Letters to the Editor
zzz05
Published Letters: 431 Editor's Choice: 9
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Thank God we're better than that
[Read the article: American empire, going, going ...]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"A xenophobic empire would have imprisoned its Muslims wholesale,"
Well, thank God the US didn't go in that direction, eh? The public certainly would have rebelled. All those Second Amendment folks would have borne their arms to prevent the government from doing anything like that.
Held in 9/11 Net, Muslims Return to Accuse U.S.
By NINA BERNSTEIN
January 23, 2006
Hundreds of noncitizens were swept up on visa violations in the weeks after 9/11, held for months in a much-criticized federal detention center in Brooklyn as "persons of interest" to terror investigators, and then deported. This week, one of them is back in New York and another is due today - the first to return to the United States.
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As in the cases of all the Muslim immigrants rounded up in the New York area after the terror attacks, the six were never accused of a crime related to 9/11; officials eventually cleared all of them of links to terrorism. A report by the inspector general of the Justice Department found systemic problems with immigrant detentions and widespread abuse at the federal detention center where the six had been held; several guards have since been disciplined.
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"The post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps were the first example of the Bush administration's willingness to ignore the law and hold people outside the judicial system," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the Ibrahim brothers. "The kind of torture, interrogation and arbitrary detention that we now associate with Guantánamo and secret C.I.A. facilities really started right here, in Brooklyn."
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Illegal recording of lawyer-client conversations was one of the abuses documented at the Brooklyn detention center in a scathing 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general. The report also found a pattern of physical abuse, some of it caught on prison videotape, including beatings and sexual humiliations like those described by the Ibrahim brothers or other former detainees. The report said it was Mr. Ashcroft's policy to hold detainees on any legal pretext until the F.B.I. cleared them, even though such clearances took months and many detainees were immigrants picked up by chance.
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The Ibrahim brothers are more fearful. They say that their parents begged them not to return to the country where they were held in maximum security without charges for eight months and, the brothers charge, beaten and tormented by guards. "Part of my motivation is to make sure that what happened to us doesn't happen to more people in the future," said Yasser, who was due to arrive in New York today, joining his brother, who came on Friday.
Both spoke with nostalgia of the three or four years they lived in New York, on and off, before 9/11. When they were not working, they said, they hung out together in Greenwich Village, browsed electronics stores near Times Square and took friends on the rides at Coney Island. Hany proudly recalled how he worked his way up from stock boy to grill man and then manager of a deli in Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn. "The best I lived in my life was in New York," he said.
Right after the World Trade Center attack, they said, their parents urged them to come home. "We assured them," Yasser recalled: " 'This is the United States. They don't arrest people for no charges. We didn't do anything, so nothing's going to happen to us.' "
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Physical abuse, the lawsuit says, began the moment they arrived, chained and shackled. As Yasser described it, guards supervised by Lieutenant Pray slammed his brother face-first into a wall where an American flag T-shirt had been taped, then did the same to him.
Pain became part of the brothers' daily routine, the lawsuit charges. Escort teams cursing them as Muslims and terrorists slammed them into every available wall when they were taken from their cells, twisted their wrists and fingers, and stepped on their leg chains so that they fell, their ankles bruised and bloody, according to the suit.
But worse than physical or verbal abuse, Yasser said, was "the feeling that we are being hidden from the outside world, and nobody knows in the outside world that we are arrested and in this place." Hany, who says he had a nervous breakdown when he returned to Egypt, recalled that guards and lieutenants terrified him by saying, "You're going to stay here the rest of your life."
At a closed immigration hearing on Nov. 20, three weeks after their arrest, the brothers agreed to immediate deportation. By Dec. 7, the lawsuit says, F.B.I. memos stated that clearance checks on the Ibrahims had shown no links to terrorism. But they were held six more months - Hany until May 29, 2002, and Yasser until June 6.
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"It's going to be very difficult for me to go back for just a week and not to be able to see the places that I loved before," he said of his return. "America's the land of the free."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/nyregion/23detain.html
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bush speaks
[Read the article: Goodbye, "Decider." Hello, "Mr. Interrupter"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]oh god. they really shouldn't let him off leash.
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makes perfect sense
[Read the article: Romney's man on waterboarding]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]you waterboard them until they confess to being terrorists, then it's OK that you waterboarded them, because they're confessed terrorists and they deserve it.
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religion
[Read the article: Romney and Huckabee's religious intolerance ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]'A practicing Jewish psychologist I met recently said that the reason religion is important is that it provides answers to the question "why are we here?"'
To which any authentic Jew would immediately reply, "So where should we be?"