Pacific Views

The devil is in the details.

And the really important details always seem to be buried way down at the bottom of news stories.

For example, the NY Tiimes has an article today about the imprisonment and deportation from the US of a man from Nepal. It seems that Purna Raj Bajracharya was videotaping some street scenes in New York to send back to his family in Nepal. Unfortunately, he happened to point his camera at the NY headquarters of the FBI, for which he got three months of solitary confinement in the infamous federal detention center in Brooklyn. That center, you might recall, was the subject of a November 2003 report from the US Justice Department's inspector general. That report confirmed detainees' claims of physical and mental abuse at the hands of center guards and officials.

Bajracharya eventually got out of the Brooklyn detention center, but only after (ironically) an FBI agent asked Legal Aid for help in ending his detention. Bajracharya was then deported because of an earlier immigration law violation.

This story of the difficulties suffered by a supposedly suspicious immigrant because of Dubya's draconian security laws is bad enough, but the real clincher comes near the bottom of the story:

Mr. Bajracharya's accounts of mistreatment fit the pattern reported by the inspector general. A spokesman for the United States attorney's office in Brooklyn, Robert Nardoza, said the office recently declined to prosecute abuses detailed in the reports "mainly because all of the witnesses had been deported and were unavailable to be interviewed."

So, Dubya's Justice Department isn't prosecuting the abuses at the Brooklyn detention center because all of the victims have conveniently been sent out of the country.

What a surprise.

Posted by Magpie at June 30, 2004 05:44 PM | War on Terrorism | Technorati links |