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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - September 30, 2010
Ashcroft's Post-9/11 Roundups Spark Lawsuit
by: William Fisher
Inter Press Service-Report
New York - Hundreds of people who believe they were falsely
detained and imprisoned by the Department of Justice in
the wake of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks are now seeking
redress through the U.S. courts.
The exact number of detainees is unclear, as no lists were
ever released publicly. But according to a report by the
Office of the Inspector General in 2002, 475 9/11 detainees
were arrested and detained in New York and New Jersey.
Hundreds more were arrested across the country.
Some of these men are plaintiffs in a federal class action
lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft and
other top officials in the administration of President
George W. Bush (2001-2009) who were responsible for their
illegal roundup, abuse and detention.
The suit charges that the detainees were kept in solitary
confinement with the lights on 24 hours a day; placed under
a communications blackout so that they could not seek the
assistance of their attorneys, families and friends;
subjected to physical and verbal abuse; forced to endure
inhumane conditions of confinement; and obstructed in their
efforts to practice their religion.
Some of the abuse included beatings, repeated strip
searches and sleep deprivation. The allegations of inhumane
and degrading treatment have been substantiated by two
reports of the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector
General, and several defendants in the case have been
convicted on federal charges of cover-ups and beatings of
other prisoners around the same time period.
On Sep. 13, six new plaintiffs joined the lawsuit, which
is still a proposed class action; there has not yet been a
ruling on class certification.
These plaintiffs include two Pakistani men, Ahmer Iqbal
Abbasi and Anser Mehmood; two men from Egypt, Ahmed Khalifa
and Saeed Hammouda; Benamar Benatta; an Algerian man who
has sought and received refugee status in Canada; and
Purna Raj Bajracharya, a Nepalese Buddhist whose prolonged
detention after 9/11 prompted outrage not only by civil
libertarians, but even by the FBI agent who originally
investigated him.
Bajracharya was videotaping the sights of New York City for
his family back in Nepal when he inadvertently included an
FBI office. He was taken into custody, where officials
found he had overstayed his tourist visa, a violation
punishable by deportation.
Instead, Bajracharya wound up in solitary confinement in a
federal detention centre for three months, weeping constant-
ly, in a six-by-nine-foot cell where the lights were never
turned off. Bajracharya, who speaks little English, might
have been in there much longer if James Wynne, the FBI
agent who investigated him, had not summoned Legal Aid.
Despite the fact that the government never charged any of
them with a terrorism-related offence, immigration author-
ities kept the men in detention for up to eight months,
long past the resolution of their immigration cases,
according to attorneys at the Center for Constitutional
Rights, which brought the class action on behalf of the
plaintiffs.
"I was deprived of my liberty and I was abused at the hands
of the U.S. government simply because of my religion and
ethnicity. Now, nine years later, I seek to vindicate my
rights and hold the people who mistreated me accountable,"
said Benamar Benatta. "My hope is that this never happens
to anyone again."
Benatta succeeded in having a criminal charge for possess-
ion of false immigration documents thrown out of court when
the federal judge in his case ruled that his immigration
detention was a "subterfuge" and "sham" created to hide the
reality that, because Benatta was an "Algerian citizen and
a member of the Algerian Air Force, [he] was spirited off
to the MDC (Metropolitan Detention Center) in Brooklyn...
and held in the [Administrative Maximum Special Housing
Unit] as 'high security' for the purposes of providing an
expeditious means of having [him] interrogated by special
agents of the FBI."
"After 9/11 hundreds of men were swept up and detained in
deplorable conditions based only on their religion and
ethnicity," CCR Attorney Rachel Meeropol told IPS.
"Nine years later, my clients are still determined to hold
the masterminds of these sweeps accountable, and we will
continue this fight until former Attorney General John
Ashcroft, and his cronies, are forced to answer for their
policy of profiling and abuse," she said.
"No matter what exalted position they hold, cannot get away
with ordering abuse and racial profiling. This battle is
far from over," Meeropol added.
The suit names as defendants then-Attorney General
Ashcroft; Robert Mueller, current director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI); former immigration
commissioner James Ziglar; and officials at the MDC, where
the plaintiffs were held.
It includes additional detail regarding high-level involve-
ment in racial profiling and abuse, including allegations
that Ashcroft ordered immigration authorities and the FBI
to investigate individuals for ties to terrorism by, among
other means, looking for Muslim-sounding names in the
phonebook.
In the resulting dragnet, hundreds of men were arrested,
many based solely on their physical appearance ? "Middle
Eastern-looking men."
Many other arrests were based on anonymous tips called in
to the FBI. The complaint also discloses, in some cases for
the first time, the "discriminatory and nonsensical tips"
that led to each plaintiff's arrest and detention, the CCR
says.
Lead plaintiff Ibrahim Turkmen, for example, was arrested
after his landlady called the FBI to report that she rented
an apartment to several Middle Eastern men, and "she would
feel awful if her tenants were involved in terrorism and
she didn't call."
Among other documented abuses in detention, many of the
9/11 detainees had their faces smashed into a wall where
guards had pinned a t-shirt with a picture of a U.S. flag
and the words, "These colors don't run." The men were
slammed against the t-shirt upon their entrance to MDC
and told "welcome to America".
The t-shirt was smeared with blood, yet it stayed up on
the wall at MDC for months.
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