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Two federal prisons are being used overwhelmingly to hold Muslim prisoners and prisoners with unpopular political beliefs, and are practicing religious profiling, retaliation and arbitrary punishment.
These are the principal allegations in a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) against U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ houses the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which runs the two units, one in Terre Haute, Indiana, the other in Marion, Illinois.
“These units are an experiment in social isolation,” said CCR Attorney Alexis Agathocleous. “People are being put in these extraordinarily restrictive units without being told why and without any meaningful review. Dispensing with due process creates a situation ripe for abuse; in this case, it has allowed for a pattern of religious profiling, retaliation and arbitrary punishment. This is precisely what the rule of law and the Constitution forbid.”
At the same time, some prisoners at the CMU are protesting their being designated as “terrorists” by the DOJ, despite never having been convicted of any terror-related crime.
One such prisoner is Dr. Rafil Dhafir, an American Iraqi-born upstate-New York oncologist. He was arrested by 85 federal agents who descended on his home, handcuffing him in his driveway. Then Attorney General John D. Ashcroft referred to him as a terrorism supporter apprehended
Dhafir was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to 22 years in prison for violating the Iraqi sanctions by sending money to Iraq through his charity, “Help the Needy,” and for fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and a variety of other nonviolent crimes. Five other people, including his wife, had already pleaded guilty to charges in connection with the case.
In the period leading up to his trial, political figures strove to paint Dhafir with a broad terrorist brush. Then New York State governor George E. Pataki described Dhafir's as a "money laundering case to help terrorist organizations . . . conduct horrible acts." The New York Times reported that prosecutors hinted at national security reasons for holding Dhafir without bail. And Federal prosecutors heralded his arrest as another blow in the Justice Department's war on terrorism.
However, federal prosecutors never filed any charges related to terrorism nor did they prove any link to terrorists. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “this turned out to be a case of white-collar crime; the trial process was filled with descriptions of financial statements and details of financial transactions.” In Full
One of the latest uncovered incidents took place in a village in Paktia Province, where a squad of Special Operations Forces (without uniform) raided a house late at night looking for two Taliban suspects. They didn’t find them, and instead killed a local police chief and a district prosecutor. Three women who came to their aid were also killed. According to several witnesses, the women were discovered bound and gagged, showing signs of slashing wounds from a knife. Afghanistan, The Secret War [Voltairenet.org]
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