Not many people noticed this week — for some reason, Scott McClellan didn’t call attention to it — but the federal government quietly settled with a plaintiff in the first of a number of lawsuits concerning the treatment of Muslim and Arab detainees in the U.S. in the wake of 9-11.
Egyptian national Ehab Elmaghraby, who lived in New York City for 13 years, is now $300,000 richer as a result of having been swept up in the days after 9-11 and imprisoned incommunicado for nearly a year without charges before finally being deported to his native Egypt. While in prison, Elmaghraby was continually abused, including, at one point, undergoing a body cavity search by having a flashlight rammed up his rectum, an experience that is still causing the man medical complications.
One other plaintiff with Elmaghraby is proceeding to trial, and a whole rash of similar lawsuits, including a class action lawsuit, is in the legal pipeline. By the time they’re done, the Bush policy of indiscriminately sweeping up Arab and Muslim non-citizens in the wake of 9-11, and the victims’ often harrowing experiences while imprisoned, could cost taxpayers a lot of money. Needless to say, none of those so imprisoned were ever charged with terrorism-related crimes.
In an interesting related development, Department of Justice lawyers were in court Friday, in the case of a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner now suing the U.S. The DoJ was claiming that John McCain’s new law banning torture by U.S. government personnel somehow does not apply to Guantanamo Bay guards or interrogators because the facility is offshore.
Now, it’s not surprising the Bush administration is trying to weasel out of the law banning torture; in his signing statement, George Bush told us he intended to do exactly that. What is interesting is why DoJ lawyers thought it necessary to make such a tenuous argument in this case. It suggests that they fear the court will find that the plaintiff was, in fact, tortured, and the question would then be whether the torture was or was not legal. Remember the phrase “We do not torture!”? This is all but a federal government admission that we do, in fact, torture, as defined by a court of law. No news there, but it’s nice to hear it from the torturer’s mouth.