Please click this and help my rating:

July 20, 2003

Ashcroft Could Face Reckoning on Detainee Mistreatment

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

A 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.

Full story...

Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: 1.5
Learning Percentage: 60%

Posted by Lance Brown at July 20, 2003 03:59 AM | TrackBack
Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?






Email this entry to:

Your email address:

Message (optional):

All contents of this site Copyright © 1996-2003 by Lance Brown for President in 2008. 
Please distribute and link freely; and please let us know by e-mailing editor@freedom2008.com.

Thank you very much for your visit.



Ring of Freedom & Liberty
[Previous 5] [Previous] [Skip 1] [Next] [Next 5] [List] [Join]