Federal 9/11 detainee beatings caught on tape
After 9/11, The Department of “Justice” rounded up hundreds, maybe thousands, of Muslims, generally on minor visa violations that would be ignored were they Brits or a Canadians, threw them in jail, let the guards badly abuse them, then lied about it.
However tapes of these beatings and mistreatment have emerged.
In a surprise development, hundreds of videotapes that were originally said by the Department of Justice not to exist were discovered recently by its own internal affairs bureau and document many of the detainee abuses listed in an earlier internal report. In one case, the tapes show federal prison guards pushing detainees’ faces into a wall-hanging t-shirt emblazoned with the U.S. flag and the words, “These colors don’t run!”
“The tapes show that immigrants were abused at the hands of their jailers.” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. “Hundreds of immigrants were detained even though they had no connection to the terrorist attacks and now we find out that the government abused many of them while in detention. Clearly, the Justice Department’s war on terrorism quickly became a war on immigrants.”
Shocking in their scope and variety, the abuses included actions like the U.S. flag incident described above, other instances where federal prison guards slammed detainees against walls and bars by their heads or necks, the misuse of strip searches and physical restraints to punish detainees, and the practice of illegally recording detainees’ meetings with attorneys.
There’s another word for slamming detainess heads into walls, and that word is torture. And it happened right here in the US, with a wink and a nod from the Bush Administration.