Home > The prisoner-abuse scandal at home
The stories sound familiar: Muslim prisoners beaten
and sexually humiliated by American guards. But it
happened in Brooklyn, not Baghdad.
By Michelle Goldberg
May 19, 2004 | BROOKLYN, N.Y. — The American guards
took Mohamed Maddy’s glasses before they slammed him
into the wall. A portly middle-aged father of two, Maddy
was crying, trying to move his shoulder in front of him
so it would take the blow, but they kept smashing him
into the concrete, leaving him with dark purple bruises.
Then they told him to strip, and when he balked at
removing his underwear — "I am Muslim, I can’t do it,"
he said — they screamed, "Fucking Muslim! Take them
off!"
They made him bend over and said, "Take your hand and
open your ass." He sobbed harder as they performed a
cavity search. Afterward, they told him to get dressed
and put him in handcuffs and leg irons connected by a
chain to his waist. They ordered him to run and then
stepped on his leg chain so he’d fall down, only to be
yanked back up and forced to run again, over and over.
Without his glasses, Maddy couldn’t see where he was
going, but he thinks he was running in circles.
Finally he was thrown in a cell. For the first month,
the light was left on 24 hours a day. If he tried to
shield his eyes and snatch a moment of sleep, the guards
would kick the doors. On the rare occasions when he was
taken out, he was strip-searched, often twice in the
same day, even if he hadn’t been out of the guards’
sight. Sometimes they did the searches in public.
Sometimes they laughed and jeered. An official report
later concluded that many of these searches had nothing
to do with safety — they were about punishment and
humiliation.
Stories like Maddy’s have lately been pouring out of
Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s never been to those
countries. Maddy’s ordeal took place at the Metropolitan
Detention Center in Brooklyn, where 84 of the 762 Muslim
immigrants who were detained after Sept. 11 were held.
The torture there wasn’t nearly as severe as it was at
Abu Ghraib, and, according to recent reports, at
Guantánamo in Cuba. But there are striking similarities,
suggesting that what happened in Iraq may be an
escalation of a pattern of human rights violations that
began almost as soon as the World Trade Center crumbled.
In April 2003, as the war in Iraq dominated the
headlines, the Justice Department’s Office of the
Inspector General issued a 239-page report titled "The
September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of
Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with
the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks." Then, in
December, the Inspector General’s Office issued a
supplemental 49-page report detailing abuses at the
Metropolitan Detention Center, where Maddy was held. In
its May 24 issue, Newsweek revealed that attorneys for
two detainees are pressing to release 300 hours of
videotape that captured the abuses — tapes that were
cited in the reports on the detention center, but that
have never been made public.
As the reports document, prisoners being held at MDC in
connection with Sept. 11 were regularly stripped and
sexually humiliated. Prolonged sleep deprivation was
common. Guards regularly slammed inmates against walls.
Several detainees claimed they were also punched and
kicked. In Passaic County Jail, prisoners were menaced
with dogs. At several prisons, people were put in
solitary confinement for weeks or even months. They were
denied access to visitors. Many were never charged with
any crime.
The reports paint a picture of mass roundups conducted
without probable cause, followed by "prolonged
confinement for many detainees, sometimes under
extremely harsh conditions." It lists some of the rather
specious justifications given for classifying people as
Sept. 11 detainees. One man was "arrested, detained on
immigration charges, and treated as a September 11
detainee because a person called the FBI to report that
the [redacted] grocery store in which the alien worked,
is operated by numerous Middle Eastern men, 24 hrs — 7
days a week. Each shift daily has 2 or 3 men ... Store
was closed day after crash, reopened days and evenings.
Then later on opened during midnight hours. Too many
people to run a small store."
Something similar seems to have happened in Iraq, where
the Red Cross estimated that between 70 and 90 percent
of the inmates at Abu Ghraib were innocent. On May 5, a
U.N. working group on arbitrary detention issued a
statement saying, "According to the information received
by the Working Group, the majority of persons in
detention in Iraq have been arrested during public
demonstrations, at checkpoints and in house raids. They
are being considered ’security detainees’ or ’suspected
of anti-Coalition activities’. The Working Group’s
Chairperson-Rapporteur is seriously disturbed by the
fact that these persons have not been granted access to
a court to be able to challenge the lawfulness of their
detention, as required by the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights."
Policies of arbitrary detention often lead to coercive
interrogation and abuse, says David Cole, professor of
law at Georgetown University and author of "Enemy
Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in
the War on Terrorism." In both America and Iraq, he
says, "the approach was to sweep broadly, to pick people
up on little or no evidence other than their religious
or ethnic identity. That process puts a premium on
interrogation because the whole idea is that we don’t
know who the bad guys are, so your job as an
interrogator is to find out who they are through
interrogation. When they say we don’t know anything
about it, it’s going to put pressure on interrogators to
use coercive methods. Anytime you abandon the
presumption of innocence and adopt a broad, sweeping
detention policy, it’s going to lead to questionable
interrogation tactics."
