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After 9/11 hundreds of noncitizens were arrested on visa violations and put in detention centers. They were not charged with any crime, nor were they deported for their visa violations. They were, according to their lawyers, beaten, abused, kept in chains and humiliated. The government eventually decided they had no connection to terrorism and sent them home.
Now six are back, suing the government over their treatment.
And, despite the government saying they are not involved with terror, they are being treated harshly: in the custody of marshals and cannot make contact with any friends here. Yet, their faith in American justice, reports Nina Bernstein in the January 23, 2006 NYT (p. A1) is touching to say the least. “I am sure justice will be served because peoples of U.S.A. are justice-loving people regardless of race and religion.
One can hope. If the Bush administration loved justice they would apologize. Fat chance.
The defendants are represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights which charged that among other things, the defendants were slammed into walls, left shackled for hours and stepped on their leg chains as they were walking in order to make them fall down. That there is some truth to this, at the minimum, is shown by the fact the Federal Bureau of Prisons has disciplined some of the guards. Like Abu Garib, however, no one appears to be looking very hard at how the “few bad apples” were allowed to abuse prisoners with impunity for so long.
More to the point is why these people were even jailed. The Bush administration and its apologists like to claim that in the war on terror, you must work quickly and investigate very lead. But some of these detainees were kept in jail for months after the federal government had decided they had no links to terrorism. So how does that advance the war on terror? It doesn’t. Further, we have accepted without question that a “balance” must be struck between civil liberties and national security. But as this story illustrates, often there is no connection between restricting our liberties and keeping us safe.
You can also read about this story here:
Salon: The prisoner-abuse scandal at home
Democracy Now: Brooklyn's Abu Ghraib
Comments
I wish I could think or write as well as Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, but I cannot.
So I shall quote the latter:
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
All of the above was done under the guise of the Patriot Act, approved by Congress and upheld (so far) by the courts. And we know who controls those branches of government.
Shame on us.
Posted by: Rusty Harris | January 27, 2006 03:58 PM