9/11 Detainees in New Jersey Say They Were Abused With Dogs

[struggle4progress]

Published: April 3, 2006

The photograph, seen worldwide, is one of the defining images from Abu Ghraib: a dog strains at its leash, lunging at a terrified prisoner in an orange jumpsuit. One United States military dog handler was recently convicted of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq, and the court-martial of another is to start in May.

But for Ibrahim Turkmen and Akhil Sachdeva, the image evokes something closer to home: the dogs used inside the Passaic County Jail in New Jersey. The two men, plaintiffs in a pending class-action lawsuit known as Turkmen v. Ashcroft, were among hundreds of immigrant detainees held in the Passaic jail for months after 9/11 before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported on visa violations.

Until now, lawsuits brought by former detainees against top American officials have focused attention on the maximum security unit of a federal detention center in Brooklyn where the Justice Department's inspector general found widespread abuse. But today in Toronto, as Mr. Sachdeva, a Canadian citizen born in India, gives his first deposition for the class-action lawsuit, the spotlight will shift to the New Jersey jail.

There, about 400 of the 762 mainly Muslim detainees rounded up in the United States after 9/11 were held. The lawsuit charges that the detainees' confinement was arbitrary, illegally based on their religion or national origin, and that guards routinely terrorized them with aggressive dogs. <snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/nyregion/03detain.html

[EFerrari]

1. Kick

[genieroze]

2. I wonder if they do that to everyone in that jail or these people were

singled out.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

4. Do you really have to ask?

[tanyev]

7. Good question. I worked at a county jail records office for a couple

years and we never had any dogs, but that was back in the early 90s. Maybe they're all the rage now.

[Solly Mack]

3. I've wondered time and time again about the number of people

the US government disppeared into prisons and INS detention centers within the US just after the 9-11.

I wonder how many survived/will survive to tell their story.

I wonder how many are still being detained.

I wonder if we will ever know the real number.

I don't trust the American government to be honest about it.

[lostnfound]

5. Just one month after DemocracyNow! interviewed the guy, not bad!!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/01/1520252&mode=thread&tid=25

NYT is catching up!! :-)

Dear NYT, I am truly glad that you published this. What matters is that the truth gets out.

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

6. Kick...

...eom

[Benhurst]

8. Have these people no shame. Don't they know

"What happens in New Jersey, stays in New Jersey"?

What's the world going to think of The World's Only Superpower if this sort of thing gets out?

Such people should keep their mouths shut and, in the words of The Leader, let freedom reign.