A once great nation is diminishing itself - daily!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/ny....final.html?hp

"A Mate" wrote in message
u...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/ny....final.html?hp

As that requires signing up to read (which I'm not going to do). Your
message is meaningless.

In article ,
"Mark Hewitt" wrote:

"A Mate" wrote in message
u...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/ny....final.html?hp

As that requires signing up to read (which I'm not going to do). Your
message is meaningless.

Here it is:


June 30, 2004

In F.B.I., Innocent Detainee Found Unlikely Ally
By NINA BERNSTEIN


t took no more than a week for James P. Wynne, a veteran F.B.I.
investigator, to confirm the harmless truth that only now, more than two
years later, he is ready to talk about. The small foreign man he helped
arrest for videotaping outside an office building in Queens on Oct. 25,
2001, was no terrorist.

He was a Buddhist from Nepal planning to return there after five years
of odd jobs at places like a Queens pizzeria and a Manhattan flower
shop. He was taping New York street scenes to take back to his wife and
sons in Katmandu. And he had no clue that the tall building that had
drifted into his viewfinder happened to include an office of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.

Yet by the time Mr. Wynne filed his F.B.I. report a few days later, the
Nepalese man, who spoke almost no English, had been placed in solitary
confinement at a federal detention center in Brooklyn just because of
his videotaping. He was swallowed up in the government's new maximum
security system of secret detention and secret hearings, and his only
friend was the same F.B.I. agent who had helped decide to put him there.

Except for the videotape ‹ "a tourist kind of thing," in Mr. Wynne's
estimation ‹ no shred of suspicion attached to the man, Purna Raj
Bajracharya, 47, who came from Nepal in 1996. His one offense ‹ staying
to work on a long-expired tourist visa ‹ was an immigration violation
punishable by deportation, not jail. But he wound up spending three
months in solitary confinement before he was sent back to Katmandu in
January 2002, and to release him from his shackles, even Mr. Wynne
needed help.

The clearance process had become so byzantine that the officer who had
set the procedure in motion could not hasten it. Unable to procure a
release that officially required signatures from top antiterrorism
officials in Washington, Mr. Wynne took an uncommon step for an F.B.I.
agent: he called the Legal Aid Society for a lawyer to help the jailed
man.

Now, for the first time, the F.B.I. agent and the Legal Aid lawyer,
Olivia Cassin, have agreed to talk about the case and their unlikely
alliance. Their documented accounts offer a rare, first-hand window into
the workings of a secret world.

Within 10 days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department
instructed immigration judges that all cases designated as "special
interest" were to be handled in separate closed courtrooms, without
visitors, family or reporters, and without confirming whether a case was
on the docket. The secrecy left detainees with little access to lawyers.

Visa violators would be held indefinitely, until the F.B.I. was sure the
person was not involved in terrorism. As a visa violator under
suspicion, Mr. Bajracharya was among hundreds placed in the special
interest category, and his case was wiped from the public record.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that though
he was unfamiliar with the case, the system of secrecy Mr. Bajracharya
encountered is lawful and necessary. "The idea that someone who has
violated our immigration laws may be of interest on a national security
level as well is an unfortunate reality, post-9/11," he said. Closed
hearings are legal as long as due process is provided, he said, and all
abuses will be dealt with.

But Ms. Cassin, of Legal Aid, argues that under this secret practice,
there is no way to know whether other noncitizens are even now being
unfairly detained. "By its very nature," she said, "it can happen again
without our knowing about it."

Mr. Bajracharya was finally returned to Nepal on Jan. 13, 2002. By then
he had spent almost three months in a 6-by-9-foot cell kept lighted 24
hours a day. The unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn
where he was kept has become notorious for the abuses documented there
by the Justice Department's own inspector general, who found a pattern
of physical and mental mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees. Videotapes
showed officers slamming detainees into walls, mocking them during
unnecessary strip-searches, and secretly taping their conversations with
lawyers.

Mr. Wynne would not comment on detention policies, and said that he
should not be "held out as the one lone person who did the right thing."
But during an extended interview approved by his F.B.I. superiors, he
read aloud from phone logs documenting desperate messages from the man's
family in Katmandu, his efforts to reassure the weeping detainee, and
his own dawning recognition that no resolution was in sight.

"I told Purna that I would try to help him, that I wouldn't forget about
him," Mr. Wynne explained. "I felt some - not responsibility, but I felt
that there was no one else."

By telephone from Katmandu, Mr. Bajracharya recalled the fear,
humiliation and despair he had experienced in prison. "I had nothing but
tears in my eyes," he said through a translator. "The only thing I knew,
I was innocent, but I didn't know what was happening."

He said he was stripped naked in the federal jail. "I was manhandled
and treated badly," he said, becoming agitated. "I was very, very
embarrassed even to look around, because I was naked."

The ordeal began when his videotaping aroused the suspicions of two
detectives from the Queens district attorney's office, which has space
in the same 12-story building where the F.B.I. occupies three floors.
After taking him inside for questioning, they called upstairs to the
F.B.I., and Mr. Wynne was dispatched to take over the interrogation.
With no translator, Mr. Bajracharya tried to explain himself to half a
dozen law enforcement officers, including two federal agents from the
Immigration and Naturalization Service who verified his illegal
immigration status.

