| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"james g. keegan jr." |
| Date: |
15 Oct 2006 09:06:25 AM |
| Object: |
1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps |
1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps
By Martha Mendoza
The Associated Press
Saturday 14 October 2006
In a jail cell at an immigration detention center in Arizona sits
a man who is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, not
considered a danger to society.
But he has been in custody for five years.
His name is Ali Partovi. And according to the Department of
Homeland Security, he is the last to be held of about 1,200 Arab and
Muslim men swept up by authorities in the United States after the
Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
There has been no full accounting of all of these individuals.
Nor has a promised federal policy to protect against unrestricted
sweeps been produced.
Human rights groups tried to track the detainees; members of
Congress denounced the arrests. They all believed that all of those
who had been arrested had been deported, released or processed
through the criminal justice system.
Just this summer, it was reported that an Algerian man, Benemar
"Ben" Benatta, was the last detainee, and that his transfer to Canada
had closed the book on the post-9/11 sweeps.
But now The Associated Press has learned that at least one person
- Partovi - is still being held. The Department of Homeland Security
insists he really is the last one in custody.
"Certainly it's not our goal as an agency to keep anyone detained
indefinitely," said DHS spokesman Dean Boyd. Boyd said the department
would like to remove Partovi from the United States but that he
refuses to return to his homeland of Iran.
And so he remains, a curious remnant of a desperate time.
Within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks - before it was even clear
if they were over - the FBI was ordered to identify the terrorists
who had managed to slip so smoothly into American society and to
catch anyone who might have been working with them. The FBI operation
was called PENTTBOM; it was swift and fierce, and the stakes couldn't
have been higher.
When in doubt, the orders came, arrest now and ask questions
later. To make this easier, law enforcement officials were authorized
to use immigration charges as needed. The risk of allowing terrorists
to slip away just because there wasn't ample evidence to hold them on
terror charges could not be tolerated. And thus hundreds of
individuals who were not terrorists, nor associated with terrorists,
were temporarily taken into city, county and federal custody.
They were caught in their bedrooms while they slept, pulled from
the restaurant kitchens where they worked, stopped at the border,
even federal offices where they had gone to seek help. In the end,
then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's call for "aggressive
detentions" in the unprecedented sweeps netted more than 1,200
individuals in less than two months.
The initial reaction to the sweeps was confusion. Members of
Congress, leading civil rights organizations, Arab and Muslim
activists, even the Justice Department's internal watchdogs, didn't
know how to react.
"After 9/11, everyone was caught off guard. There was so much
secrecy surrounding the government's policies that it took a number
of months before the public and civil-liberties groups began
unraveling what the government was doing," said Lee Gelernt, an
American Civil Liberties Union attorney.
Then came demands, from Congress, from the Justice Department's
Inspector General, from the ACLU and Human Rights Watch and from Arab
and Muslim activists, that these individuals must be accounted for.
To date that hasn't occurred.
"The fact is the United States has not come forward with
information on what happened to these people, or released their
names," said Rachel Meeropol, a staff attorney at the Center for
Constitutional Rights, an advocacy organization that represents
several detainees being held in Guantanamo. "Our understanding is
that the majority of these people who were swept up on immigration
violations were then held in detention until they were cleared of any
connection to terrorism. We believe that accounts for the vast
majority of people who were swept up."
Here's what is known: 762 of the 1,200 PENTTBOM arrestees were
charged with immigration violations at the behest of the FBI because
agents thought they might be associated with terrorism. Partovi was
one of these 762. Much as Partovi used a false passport, nearly all
of these detainees had violated immigration laws, either by
overstaying their visas, entering the country illegally, or violating
some other immigration law.
Unlike Partovi, almost everyone was either deported or released
within a few months.
There were still at least 438 other individuals who were not
accounted for. Most of those individuals, said Justice Department
officials, were released within days. But at least 93 were charged
with federal crimes and processed through the courts, and an unknown
number were deemed material witnesses.
