Defense attorneys call it Brooklyn’s Abu Ghraib. On the ninth floor of the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, terrorism suspects swept off the streets after the Sept. 11 attacks were repeatedly stripped naked and frequently were physically abused, the Justice Department’s inspector general has found.
**Humiliated them by making fun of - and sometimes painfully squeezing - their genitals.
Deprived them of regular sleep for weeks or months.
Shackled their hands and feet before smashing them repeatedly face-first into concrete walls - within sight of the Statue of Liberty.**
Forced them in winter to stand outdoors at dawn while dressed in light cotton prison garb and no shoes, sometimes for hours.
“In December, they left me outside for more than four hours [wearing] only a jumpsuit and a light prison coat,” Ahmed Khalifa, an Egyptian, told the Daily News. “I asked them to let me inside. They were laughing and pointing to me. When I finally got back inside, I felt like I had frostbite.”
But Inspector General Glenn Fine, whose staff reviewed 380 MDC videotapes, reported in 2003 that “These tapes substantiated many of the detainees’ allegations.” Furthermore, the officers were not just a few bad apples but “a significant percentage of those who had regular contact with the detainees,” Fine wrote last March.
Wael Kishk, an Egyptian student who was unable to walk, alleges he was beaten by guards on Feb. 15, 2002 - the same day he complained to a judge in open court about earlier mistreatment at MDC. When guards were returning him to the jail that day, he says they threw him into the back of a transport bus with his hands cuffed behind his back and his ankles shackled close together. Kishk, now in Cairo, recalled landing painfully on the floor, face down, unable to break his fall.
Back at MDC, said Kishk, the guards piled him into a wheelchair and took him to a room where they stripped him and “started stomping on me.”
“There were three of them - with their leader, four,” Kishk said. “They took all my clothes off and turned me on my stomach. Then, the leader put his foot on the back of my neck and told me, ‘All of this is so you will stop playing games,’” an apparent reference to his statements in court.
Rami Dahmany, another Egyptian inmate, alleged he was injured by two guards - Michael McCabe and Christopher Witschel - when he complained about a strip search. They grabbed an already injured finger on his right hand and bent it painfully far back, then twisted it hard.
“They saw the finger was damaged,” said Dahmany, speaking by phone from Egypt. “I still have an injury from that. I can’t fold my hand. The finger stands up all the time.”
McCabe and Witschel are accused of similar conduct in a lawsuit filed by other former inmates.
Witschel declined comment. McCabe could not be reached.
Ehab ElMaghraby, a restaurant worker from Egypt, alleges in a lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons that MDC guard Steven Barrere inserted a flashlight into his rectum during a strip search while other guards looked on. ElMaghraby said he saw blood on the withdrawn flashlight. Two other MDC officials - Michael DeFrancisco and Raymond Cotton - inserted a pencil into his rectum during other searches, ElMaghraby alleged.
“There’s a lot more I can’t describe,” said Kishk. “It was very degrading.”
Oded Ellner - one of five Israeli Jewish terrorist suspects - said he sought medical help after MDC’s allegedly meager, often spoiled meals left him with severe dysentery symptoms. The doctor came with five guards and a camera, he said. She then ordered him to strip and shift his backside into a small space in the cell door so she could conduct a rectal exam from outside the cell.
“I’m a human being, not an animal!” Ellner said he shouted. “I have a right to an exam.” The guards, he said, “just laughed,” and all walked away.
“It’s a whitewash,” said Steven Leegan, an attorney for Indian Muslim inmate Mohammed Jaweed Azmat. “This was a mini-Abu Ghraib in Brooklyn.”
“I was very trusting of the system,” said Kishk. "I was infatuated and overtaken by your ideals of tolerance.
“I got the flip side of all the ideals I believed America held.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime_file/story/282569p-242172c.html
The peversions of amerikkkan behaviour are not restricted to prisons like abu gharib in Iraq it is widespread even in the heart of Amerikkkan soil.