GOD BLESS AMERIKA -

Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of Send these,
the homeless, tempest-tost to me, your teeming shore.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

--bp
"We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks,'' said Barbara Comstock, director of public affairs for the Justice Department. Comstock said several federal courts have ruled the detentions are fully within the law.

More than 760 illegal immigrants were imprisoned in the weeks and months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as authorities traced thousands of leads and sought to prevent a feared follow-up attack. Most of those people -- more than 500 -- have now been deported, and none have been charged as terrorists. Others are awaiting deportation.

According to the report, some detainees were locked in their cells for 23 hours a day and put in handcuffs and leg irons each time they were moved. For months, their cells were lit for 24 hours a day. Guards taunted some, warning them that they would ``die here.'' They were given only one call a week to a lawyer.
--ep--

--bp--
For example, we found that M.D.C. staff frequently, and mistakenly, told people who inquired about a specific Sept. 11 detainee that the detainee was not held at the facility when, in fact, the opposite was true.
...
the evidence indicates a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the M.D.C. against some Sept. 11 detainees, particularly during the first months after the attacks.
--ep



You know, Mr Ashcroft, most people are not bad people.

I must applaud your effort to ensure the highest standards in federal law enforcement, regardless of the situation. Nothing like a few months in supermax conditions to make a man a man. But it apparently won't make a suspect convictable, or to warrant any apology to the innocent, or any sort of explanation to the taxpayers (your employers, Mr. A) as for just why these 760 prisoners were treated in this rather inhumane fashion, when apparently most of their actual crimes included such offenses as overstaying their visa? And how about those teenagers we've held at camp x-ray? 14, not 19. Well done all around. Way to let fear and terror get to you. Soon enough though, once you can ram PATRIOT II down the throat of the congress, you can deport my ass to anywhere you like, despite my native birth. I await a knock on the door, and the ticket to the island.