No Curtains for Justice

[Solly Mack]

Ashcroft's Roundup

...because forgetting is not an option

March 2003

"The program began in earnest on November 6, when Ashcroft issued the first federal notice calling for nationals from five Muslim countries--Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Sudan--to register on or before December 16. The government subsequently announced the second, third, and fourth rounds of the program, with deadlines extending through March.

A world map of countries whose citizens are affected by Special Registration now overlaps almost exactly with the map of Muslim-majority countries, extending from Algeria to Indonesia. The only non-Muslim country included is North Korea.

For Muslim immigrants, Special Registration is a kind of Catch-22: They risk possible detention and deportation if they come forward. And they face criminal penalties if they don't.

During a recent visit to the neighborhood, we interviewed a man holding a green card. He said he had previously saved $100,000 to put down on a new home in the area. Now, he said, "I am saving it for when I get detained." He added that he and others were worried that after the current targets, the Bush Administration "would come after green-card holders and then citizens." Another woman, a store owner in the neighborhood, argued: "We should register so they can lock us up?"





Post-9/11 Immigrant Roundup Backfired - Report

June 2003

"During national security crises, Washington has often followed ''the course of least resistance'', according to Cole, who noted that immigrants are particularly vulnerable to abuses at such times.


''If anything, we have painted an image of us as a narrow, biased society that really believes in the Clash of Civilizations,'' he said, singling out Attorney General John Ashcroft as especially responsible. ''It serves us poorly abroad, and it has provided ammunition to some of the fiery imams who encourage young people (to sacrifice) themselves.''





September 11, 2007

On September 12, in fact, there was a meeting in the White House, and Bob Mueller, the head of the FBI, was saying that we have to round up the people who were responsible for supporting the 9/11 hijackers, and we have to do it fairly and legally so we can bring them to justice. And John Ashcroft interrupted at that point and said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. We need to prevent the next attack from occurring. And if we can’t bring them to justice, so be it.”

And they took John Ashcroft’s advice, not Bob Mueller’s advice, and decided to throw out the rules in the name of preventing another attack, with the result being that we haven’t brought anybody to justice and we’ve captured very few terrorists. Those that we have captured, we can’t bring to justice, because the way in which we captured them, either by disappearing them or by interrogating them, using torture, has immunized them from being held accountable.

So what did they do? They went out and rounded up Arabs and Muslims in the first two years after 9/11. They’ve admitted to detaining over 5,000 foreign nationals in preventive detention anti-terrorism measures. They sought out 8,000 young men for FBI interviews, simply because they are from Arab and Muslim countries. And they required 80,000 to register with INS, be fingerprinted, photographed and interviewed, again, simply because they came from Arab and Muslim countries, no other criteria for suspicion. But the theory was we might find a terrorist here.

Of the 5,000 detained, zero today stand convicted of a terrorist offense. Of the 8,000 sought to be interviewed by the FBI, today zero stand convicted of a terrorist offense. And of the 80,000 brought in for special registration, none convicted of a terrorist offense. So the government’s record there is, in what is really the largest campaign of ethnic profiling since World War II, is zero for 93,000."





U.S. report faults the roundup of illegal immigrants after 9/11

(or "911 changed everything" coughspewchoke)

June 2003

The Justice Department has sought to maintain the secrecy of the arrests, fighting news organizations' efforts to gain access to deportation proceedings and for disclosure of more information about the detainees.

The policy shift — moving authority away from immigration officials — represented "uncharted territory," ...it assumed that a person in detention could have a link to terrorism unless and until the F.B.I. said otherwise.

Though this policy was apparently never written down, it was cleared "at the highest levels" of the Justice Department, the report found.

In New York City, anyone who was picked up as a result of a lead in the Sept. 11 investigation was held under this policy, "regardless of the strength of the evidence or the origin of the lead," the report said. Had it not been for the attacks, "most if not all" of the arrests would probably have never been pursued, the report said"





Letter from Amnesty International to John Aschcroft on the treatment of detainees taken into custody during the round-ups




A Prisoner Of Panic After 9/11

November 2003

"Benatta was among the 1,200 or so men detained by U.S. law enforcement agents in the frenzied weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He had a most unfortunate résumé: An Algerian and a Muslim, he was an avionics technician, and -- like most of the others -- he lacked proper immigration papers.

It was as though Benatta became invisible. His name never appeared on lists of detainees. His family in Algeria believed he had vanished. No defense attorney knew of his existence until a federal defender in Buffalo was assigned his case in late April 2002.

After the terrorist attacks, federal officials defended detentions for immigration violations as central to preserving national security. "Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa -- even by one day -- we will arrest you," U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said in October 2001.

The inspector general's report also said that corrections and court officers in the New York region had subjected detainees to "patterns of verbal and physical abuse."





Inaction in New York Prison Abuse Stirs Anger

May 2005


"It was the first prison abuse scandal of the post-Sept. 11 era, when scores of immigrants were rounded up and jailed in New York after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

They were never charged with terrorism — but they endured *abusive treatment that Justice Department investigators concluded was outrageous and cruel. It included being slammed into walls and subjected to unnecessary body cavity searches, some of it captured on videotape.

The defendants, from prison guards up to former U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, argue in court papers that they are immune from legal action because the circumstances of the detentions were within the scope of their official duties.

"Here in Egypt, I would say 'Yes, this could happen to anybody.' In America, it was shocking and disappointing," Ebrahim said by phone from Egypt. "We learned everything about democracy and human rights from the United States."

*to include:sleep deprivation, denial of medical care,slammed face-first against prison walls, leg chains stomped on with boots, causing pain





U.S. Is Settling Detainee's Suit in 9/11 Sweep

February 2006


The federal government has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian who was among dozens of Muslim men swept up in the New York area after 9/11, held for months in a federal detention center in Brooklyn and deported after being cleared of links to terrorism.

The settlement, filed in federal court late yesterday, is the first the government has made in a number of lawsuits charging that non-citizens were abused and their constitutional rights violated in detentions after the terror attacks.

It removes one of two plaintiffs from a case in which a federal judge ruled last fall that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other top government officials must answer questions under oath. Government lawyers filed an appeal of that ruling on Friday.

In the settlement agreement, which requires approval by a federal judge in Brooklyn, lawyers for the government said that the officials were not admitting any liability or fault. In court papers they have said that the 9/11 attacks created "special factors," including the need to deter future terrorism, that outweighed the plaintiffs' right to sue."





11 Jail Guards Are Indicted in 2 Beatings in Brooklyn

April 2007

But in recent years, it has come under scrutiny for its treatment of inmates, particularly those swept up after 9/11 as part of terror investigations.

In April 2002, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal and educational group, filed a lawsuit, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, charging that at least five Arab and South Asian inmates at the jail had been subjected to abuse, including being kept in solitary confinement with the lights on 24 hours a day. Captain LoPresti, Lieutenant Torres and Officer Rosebery are defendants in the suit, as well as in a companion suit called El Magrabi v. Ashcroft.

In 2003, the inspector general for the United States Department of Justice issued two reports describing a pattern of mistreatment of detainees, and cited evidence that included videotapes of officers shoving unresisting, shackled detainees into walls and mocking them during body cavity searches. Turkmen v. Ashcroft accuses Officer Rosebery of repeatedly stepping on an inmate’s shackle chains in the elevator, and Lieutenant Torres is accused of forcing another to strip in front of her. While the suit does not accuse Captain LoPresti — one of the highest-ranking officers at the jail — of any specific act, it says he allowed an atmosphere of abuse to exist. The suit is now before the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.

[Solly Mack]

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