From the Wahington Post (via Drudge) comes this story of an Algerian Muslim who apparently tried to find political refuge in the USA shortly before 9/11. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong profession -- he was an Algerian Air Force officer. He's been held in solitary without charges -- the reason they give for holding him keeps changing, but they still hold him.
Benamar Benatta sits in a whitewashed cell, lost in a post-Sept. 11 world.Hopefully, this is an isolated case. But it's cases like this that undermine the case for holding the people you really want to hold. Somebody needs to lose their job. Posted by Kevin Murphy at November 29, 2003 10:19 AM | TrackBack
Jailed the night of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the Algerian air force lieutenant with an expired visa has spent the past 26 months in federal prisons, much of that time in solitary confinement -- even though the FBI formally concluded in November 2001 that he had no connection to terrorism....
The federal government has few explanations for what happened. In legal briefs, the U.S. attorney in Buffalo blamed some of the delays on bureaucratic wrangling between prosecutors and the U.S. Marshals Service, and the confusion that followed the terrorist attacks. But in the documents, U.S. Attorney Michael A. Battle of the Western District of New York ultimately acknowledged that such conditions could "not justify violating the defendant's rights."
Two years after the attacks, federal Magistrate Judge H. Kenneth Schroeder Jr. would examine Benatta's case and find a study in governmental excess.
Schroeder issued an unsparing report in September, writing that federal prosecutors and FBI and immigration agents engaged in a "sham" to make it appear that Benatta was being held for immigration violations. Prosecutors trampled on legal deadlines intended to protect his constitutional rights and later offered explanations for their maneuvers that "bordered on ridiculousness," Schroeder wrote. And he found that the government compounded its mistakes by failing to act once it was clear that Benatta was not an accomplice to terrorists.