LOS ANGELES - When he was yanked off a Washington-bound plane and sent home, the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens says he became the victim of an "unjust and arbitrary system" that is diminishing the United States' reputation as a defender of freedom.

In an opinion piece published in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times, Yusuf Islam said he and his 21-year-old daughter were on their way to Nashville, Tenn., last week to look into a music project when their flight from London was diverted to Bangor, Maine. Islam's name had turned up on a list of people suspected of having ties to terrorists.

"The unbelievable thing," Islam wrote, "is that only two months earlier, I had been having meetings in Washington with top officials from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to talk about my charity work.

"Had I changed that much? No. Actually, it's the indiscriminate procedure of profiling that's changed," Islam wrote. "I am a victim of an unjust and arbitrary system, hastily imposed, that serves only to belittle America's image as a defender of the civil liberties that so many dearly struggled and died for over the centuries."