[News] Held in 9/11 Net, Muslims Return to Accuse U.S.

[Anti-Imperialist News]

NY Times


January 23, 2006

Held in 9/11 Net, Muslims Return to Accuse U.S.
By 
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=NINA%20BERNSTEIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=NINA%20BERNSTEIN&inline=nyt-per>NINA 
BERNSTEIN

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.

They are no longer the accused but the accusers, 
among six former detainees who are coming back to 
give depositions in their federal lawsuits 
against top government officials and detention 
guards, at a time when the constitutionality of 
part of the government's counterterrorism offensive is under new scrutiny.

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.

But as the six return to the city - four of them 
from Egypt, one from Pakistan, one from London - 
the conditions imposed by the United States 
government include the requirement that they be 
in the constant custody of federal marshals.

They are barred from calling anyone during their 
weeklong stays at an undisclosed New York hotel, 
where 12 days of closed depositions are to begin 
today. They can expect hours of questioning by 
lawyers representing at least 31 defendants in 
the lawsuits, including 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/john_ashcroft/index.html?inline=nyt-per>John 
Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_s_iii_mueller/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Robert 
S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.

The first returning detainees, Yasser and Hany 
Ibrahim, who are brothers, say that putting 
themselves back in the hands of the government 
they are suing is an act of faith in America. In 
recent telephone interviews from Alexandria, 
Egypt, the two described themselves as frightened 
but resolute in pressing a 2002 class-action 
lawsuit charging that they were abused and 
deprived of due process because of their religion or national origin.

"I'm seeking justice," said Yasser, 33, who had a 
Web site design business in Brooklyn before he 
and Hany, 29, a deli worker, were delivered in 
shackles to the Metropolitan Detention Center in 
Brooklyn 19 days after 9/11. "It's from the same 
system that did us injustice before. But I have 
faith in this system. I know what happened before was a mistake."

Charles S. Miller, a spokesman for the Justice 
Department, said officials would not comment on 
any aspect of the case, including the conditions 
of the men's return to the city and their 
allegations. But in court papers, the defendants 
deny wrongdoing, and department lawyers argue in 
part that the Sept. 11 attacks created "special 
factors" - including the need to detect and deter 
future terrorist attacks - that outweigh the 
plaintiffs' right to sue for damages for any constitutional violations.

The detainees' lawyers say that what happened at 
the Brooklyn detention center can be recognized 
four years later as the template for many of the 
counterterrorism measures now being fiercely challenged.

"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."

Richard Peter Caro, a lawyer for Stuart Pray, the 
lieutenant who oversaw the detainees' arrival at 
the detention center, said yesterday: "We're glad 
that they're coming in to be deposed so we can 
really get at the facts and finally see what the 
evidence shows. I'm confident that my client will 
be found to have committed no wrongdoing at all."

Last week, the center filed a class-action suit 
against President Bush and other administration 
officials over the National Security Agency's 
domestic eavesdropping without warrants. Ms. 
Meeropol is one of the plaintiffs, contending 
that her communications with clients like the 
Ibrahims may have been monitored illegally. The 
government says the surveillance program is a 
legal and valuable tool in the war on terror.

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.

At the time, Mr. Ashcroft said he made "no 
apologies" for finding every legal way possible 
to protect the American public. Nonetheless, 
officials pledged to work on getting kinks out of 
the system, and said abuses would be punished.

Critics charge that the authority that Mr. 
Ashcroft asserted after 9/11 - to detain any 
noncitizen considered a "person of interest" 
secretly and indefinitely - is unconstitutional. 
Government officials argue that secrecy is needed 
to keep terrorists in the dark.

Mr. Ashcroft has sought to have the two lawsuits 
brought by the detainees dismissed. But in a 
decision appealed by the government, a federal 
judge in Brooklyn ruled in September that he and 
other defendants would have to answer questions, 
at a later deposition, in one of the suits: a 
2004 complaint by another two of the six returning detainees.

Those two men, in their late 30's, are Ehab 
Elmaghraby, an Egyptian immigrant who ran a 
restaurant near Times Square, and Javaid Iqbal, a 
Pakistani immigrant whose Long Island customers knew him as "the cable guy."

"I am not afraid," Mr. Iqbal wrote last week in 
an e-mail message about his return. "I am also 
sure that justice will be served because peoples 
of U.S.A. are justice-loving people regardless of race and religion."

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.' "

But at 2 p.m. on Sept. 30, 2001, the lawsuit 
says, a dozen terrorism investigators from the 
F.B.I., the police and immigration services 
knocked at the door of the Ocean Parkway 
apartment that the brothers shared with several 
Egyptian and Moroccan friends. After questioning, 
the investigators took away Yasser, Hany and 
another man, all of whose tourist visas had expired.

Why investigators showed up is unclear, said 
their lawyer, Ms. Meeropol. But she noted that 
some interrogations were prompted by anonymous 
tips about "suspicious-looking" foreign men. 
Federal officials have contended that at a time 
when a second terror attack seemed imminent, all 
tips had to be checked. As a practical matter, 
once the brothers were labeled "of interest" to 
investigators, they were destined for the 
maximum-security unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center.

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.

The suit asks the court to declare that all the 
detentions were unjustified and illegal, to award 
compensatory and punitive damages, and to order 
the government to return personal property it confiscated.

To prevent unnecessary detentions and abuses of 
noncitizens in the event of a new national 
emergency, the Justice Department's inspector 
general, Glenn A. Fine, in 2003 recommended 
changes in counterterrorism policy as well as 
disciplinary action against at least 10 guards 
and supervisors. In his last report to Congress, 
in August 2005, Mr. Fine said that many of his 
recommendations had been acted upon but that 
formal policy changes were still being negotiated.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has fired two 
detention officers, suspended two for 30 days and 
demoted one in connection with the Brooklyn 
inquiry, said Traci Billingsley, a bureau spokeswoman.

The Ibrahim brothers say that when they finally 
reached home, they found that the presumption of 
guilt had followed them into an Egyptian secret 
service dossier that made them unemployable. 
Yasser, now married with a 2-year-old son, said 
he and Hany were eking out a living in a small jewelry business.

"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."

The Freedom Archives
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www.freedomarchives.org 
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