Ashcroft Could Face Reckoning on Detainee Mistreatment

[G_j]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0329/lee.php


Ashcroft Could Face Reckoning on Detainee Mistreatment
Exposé Energizes Court Battle
by Chisun Lee
July 16 - 22, 2003

month after its release, a meticulous exposé of the Justice Department's troubling treatment of immigrants detained after the September 11 attacks has spurred a burst of legal activity that could lead to a reckoning for U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in a Brooklyn courthouse.

So far unnoticed by the press and the public, a group of detainees has seized on the 198-page report by the Justice Department's inspector general as new fodder for a class action suit that had previously starved for information from government agencies. In late June, lawyers for the detainees filed in federal court an expanded version of their civil complaint against Bush administration officials.

The moment Inspector General Glenn Fine released his findings on June 2, lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City began amplifying the year-old challenge on behalf of immigrants who had been arrested in the September 11 probe and held in area prisons. It is the only known action so far to allege sweeping rights violations in these detentions, claiming that they amounted to a systemic, top-down wrong.

Seven former detainees accuse Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller, former Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner James Ziglar, and prison wardens and guards of ethnic profiling, violating their due process rights, and physical and verbal abuse, among other grievances. CCR wants Brooklyn U.S. District Court judge John Gleeson to hear the lawsuit as a class action encompassing possibly dozens, even hundreds, of other detainees.

...more...

[NYC]

1. This is good news.

Thanks.

[deneb]

2. Journalism lives at the Village Voice

Terrific stuff, from folk like Nat Hentoff and James Ridgeway, and that article by Chisun Lee.

Exposé - what does that mean in Murikan?

[G_j]

3. I agree

they've had some terrific articles.
Nat Hentoff has become a mainstay for me. I posted the latest Lee article in GD but I think it's pretty much gone now.

Every week they have something worth reading.