Horror Story - Inside America's Secret New Justice System

[Eloriel]

Inside America's secret new justice system
Nina Bernstein NYT
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=527278.html

It took no more than a week for James Wynne, a veteran FBI investigator, to confirm the harmless truth, and now, two years later, he is ready to talk about it: The small, foreign-looking man he had helped arrest for videotaping outside a tall office building in Queens, New York, on Oct. 25, 2001, was no terrorist.

He was a Buddhist from Nepal planning to return there after five years of odd jobs in at places like a pizzeria in Queens and a flower shop in Manhattan. He was taping street scenes to take back to his wife and sons in Katmandu. And he had no clue that the tall building that had drifted into his viewfinder happened to include an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Yet by the time Wynne filed his FBI report a few days later, the Nepalese man, who spoke almost no English, had already been placed in solitary confinement at a federal detention center in Brooklyn just because his camcorder had caught a building with an FBI office on three of its 12 floors. He was then swallowed up in the government's new maximum security system of secret detention and secret hearings, and his only friend was the FBI agent who had helped put him there.

Except for the videotape - "a tourist kind of thing," in Wynne's estimation - there was not a shred of evidence against Purna Raj Bajracharya, 47, who came from Nepal in 1996. His one offense, staying to work on a long-expired tourist visa, was an immigration violation punishable by deportation, not jail. But he wound up spending three months in solitary confinement before he was sent back to Katmandu in January 2002, and to release him from his shackles, even Wynne needed help.

The clearance process had become so byzantine that Wynne could not hasten it. Unable to procure a release that officially required signatures from top antiterrorism officials in Washington, he took an uncommon step for an FBI agent: he called the Legal Aid Society for a lawyer to help the jailed man.

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[G_j]

1. and we hardly know

how many times this story has been repeated or how many 'secret' detention centers are in place around the globe.

shame

[OneBlueSky]

2. outrage #3,112,342 under the Bush administration . . .

and that number may be too low . . . someone posted an article about outrage burnout yesterday, and how I'm feeling after reading this is a prime example . . . I AM outraged, but I just don't have the juice left to wax poetic about it, or do anything about it . . . all I can do at this point is vote for Kerry and hope for the best . . .