It’s not clear whether the guards in Brooklyn and those
in Baghdad adopted similar tactics independently, or
whether they were acting under similar orders. As
Seymour Hersh has reported in the New Yorker, the
Defense Department authorized policies in Guantánamo and
Iraq that were designed to enable interrogations.
According to Hersh, they included sexual humiliation,
sleep deprivation, "exposure to extremes of cold and
heat, and placing prisoners in ’stress positions’ for
agonizing lengths of time."
Milder versions of these methods were employed at MDC,
but there’s no evidence that guards there were acting
under orders from federal officials. Still, says Cole,
"[R]eports of [abuse] are so consistent among domestic
detainees that it seems it must have been a policy
choice. Assuming the best of the policy makers, would
assume they’re doing it for interrogation purposes."
Regardless of who ordered the abuse, prison officials
were operating under loosened legal constraints that
encouraged mistreatment. "There was a perception of
guilt imposed in both cases," says Nancy Chang, senior
litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional
Rights. Those detained in America, like those in
Guantánamo and Iraq, "were abused as enemy combatants or
potential enemy combatants. They were treated quite
differently from regular prisoners. They were placed
under the most extreme conditions of confinement without
any prior determination that they posed a danger."
In both the United States and Iraq, the tactics were
similar, even if the severity was not.
Images of the abuse at Abu Ghraib have forced Mohamed
Maddy to relive the eight months he spent in American
prisons, and especially the months he spent at the
special housing unit at the Metropolitan Detention
Center. "I can see that it is almost the same," he
writes in an e-mail from Cairo, where he’s lived with
his two sons since being deported in May 2002. "[W]e
were all pushed viciously against the wall, hands tied
behind back, chains on both legs, lots of hits on the
face and the rest of the body, severe humiliation like I
never saw before, they were cursing us almost every
minute of the day and prevented us from sleeping. In
brief, the treatment was very inhuman and against all
human rights and ethics."
Of course, this may sound like the hyperbole of a
traumatized man, but the inspector general’s report on
conditions at MDC confirm most of what he says. "[W]e
concluded that it was inappropriate for staff members in
the ADMAX SHU [Administrative Maximum Special Housing
Unit] to routinely film strip searches showing the
detainees naked, and that on occasion staff members
inappropriately used strip searches to intimidate and
punish detainees," the report says. It cites videotapes
of the strip searches in which the voices of female
officers can clearly be heard, confirming detainees’
reports that they were stripped in front of women. On
some tapes, the report says, "staff members laughed,
exchanged suggestive looks and made funny noises before
and during strip searches."
The report also found evidence of routine physical
abuse. "[W]e concluded, based on videotape evidence,
detainees’ statements, witnesses’ observations, and
staff members who corroborated some allegations of
abuse, that some MDC staff members slammed and bounced
detainees into the walls at the MDC and inappropriately
pressed detainees’ heads against walls," the report
says. "We also found that some officers inappropriately
twisted and bent detainees’ arms, hands, wrists, and
fingers, and caused them unnecessary physical pain;
inappropriately carried or lifted detainees; and raised
or pulled detainees’ arms in painful ways. In addition,
we believe some officers improperly used handcuffs,
occasionally stepped on compliant detainees’ leg
restraint chains, and were needlessly forceful and rough
with the detainees — all conduct that violates [Bureau
of Prisons] policy."
There were also numerous reports that, in addition to
the lights being left on in the cell for 24 hours a day,
officers went out of their way to keep detainees awake.
"For example, one detainee claimed that officers kicked
the doors non-stop in order to keep the detainees from
sleeping," the inspector general’s report says. "He
stated that for the first two or three weeks he was at
the MDC, one of the officers walked by about every 15
minutes throughout the night, kicked the doors to wake
up the detainees, and yelled things such as,
’Motherfuckers,’ ’Assholes,’ and ’Welcome to America.’
... Another detainee said that officers would not let
the detainees sleep during the day or night from the
time he arrived at the MDC in the beginning of October
through mid-November 2001."
Almost all the 9/11 prisoners at MDC were being held for
interrogation, not because police had any evidence
connecting them to terrorism. Maddy was one of the few
in the unit who had actually committed a crime — while
working for a passenger services company at JFK airport,
he had smuggled his wife and sons into the country.
Today, Maddy lives in a cacophonous Cairo suburb where
car horns compete with mournful Arab pop singers and
small boys driving donkey carts clatter down dusty side
streets. He’s a hospitable man who cooks me a dinner of
grilled chicken and Greek salad while his teenage sons,
Eslam and Karim, play a James Bond video game on their
Xbox and listen to the soundtrack from Eminem’s "8
Mile." Friendly as he is, though, he can’t hide a
sadness that’s made him lose interest in everything in
the world except his boys and his misfortunes.
In prison, he was questioned "six, seven or eight
times," he says, usually about how often he went to the
mosque and whether he knows any "bad people in the USA."
Not being a radical man — he has a picture of Bill
Clinton hanging on the wall of his Cairo apartment — he
was little help. "I tell them the truth, but they say,
’You are liar,’" he says.
Indeed, several detainees say it was their professions
of innocence that led to weeks of solitary confinement
and other torments.
