ZGram - 6/17/2003 - "The Zundel Story: 762 times over!"

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ZGram -  Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

June 17. 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

The Zundel story - 762 times over!

[START]

Blumner: Ashcroft Nonapologetic Despite Findings of Post-9-11 Injustice

By Robyn Blumner
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES / June 13, 2003

     None Selected Attorney General John Ashcroft must loathe this 
country's traditions of freedom. How else can one explain his blithe 
reaction to a report released Monday by the Justice Department's own 
inspector general that details how his department mistreated hundreds 
of immigrants detained following Sept. 11?
     Page after page of the nearly 200-page report is as scathing and 
condemning as bureaucrat-speak gets. Yet Ashcroft told Congress 
Thursday that he does "not apologize" for the way his department 
conducted itself post-Sept. 11.
     None of the report's findings apparently pricked his conscience: 
not the way men were indiscriminately arrested, or the way they were 
kept from contacting attorneys, or the way they were left to languish 
for months while the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents assigned 
to clear them of terrorist links were given other duties.
     The report covers the experiences of 762 immigrants, almost all 
male and from Muslim or Middle Eastern countries, who were picked up 
on immigration violations and designated "of interest" in the 
terrorism investigation. In the end, beyond Zacarias Moussaoui, who 
was arrested prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, not one of the detainees 
was charged with a terrorism-related crime. Not one.
     How can the Justice Department claim to have been safeguarding 
Americans when it threw away the rule book -- the principles of due 
process -- and in doing so came up with zero al-Qaida members beyond 
Moussaoui? If the great paradigm of this century is liberty vs. 
security, then where was the security payoff?
     At the direction of Ashcroft and his underlings -- including 
Michael Chertoff, an assistant attorney general who has been 
nominated for a federal appellate court seat -- we gave up the 
presumption of innocence, suspicion based on fact, the possibility of 
bail, public immigration hearings and humane conditions of 
confinement. In exchange, we obtained no added safety.
     I'd say this was a sucker's deal -- one Ashcroft not only vows to 
continue but wants Congress to authorize. Even after this bruising 
evaluation, Ashcroft had the audacity to ask the House Judiciary 
Committee for expanded powers to hold people suspected of terrorism 
indefinitely.
     When Ashcroft looks at the Bill of Rights, he must see it with 
shark-dead eyes.
     But let's put rights aside; how about just talking about the 
fundamentals of good police work? According to the inspector 
general's report, there was virtually no investigation done before 
immigrants were dubbed "of interest." For example, three Middle 
Eastern men in Manhattan were arrested after they were stopped for a 
traffic violation and had plans to a school in their car. They were 
doing construction work at the school, a fact their employer 
confirmed the next day, but they were nonetheless held as Sept. 11 
detainees.
     If a "lead" -- which was often an anonymous tip about a Muslim 
neighbor who worked odd hours -- led the FBI to a location and there 
were a dozen others there with immigration violations, all would be 
arrested and treated as Sept. 11 detainees.
     Once an immigrant "of interest" was taken into custody, the 
Justice Department commanded that he not be released or deported 
until cleared by the FBI -- a process the inspector general found 
took an inordinate amount of time, on average 80 days.
     The report makes repeated references to the irresponsible way the 
FBI went about these clearances, often taking months to do a job that 
should have taken days.
     It also describes how then-Immigration and Naturalization Service 
lawyers pleaded with the FBI to provide them with facts on individual 
detainees that would justify holding them without bond. Typically, 
the FBI had nothing to offer. The INS was told to claim the need for 
bond denial anyway.
     As the report indicates, a whole new set of rules was imposed on 
these detainees. New policies allowed the INS (which has been 
absorbed into various parts of the Department of Homeland Security) 
to hold off for weeks or more before charging the immigrants. Aliens 
who agreed to leave the country and not fight their deportation 
orders were nonetheless kept for months until "cleared" by the FBI 
before being allowed to fly home.
     Another part of the report gives a sickening accounting of how 
some of the detainees were held. Eighty-four detainees deemed of 
"high interest" by the FBI were sent to the Metropolitan Detention 
Center in Brooklyn. All of them, without any individual assessment of 
dangerousness, were kept under the most restrictive conditions: a 
lockdown of 23 hours a day and hands and feet shackled when out of 
their cell.
     Petty cruelties were inflicted on these men -- men who were only 
charged with civil immigration violations -- such as having their 
cell lights on all night and not being given warm clothes so they 
could utilize their hour of recreation.
     The detainees were allowed one phone call to an attorney a week 
and one social telephone call a month. Their weekly phone call to try 
to secure counsel was sabotaged by the fact that the list of 
immigration attorneys given them had many wrong numbers. But a wrong 
number was counted as their weekly allotment.
     The report describes how word came from the highest levels of the 
department to the director of the Bureau of Prisons that any legal 
means should be taken to disrupt the ability of these men to 
communicate with the outside.
     They were also the subject of cruelties not so petty, such as 
being slammed against walls and having arms and fingers twisted by 
guards.
     Again, none of these men was found to have terrorist ties.
     Five hundred and five of the detainees have now been returned to 
their home countries. The bulk came from Pakistan, but many were from 
Egypt, Yemen and other places where hatred toward America has become 
a national security problem for us. Now they can hate us not just for 
our freedoms but for our repressions.
     And to this Ashcroft makes no apologies.
     How is this making us safer?
    -----
     Tribune Media Services