelago in 1974 about children spying on parents, neighbors reporting friends to the KGB and vicious Soviet repression with the disappearance of thousands into the depths of Siberia. The description is vivid, the detail disturbing; the reader is left terrified realizing that unlike 1984 this is not fiction.

It is even more chilling to confront that Guantanamo Bay is one of America’s Gulags. Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Russian Gulag for writing a joke about Stalin, and found there the millions that were held, tortured and killed, a horrible secret that Russia kept not just from the world but its own people. There is a parallel in the American Gulag: hundreds are held for flimsy reasons, without charges or legal recourse and subjected to treatment that clearly violates the Geneva Convention and amounts to torture. The flimsy pretext that allows all this to happen is that Guantanamo Bay, per the Bush government is not American territory, so freedoms and rights are in abeyance.

And it does not end there. America is in the process of the Virtual Gulag. Technological advances have their downside as well. Individuals that the Department of Homeland Security wishes to monitor can be spied on in the most invasive manner imaginable. And should some “dirt” be gained on the subject the monitoring can become even more intrusive and finally the net closes in to the point that a virtual imprisonment is in effect. And thanks to the USA Patriot Act, little substance is needed to charge the person and off they go to the real American Gulag.

Vigilance cannot be discounted, especially in face of Al-Qaeda that appears unfazed, and yet the Constitution of the land that used to be the envy of the world cannot so easily become a redundant document. Why have we lost all sense of proportion?

Muslims living in America are watched by Big Brother, arrested on small suspicions like Brandon Mayfield of Oregon whose fingerprints they claimed were found on a bag in the train bombing in Spain. Mayfield had reverted to Islam and the FBI was impervious to Spanish statements that the fingerprints differed markedly from the ones on the bag. If Big Brother’s suspicion is particularly piqued, you could find yourself packed off to the American Gulag. And currently they throw away the key for about two years. God be with you.

(Mahjabeen Islam is a physician practicing in Toledo, Ohio. Her email is mahjabeenislam@hotmail.com