As the years passed, said the ACLU's Gelernt, public concern
faded.
"Initially there was a lot of attention on the 1,200 people, but
we're still not sure exactly what happened to all of them," said the
ACLU's Gelernt.
The repercussions are still being felt, say advocates.
"Those 1,200 were taken in on pseudo-immigration charges," said
Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch. "It really is a black mark on
the U.S. and it undermines our intelligence gathering because it
creates distrust between law enforcement officials and communities
where those officials should be building rapport and trust."
"People lost years of their lives and families were ripped apart
in the frenzy of fear," said Kerri Sherlock, director of policy and
planning at the Rights Working Group, an advocacy organization in
Washington D.C. "Do we really want to be a country that locks people
up without guaranteeing their basic constitutional rights?"
In June 2003, the Justice Department's inspector general, an
in-house auditor, found widespread abuses in the way immigration laws
were used to hold people suspected of terrorism in the months
following 9/11. The inspector general made 21 recommendations aimed
at protecting individuals' civil rights. Twenty of those
recommendations have been adopted.
The last recommendation calls for the Justice Department and the
Department of Homeland Security to formalize policies,
responsibilities, and procedures for managing a national emergency
that involves alien detainees. After the inspector general's report,
the Justice and Homeland Security departments agreed with the
recommendation and began negotiating over language. Officials at both
departments say those negotiations are still going on.
"The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of
Justice continue to work toward the development of formal joint
policies and approaches for the handling of such national security
cases during periods of national impact," said Homeland Security
Department spokesman Dean Boyd.
However, Boyd stressed that guidelines were set up in 2004 to
make sure detainees' rights are being protected on a case-by-case
basis.
"We learned from the past," he said. "We evaluate each situation
to make sure it's being handled fairly."
Tim Lynch, a lawyer with the libertarian think tank Cato
Institute, said guidelines are not enough.
"I don't think the guidelines will mean very much in an emergency
if they don't have the binding force of law," he said. "We shouldn't
be surprised if those guidelines aren't followed if there's another
massive attack."
When the AP wrote Ali Partovi to ask for an interview, he called
collect from the Florence Correctional Center, a privately run
detention center in Arizona where he is held. Adamantly, he said he
did not want to be interviewed and that he wanted to remain private,
even though he said understood his case files, including litigation
he files himself, are part of the public record.
He later reportedly told a public affairs officer at the facility
that he is too busy for an interview - perhaps preparing his many
legal appeals.
In his lawsuits - there have been seven so far - Partovi claims
he is a victim of civil rights abuses and demands between $5 million
and $10 million in restitution. The most recent was filed in July.
The staff at the jail where he was first held "poured hot coffee
on my body, they also poured cold ice water on my body," he wrote in
one, claiming that staffers also cuffed his hands and feet, which
caused "my ankle and lower extremities to swell abnormally."
"It is my firm belief that I am constantly subjected to physical
abuse (because) of my ethnicity, I am Iranian of Persian birth," he
wrote in another, filed this summer. In that lawsuit he claimed that
immigration officers forced him to kneel while handcuffed, and then
kicked and punched his stomach and kidneys.
"As you can imagine, this is very, very painful when you are
cuffed from behind," he wrote.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney said that office was aware of
the lawsuits but could not comment on them. A detention center
spokesman said he was not aware of any lawsuits and could not respond.
Partovi doesn't have a lawyer, and he told the AP he doesn't want
one, choosing instead to represent himself, gleaning expertise from
the prison library.
He did have a lawyer once, when he was arrested in Guam in the
fall of 2001, trying to enter the country on a fraudulent Italian
passport.
"Mr. Partovi came into Guam International Airport using a false
passport. He explained about having been married to a Japanese women
and the arrangement wasn't working out. He applied for political
asylum, and I believe the federal government thought he might be a
terror suspect," said Curtis Charles Van de Veld, who was hired by
the federal government to represent him.
Partovi was sentenced to 175 days in custody, which he had
already served by the time he pleaded guilty in 2002. Then he was
turned over to the Department of Homeland Security.
