Faced with an unsympathetic reception to its argument the Government paid money to settle the case.
We may believe their assertion that no guilt is implied by this payment, and thatt forcing the government, in the persons of Robert Mueller III (FBI Director)and John Ashcroft (AG), among others, to answer for the alleged mistreatment would dangerously inhibit the zeal of the law enforcement community in future terror relatied investigations. Only, then, to avoid the security breches which could have ensued from proceeding to trial, did the government part with what, in all fairness must have been as much money as Mr. El. earned for the whole 14 years he lived and worked in Queens (with no trouble to anybody.)
In particular, we may suppose from this argument and the subsequent payment, that as a management decision, the persons who approved this settement (and by extension,we the American people, as ultimate employers) are setting internal agency policy approving of the FBI men who foound it appropriate to pick up Mr.Elmaghgrary because is he was home when they came looking for his Muslim Landlord who had expressed interest in (but not pursued) pilot school information years before. We, then, as emloyers, wish to signal to our workforce that they need fear no second guession in similar fact situtions.
Is this in fact FBI behaviour that we shoujld reinforce, and attempt to insulate from accountability because nothing may be permitted to cloud their decision to arrest a given suspect, and if it takes a year to clear him, that’s life in the big city?
Or might it be thought counterproductive to cast so wide a net, in which case we may hope that the amount involved will serve as a salutary concentration of the attention for the next crew of special agents who are following one of the reported 100,000 NSA leads.
Do you agree with the argument that the terrorist loving court rejected, ie. there are no limits to what the government may choose to do and any scrutiny thereof is dangerously inhibitory in a war on teror.
The government’s argument was not even an argument, it was ridiculous. The war on terror does not remove the rights of the accused. It does not remove the government’s duty to obey the law. I guess we can just burn the Constitution now. Anyone who still believes in it is a “traitor” I guess.
Judge John Gleeson - “Our nation’s unique and complex law enforcement and security challenges in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do not warrant the elimination of remedies for the constitutional violations alleged here.”
He is absolutely right.
James Madison - “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
He was right too.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who watches the watchmen?"
– Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347
We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens. — Sandra Day O’Connor
In the interest of simple common decency, it would (or should) apply to non-citizens also.
“Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber. Access to counsel for the purpose of protecting the citizen from official mistakes and mistreatment is the hallmark of due process.” - John Paul Stevens
Requesting $300, 000 compensation for a year of being kidnapped and repeatedly raped is extortion?
Because let’s face it, this is what we are talking about. Illegally being removed from one location and detained at another is kidnap, right? And “multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches” in this case is just another way of referring to repeated anal rape, correct?
If a white American woman were kidnapped for a year and repeatedly raped by law enforcement officers would you even be questioning whether $300, 000 dollars was extortionate? I suspect most people would be questioning how the hell the government considered it sufficient.
Are you somehow minimising this because the victim was male? Because he was non-white? Because the rapists and kidnappers were justifying their actions because there victim was a potential terrorist? I fail to see how any of those factors are anything but aggravating.
Why do you believe the amount the victim earned “the whole 14 years he lived and worked in Queens” is in any way relevant? Are you implying that the only liability here is for the loss of earnings? By this bizarre standard kidnapping and raping an unemployed woman should hardly be a crime at all, while the penalty for raping an employed woman should be pegged to her wages.
If this man’s claims are true then he has been through hell. A year of being held prisoner and repeatedly raped is not a trivial misunderstanding, it’s a nightmare and worth a shitload more than $300, 000 dollars IMO.
No, they weren’t kidnapped, non sequitur. No, they weren’t raped, non sequitur.
Wrongful imprisonment deserving of $300,000 settlement? I would say yes. No reason to add in lies about kidnapping and rape. They were taken in by legal authorities, said legal authorities had approval to take them in. They haven’t been charged with kidnapping nor is there any legal evidence it was kidnapping. There’s also no evidence the men were raped. A cavity search isn’t rape. Forcible penetration with foreign objects is considered a type of sexual battery or assault in most jurisdictions although I don’t know many who consider it to match the dictionary definition of rape.
To sum it up, yes, there was bad things done and the plaintiffs deserve their money. The rest of alaric’s post is sadly too rambling and jumps to way too many conclusions.
If it were me, I would consider $300,000 an insult. Lawusits involving police abuse often ask for millions, when the incident lasted for only a few hours.
