Abu Ghraib on the East River: Detainees Charge Abuse After 9/11

[BurtWorm]

Ashcroft is named in the suit.



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/nyregion/03brooklyn.html?pagewanted=print&position=


May 3, 2004
2 Men Charge Abuse in Arrests After 9/11 Terror Attack
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Before the World Trade Center attack, Javaid Iqbal was a Pakistani immigrant proud to be known as "the cable guy" to customers on Long Island, where he had lived for a decade and married an American. Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian, had a weekend flea market stand at Aqueduct Raceway and a restaurant near Times Square where friendly police officers would joke, "Where's my shish kebab?"

But within weeks of Sept. 11, 2001, both had been picked up by federal agents in an anti-terror sweep. For 23 hours a day, they were locked in solitary confinement in the harsh maximum-security unit of a federal detention center in Brooklyn - the one cited by the Justice Department's inspector general last year for widespread physical abuse of its detainees.

The inspector general mentioned no specific names and cases, but now, in a federal lawsuit to be filed today and in telephone interviews from Pakistan and Egypt, the former cable technician and the former restaurateur have provided the most detailed personal accounts yet of the unit's brutality and the first to accuse specific corrections officers and wardens of abuse. The accusations are similar to those now being made against military officers guarding prisoners in Iraq.

The lawsuit charges that the men were repeatedly slammed into walls and dragged across the floor while shackled and manacled, kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as "terrorists" and "Muslim bastards," and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one during which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed....

[BurtWorm]

1. kick

[BurtWorm]

2. One more kick

to remind DUers that Abu Ghraib is a state of mind. It doesn't just happen in Iraq. It happens here, in the US, in New York City.

[BurtWorm]

3. Kick again. This story should be on page 1.

It was in the Metro Section of Monday's NY Times. This is an international story, on par with the Abu Ghraib story, with the torture and prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. This is all of a piece.