New York:
The federal government is paying $1.2 million to settle the cases of five Muslim immigrants who sued over their detention and treatment in a Brooklyn jail after 9/11, when hundreds of non-citizens were rounded up and held for months before being cleared of links to terrorism and deported.
The five were part of a larger lawsuit, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, which will continue to press the argument that the round-ups and physical abuse they say they suffered were unconstitutional.
The government admits no liability or fault under the terms of the settlements, filed late on Monday in US District Court in Brooklyn. Charles S. Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the government would not comment.
But Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents the detainees, said the amount the government is willing to pay speaks volumes.
"I believe a settlement of this size is a deterrent to the United States from ever again rounding up innocent non citizens based only on suspicion about their race and religion," Ms Meeropol said. "These were guys called terrorists and treated as terrorists, shoved against the blood-spattered picture of the American flag and told, you're never getting out of here alive. And it's a long way from that to where they are now."
Yet in a telephone interview from Alexandria, Egypt, one of the five Muslims, Yasser Ebrahim, 37, said the settlement was a reluctant compromise for plaintiffs who had become increasingly frustrated by seven years of motions, cross-appeals and delays in the case. His payment - $356,250, of which he will receive $270,000 after legal expenses are subtracted - is the highest of the five because he was in maximum security detention the longest, for more than eight months without charges.
"Being held in that place for 249 days - $270,000 is not going to make up for that experience," said Ebrahim, who had a Web site design business in Brooklyn before he and his younger brother, Hany Ibrahim, a deli worker, were arrested 19 days after 9/11 and held as "persons of interest" to terror investigators.
The plaintiffs said they were physically abused from the moment they arrived, chained and shackled, at the jail, the Metropolitan Detention Centre, where they were slammed face first into a wall where an American-flag T-shirt had been taped.
The daily experiences described in the lawsuit include escort teams that cursed them as terrorists and shoved them into walls whenever they were taken from their cells, twisted their wrists and fingers and stepped on their leg chains so they fell, their ankles bloody.
Several of the federal guards accused of abusing the detainees have since been disciplined, and some, including a captain, were criminally convicted in the beating of other inmates.
The Turkmen lawsuit, filed as a class action in 2002, was the first broad legal challenge to the policies and practices that swept hundreds of immigrants into the Metropolitan Detention Center and other jails on visa violations in the weeks after the terror attacks.
The round-ups drew intense criticism, not only from immigrant rights advocates, but also from the inspector-general of the Justice Department, who issued reports saying that the government had made little or no effort to distinguish between genuine suspects and Muslim immigrants with minor visa violations. The reports also documented widespread abuse at the Brooklyn jail.
In 2006, several of the plaintiffs, including Ebrahim and his brother, were allowed to return to New York to give depositions in their lawsuit against top government officials and detention guards, but on the condition that they be in the constant custody of federal marshals. Fearful but determined, Ebrahim said at the time, "I have faith in the system."
Later that year, a federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed several of the lawsuit's key claims, ruling that the government had wide latitude under immigration law to detain non-citizens on the basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation. The judge, John Gleeson, allowed the lawsuit to continue on other claims, however, including the argument that the conditions of confinement were abusive and unconstitutional. Both sides appealed.
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral arguments in the case last February, has not issued a decision.
In May, in a lawsuit involving similar claims, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a Pakistani Muslim who was arrested after the Sept. 11 attacks could not sue John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the FBI, because he failed at a preliminary stage to allege a plausible link between the officials and the abuses he said he had suffered in the Brooklyn jail.
Legal advocates said that decision would make it very hard in the future to hold high government officials accountable for discriminatory practices. But it did not affect the federal tort claims of abuse by the Turkmen plaintiffs, Meeropol said. And because of the inspector-general's investigation, and information collected in discovery, she added, "the government faced a lot of liability for those claims."
The plaintiffs whose claims were settled include another Egyptian living in Alexandria and two natives of Pakistan, one who now lives in France, and the other, a physician, in Toronto. Two other plaintiffs, Ibrahim Turkmen and Akhil Sachdeva, who had been held in the Passaic County (N.J.) Jail, remain in the suit.
There has been no ruling on certifying the lawsuit as a class action, because of the protracted fight over government motions to dismiss it. An amended complaint filed on Monday adds five new plaintiffs.