Khaled Betar, 34, is a happy-go-lucky blue-eyed bachelor
from Amman, Jordan, whose friends know him as a bit of a
womanizer. Radical Islam holds no attraction for him —
he’s an agnostic who tends to see both his Arab and
Muslim identity as an accident of birth. The first time
he prayed to Allah was when he was thrown in prison by
FBI agents who accused him of membership in al-Qaida.
Before arriving in America, Betar spent time working in
both South Africa and Hamburg, Germany. He traveled to
America in April 2001 for the same reason many
immigrants do — to earn money. A Jordanian family he
knew owned a gas station in Stony Point, N.Y., and they
gave him a job that paid around $2,000 a month — nearly
10 times what he could make at home.
Betar had a six-month tourist visa that was still valid
in late September 2001, when FBI agents showed up at his
apartment to question him. "They asked me if I know any
people who give speeches in the mosque, if I’m religious
or not," he says. "They spoke to me for, like, half an
hour and they asked me about my passport. I showed them
my visa." The visa would expire in a week.
Knowing that, the agents waited 10 days before visiting
Betar again. When they returned, there were two
immigration agents with them. "They told me, your visa
expired and you have to go with us to the detention," he
says.
Betar would spend the next nine months in Passaic County
Jail, where he was held as a material witness to the
Sept. 11 attacks. "He was never charged with terrorism,
never charged with being a threat to national security,"
says his attorney, Sin Yen Ling of the Asian American
Legal Defense and Education Fund. "There were never any
formal charges."
But there were many interrogations. Seven of the 19
Sept. 11 hijackers spent time in Hamburg, a city with a
Muslim population of 130,000. Betar had lived there,
too, and investigators were convinced there was a
connection.
During his first interview, there were four FBI agents.
They showed him pictures of some of the hijackers, and
asked if he knew them. "They told me one of the
hijackers was in Germany," he says. "They said, ’How
come you are Muslim and you don’t know this guy?’ That’s
what they told me! I told them, man, I can’t know every
Muslim!"
A few weeks later, the agents asked him if he would take
a polygraph. He readily agreed, but after hours of
questioning, he was told that he failed (he’s never seen
the transcript, and it wasn’t given to his attorney).
Several days later, he was given a second polygraph.
Again, he was told that he failed, and he was taken to
the hole. The guard told Betar he was acting on the
FBI’s orders.
"I was in a small cell. It’s closed. There was an iron
bed and mattress and blanket, that’s all that you have.
I stayed there 24 days. All the time, they keep the
light on. Every day they came with dogs. The dogs made
noise. Every day they took me from the room to search
me. I’m in the room, how can I get anything?"
When he returned to the prison’s general population
after 24 days, "It was like a paradise for me," he says.
"You can’t imagine. The hole is terrible. It was the
worst 24 days of my life. They make you crazy, really."
There was pressure, he says, to admit to some role in
Sept. 11. "They just want me to say I know one of these
people," he says. "They want anybody. If you are
innocent, it doesn’t matter for them. They just want to
put anybody in the jail, to show people that they are
working. If this happened in Syria, Iraq, it’s normal,
but in America it’s different, really."
Eventually, though, the FBI cleared Betar of any
terrorist ties, and he was deported back to Jordan.
A resilient man, Betar seems to have largely put his
ordeal behind him. "Now, I’m all right," he says in
Amman, where he and a friend have started a business
selling nuts. "Sometimes you remember, you get
depressed, but I’m normal now. I’m OK."
Maddy, who’s found a job as an Internet marketing
manager for a Cairo tourism company, hasn’t done as
well. He has memory lapses and trouble concentrating.
"Sometimes at my job, it goes in my mind, everything
that happened in the USA. I get nervous and have to
leave what I’m doing. Never I forget. Everything’s like
videotape. I remember even when I’m sleeping. I don’t
feel safe when I’m sleeping. I don’t feel good about my
life." He wants to sue the Justice Department, but knows
little about the American legal system, and isn’t sure
where to look for a lawyer to represent him pro bono.
When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, something further
seemed to break in him. Shortly after the first pictures
of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqis were published, he
fired off an uncharacteristic message full of profanity
and rage. "How much the American people hate the Muslim
people!" he writes. "[W]e hate the stupid Bush and I
will be happy when he go to the hell in November and I
want tell him go, not come back. Fuck you Bush and your
government."
Two days later, he was mortified by his outburst. "I
would like to express my apology for using an
inappropriate language, but I have bitter feelings that
squeeze my heart and soul," he writes in a second e-
mail. "It sounds like it is a policy for the American
government to treat Arabs, especially Muslims, as bad as
they can, and it is totally untrue that the behavior was
individual incidents carried [out] by several guards."
"What I have saw with the Iraqi people made me feel very
sick. It was really disgusting and made me review all
that happened to me," he says.
Maddy wasn’t terribly religious before, but in prison he
moved closer to God, he says. Now, he fantasizes about
suing the United States for what it put him through, and
using the money to build a big mosque, white, with a
green light shining from the minaret.
But first, he says, "I will give some money to my sons,
so they don’t need to go to the USA."