Videos recorded inside a New York jail show Arab and Asian detainees, who were picked up in a sweep of immigrants in the wake of the September 11 attacks, being slammed and bounced off the prison walls by guards, according to an official US government report.
After viewing more than 300 of the videos recorded by cameras placed around the Metropolitan Detention Centre (MDC) in Brooklyn, justice department investigators have published a long list of cases of physical and verbal abuse.
Across the country, more than 1 200 people, mostly Arabs and Asians, were detained on immigration violations after the 2001 explosions and held while they were investigated for possible links with terrorist groups. None was ever charged with terrorist-related crimes.
The tapes show detainees being escorted to and from their cells and assaulted in the corridors along the way.
”We observed officers escort detainees down a hall at a brisk pace and ram them into a wall without slowing down before impact,” the report by the justice department’s office of the inspector-general said of two videotaped cases.
”In another incident, we saw staff members forcefully ram a second detainee into two walls while he was being escorted from the recreation deck to a segregation cell.”
Still pictures from the videos, released with the report, show detainees being thrust against walls by guards.
The investigators reported that the detainees in each case appeared to have done nothing to warrant rough treatment; they had in fact been entirely compliant with their captors. The report found evidence on the tapes — discovered in a prison storeroom in August this year — to support detainees’ allegations that they were routinely abused verbally.
The tapes also confirmed allegations that the guards twisted detainees’ arms while they were cuffed behind their backs, and that they sometimes over-tightened leg and arm restraints and stepped on chains connected to shackles in a way that increased the pain inflicted by them.
The report found no evidence that detainees were ”brutally beaten”, but added: ”We determined that the way these MDC officers handled some detainees was in many respects unprofessional, inappropriate and in violation of [bureau of prisons] policy.”
The inspector-general said that the tapes disproved the ”blanket denials of mistreatment” made by MDC officials in interviews with investigators.
”We found many officers lacked credibility and candour regarding their descriptions of what occurred in the MDC, which calls into question their categorical denials of any instances of abuse,” the report found. It recommended that disciplinary measures should be taken against some of the guards involved.
Nancy Chang, a lawyer for the Centre for Constitutional Rights, a pressure group that is pursuing a lawsuit over the treatment of the detainees, welcomed the report: ”These detainees were targeted based on their religion and ethnicity alone, and the emotionally charged atmosphere following the tragedy of September 11 cannot serve as an excuse for this brutality.”
The justice department issued a statement saying that the ”intense emotional atmosphere” following the terrorist attacks could not excuse the ”abhorrent behaviour” of the guards.
The prisons’ bureau made no comment.
The government’s response to September 11 is under particular scrutiny in the courts at present. The supreme court has agreed to hear arguments from British and other inmates in Guantanamo Bay that they are being illegally held and should have access to the US judicial system to make their case.
Their case received a boost on Thursday from a lower court, which ruled that the policy of holding foreign detainees in the prison camp in a US-run enclave on south-eastern Cuba without providing the rights and protections normally offered by American justice was unconstitutional and a violation of international law.
Ken Hurwitz, of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said the ruling by a San Francisco-based appeals court would serve as a counter-balance to an earlier judgement in the government’s favour by a Washington-based court when the Supreme Court comes to weigh up the case in the spring.
A US warship seized two tons of hashish from a small dhow in the northern Arabian Sea this week in what was believed to be an al-Qaeda smuggling operation, the navy said yesterday. – Guardian Unlimited Â