“Freedoms Westerners take for granted” is not quite the same as “freedoms guaranteed those living in the West,” because what happened to Ilan in Egypt happened to hundreds of Muslims living in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. According to an article written by Harvard Law Professor Philip Heymann, immediately after 9/11, some 762 aliens were placed in INS custody under an FBI investigation labeled “PENTTBOM.” The average period of detention was 80 days, and the maximum was 244 days. At least 48 of the detainees waited more than 25 days before learning the grounds for their detention. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General, many of the detainees were subjected to a “pattern of physical and verbal abuse.”
Heymann also notes an ACLU report that identified 70 individuals, including U.S. citizens, detained by the Bush Administration as “material witnesses,” when in fact the purpose was simply to lock them up while they were investigated in the hopes of finding something that would permit formal punishment of some sort. As in the case of the PENTTBOM detainees, incarceration and abuse of “suspicious” Muslims was pursued as an end in itself. Since we couldn’t punish the guilty (they were all dead), we punished the innocent.
I’m glad I didn’t have to spend five months in an Egyptian prison. Ilan Grapel was innocent man, and what happened to him in Egypt was a gross injustice. But if he thinks that what happened to him in Egypt hasn’t happened here, he hasn’t been paying attention.