A lot of people who are wrongfully imprisoned don’t ever get a dime, I’d probably be tempted to take the $300,000 in this case.
In fact this is somewhat of a problem in general, there have been cases of a person being wrongfully convicted of a crime spending 10+ years in prison and finally being released when they are exonerated. When you’re released like that you don’t get any sort of support like a parolee, you don’t get help with finding employment, financial help et al. In the long run the person involved would have been better off if they had actually committed the crime and gotten paroled versus being exonerated. And in general many of them either don’t win court cases or they are settled for a pittance.
But they’re not usually tortured and raped by the guards, either. Prison is never pleasant, but this man was treated horribly-- his human rights were violated.
The other difference is that a wrongful conviction usually doesn’t happen from prosecutorial misconduct-- it was a flaw in the trial which got it overturned, most of the time. If the prosecutor was just doing his job and the man was convicted because it reasonably appeared he was guilty, and later evidence proved he wasn’t, then there is no malfesance. If the prosecutor intentionally and maliciously fabricated evidence, and overstpped his job, there would definitly be grounds for a lawuit. In this case the “prosecutor” was the US government.
I don’t think we know either way. I also don’t think there is positive evidence these people were tortured, and they aren’t even claiming they were raped.
A wrong is a wrong, it’s like saying if I accidentally cripple you I shouldn’t have to pay your medical bills.
They just made the accusation that they were tortured, last I checked you need more than just an assertion to prove something.
"Mr. Elmaghraby, who spent nearly a year in detention, and the Pakistani man, Javaid Iqbal, held for nine months, charged that while shackled they were kicked and punched until they bled. Their lawsuit said they were cursed as terrorists and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one in which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby’s rectum, making him bleed.
In a telephone interview from his home in Alexandria, Egypt, Mr. Elmaghraby, 38, said he had reluctantly decided to settle because he is ill, in debt and about to have surgery for a thyroid ailment aggravated by his treatment in the detention center."
Do you think the government is in the habit of writing $300,000 checks to plantifs without a decent case?
Well I never said it wasn’t sexual abuse. In many states rape is an actual crime with a definition, and forcible penetration with an object like a flashlight often doesn’t fall under that definition (sometimes it does.) And in my real-world experience the common “dictionary definition” of rape involves intercourse of some kind.
A settlement doesn’t prove anything. Maybe the government didn’t want to deal with a trial because it could keep this in the news longer and make the government look worse? Maybe the government was afraid that during the trial stuff could be subpoenaed that the government didn’t want to be revealed to the public?
There are many different reasons any given entity will choose to settle instead of litigating, and having actually done what the suit alleges is only one of them. I’m not saying it isn’t possible but the matter certainly isn’t proven to me.
And the government can write a $300,000 check like it’s nothing.
Well, all you need is an assertion to arrest someone. . .
In a normal criminal proceeding it needs to be a reasonable assertion verified by a judge, in the form of issuing an arrest warrant. But up until the moment of conviction it remains nothing more than an assertion on behalf of the state that the accused is a criminal.
OJ wasn’t convicted of anything either, and he was detained for some time.
No, what I think you’re looking at here is why were these people detained for so long without being charged with a crime? What justified their detention?
I don’t know that anything did, and I never claimed otherwise.
I am not absolutely sure that this is your position, and am prepared to be disabused, but it seems to me that you are comfortable with the behavior of the FBI agents who, while on a field visit for the purpose of interrogating a landlord, arrested his tenant for no articulable reason other than he being a tenant, and also a muslim?
I fear that my tongue was insufficiently visible in my cheek, when I posed the question of the appropriateness of the damages. I am using that figure only as an index of the government’s eagerness to make the case go away. (For the record, he would have gotten five million from the jury, if he could have survived through the appeals.)
I am really more interested in how this will play out in conduct guidance for FBI special (having adopted the Mr. Rogers’ rule, the FBI has no agents who are not special…) agents.
Do you, as an american who pays their salary, want them to continue to pick people up for the stated reasons? Do you think that this settlement will encourage or discourage investigatory zeal, and is that good or bad, in your opinion?
in a normal criminal proceeding the accused has a right to be brought before a judge and a right to bail. These are the constitutional provisions that the government has found it necessary to abrogate in the case of this particular class of arrestee.
Had these rights not been abrogated, it seems likely that El G would have been released within five minutes of his appearance before a judge, saving perhaps, his life, and certainly saving america yet another travesty of justice on our muti-blotted escutchon.