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Held in 9/11 Net, Muslims Return to Accuse U.S.
By NINA BERNSTEIN
01/23/06 "New
York Times" -- -- 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 John Ashcroft, the former attorney
general, and 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."
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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