Until the AP contacted him, Van de Veld didn't realize his former
client was still in custody.
"I'm surprised he hasn't contacted me," he said.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101506Z.shtml
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: 1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps |
15 Oct 2006 08:10:47 PM |
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james g. keegan jr. quoted, in part:
In a jail cell at an immigration detention center in Arizona sits
a man who is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, not
considered a danger to society.
Yet, later on, it notes that he entered the United States using
falsified documents.
Although probably he *ought* to be accepted as a political refugee from
Iran, it looks like once his charges of abuse in the prison system end
up being resolved, he will be sent back there whether he wants to go or
not. This is tragically unfair, but I'm not sure there is a simple
solution to this.
John Savard
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| User: "james g. keegan jr." |
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| Title: Re: 1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps |
15 Oct 2006 08:27:15 PM |
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In article <1160961046.966321.184840@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
wrote:
james g. keegan jr. quoted, in part:
In a jail cell at an immigration detention center in Arizona sits
a man who is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, not
considered a danger to society.
Yet, later on, it notes that he entered the United States using
falsified documents.
you didn't read the paragraph you responded to, did you?
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: 1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps |
16 Oct 2006 08:38:44 AM |
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james g. keegan jr. wrote:
In article <1160961046.966321.184840@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
jsavard@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
james g. keegan jr. quoted, in part:
In a jail cell at an immigration detention center in Arizona sits
a man who is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, not
considered a danger to society.
Yet, later on, it notes that he entered the United States using
falsified documents.
you didn't read the paragraph you responded to, did you?
It states explicitly that he used a false passport to enter the United
States. True, that doesn't mean the article contradicted itself;
although he _committed_ a crime, according to the article, that doesn't
mean U.S. law-enforcement authorities need to charge him for it.
The fact that he hasn't been charged with a crime, yet he is locked up,
might seem like an injustice. But he is locked up because he *has not
been accepted as an immigrant*, and not accepting someone as an
immigrant because he has committed the crime of using false documents -
and yet declining to charge him with that crime, because using a false
passport to escape from the Iranian tyranny is a reasonable thing to do
- is a valid intermediate state.
Someone who has not been accepted for admission to the United States
ought not to be *in* the United States. So of course such a one will
remain locked up until deportation is completed. Due to some factors,
his deportation has been delayed. This is unfortunate, but it doesn't
justify the conclusion that innocent people are being treated like
criminals that the article tries to demonstrate.
John Savard
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| User: "james g. keegan jr." |
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| Title: Re: 1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps |
16 Oct 2006 09:06:12 AM |
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In article <1161005924.691551.227730@f16g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
wrote:
james g. keegan jr. wrote:
In article <1160961046.966321.184840@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
wrote:
james g. keegan jr. quoted, in part:
In a jail cell at an immigration detention center in Arizona sits
a man who is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, not
considered a danger to society.
Yet, later on, it notes that he entered the United States using
falsified documents.
you didn't read the paragraph you responded to, did you?
It states explicitly that he used a false passport to enter the United
States. True, that doesn't mean the article contradicted itself;
although he _committed_ a crime, according to the article, that doesn't
mean U.S. law-enforcement authorities need to charge him for it.
The fact that he hasn't been charged with a crime, yet he is locked up,
might seem like an injustice. But he is locked up because he *has not
been accepted as an immigrant*, and not accepting someone as an
immigrant because he has committed the crime of using false documents -
and yet declining to charge him with that crime, because using a false
passport to escape from the Iranian tyranny is a reasonable thing to do
- is a valid intermediate state.
Someone who has not been accepted for admission to the United States
ought not to be *in* the United States. So of course such a one will
remain locked up until deportation is completed. Due to some factors,
his deportation has been delayed. This is unfortunate, but it doesn't
justify the conclusion that innocent people are being treated like
criminals that the article tries to demonstrate.
you have convinced me you are not sane.
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