It was Mr. Wynne, as the lead F.B.I. agent, who sent him to the federal
detention center in Brooklyn pending a thorough investigation. The
F.B.I. agent, now 50, describes himself as a lifelong New Yorker who
does not take illegal immigration lightly. His specialty is
international art fraud, not terrorism. But at a time of heightened
anxiety about another terrorist attack, he maintained, it was reasonable
to suspect the worst until he could check the man's history,
discrepancies in his identity documents and questions about money wired
to Nepal.

The questions were resolved within days. The Nepalese man did not show
up in any terrorist databanks, and Mr. Wynne soon confirmed his
explanation for a $37,000 wire transfer to Nepal. The money was from a
recent legal settlement for injuries suffered when he was hit by a car
in 1999. His records, roommates and former employees all vouched for the
detainee's honesty.

On Nov. 1, 2001, the day Mr. Wynne wrote his report clearing Mr.
Bajracharya, he told him through a translator that it would take about a
week to get the matter resolved.

Over the weekend, pleading messages arrived from the detainee's sons in
Katmandu: "Please help his father; he's not that kind of person -
meaning a terrorist, I suppose," the F.B.I. agent said. On Nov. 5, he
discussed the case with the head of counterterrorism in the United
States attorney's office, and on Nov. 7 and 8, with a lawyer at the
immigration agency.

"Because he was willing to leave - he wanted to leave - it didn't seem
to me that it was a big hurdle to move him out of there," Mr. Wynne said.

But the weeks dragged on. Learning that a secret immigration hearing
was scheduled for Nov. 19, Mr. Wynne thought a resolution was at hand.
Instead, in a second conference call to the detainee after the hearing,
he found him confused and distraught. It turned out that official F.B.I.
clearance from Washington had not yet come through, and the matter had
been adjourned to another secret hearing on Dec. 6.

At this point, the agent said, he realized he had been too optimistic.
"You have to understand one thing: I'm in the Queens office; in
Manhattan they were running this whole initiative, and there was a whole
procedure set up for the clearances," he said. "I wasn't aware that
there were so many levels that needed to sign off on this thing,
frankly, when I filed my report."

The Monday after Thanksgiving, the F.B.I. agent called in Legal Aid.
"This guy needed some help - it's as simple as that," Mr. Wynne said,
insisting that anyone would have done the same thing. Ms. Cassin says
she knows of no other F.B.I. investigator who has.

But by the time she spoke with the detainee, through a thick plexiglass
barrier and under the eye of a prison video camera, she said, he was
weeping all the time.

On Dec. 6, in a secret hearing room in the prison, she said, she
watched him carried in by three burly officers of the Federal Bureau of
Prisons, shackled so completely that he could not move. "He's tiny," she
said. "His feet didn't even touch the floor."

She said government immigration lawyers agreed that since her client had
been cleared by the F.B.I., he would be permitted a "voluntary
departure." She was instructed to buy him an airplane ticket to Katmandu
through a deportation officer. She did, but the first departure date was
canceled without explanation.

Meanwhile, like other "high interest" detainees, Mr. Bajracharya was
still in solitary 23 hours a day. "After a month or two, I started to
scream that I was going to die if I didn't talk to anybody," he later
recalled.

Ms. Cassin said she pleaded with the prison doctor to put him in the
general prison population, but the doctor said he was crying so much he
would cause a riot. Instead, on Dec. 11, a Muslim detainee was sent to
share his tiny cell.

Expecting his imminent departure, Ms. Cassin and Mr. Wynne tried to
fulfill the detainee's most insistent request: to go home looking like a
respectable person, not a criminal. An assistant warden agreed to accept
a box labeled "release clothing," containing the good suit he had worn
when he came to America. Shortly before Christmas, Mr. Wynne made a
special trip to deliver it.

But when Mr. Bajracharya was finally taken to the plane on Jan. 13, he
was in shackles and an orange prison jumpsuit. "I wanted to wait for my
clothes, at least the shoes and the jacket," he said, "but they took me
by force."

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."

Back in Nepal, which is riven by civil war, Mr. Bajracharya said he
would be willing to testify against those who mistreated him if he were
asked, though he fears what the government would do to him if he did so.
Nonetheless, he remains grateful that he experienced America.

"What happened to me could have been an isolated incident," he said. "I
still believe the American government is the best in the world."

Weeks after Mr. Bajracharya returned to Nepal, Mr. Wynne and Ms. Cassin
managed to arrange delivery of his possessions by mail, including his
camcorder. But when he tried to show his wife his travelogue of New
York, all that remained on the tape was the pizzeria and the flower shop.

Mr. Wynne, sounding a bit sheepish, allowed that he had "probably
erased" the rest, thinking it might fall in the wrong hands.

"Just an abundance of caution," he murmured.

Copyright 2004*The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy |
Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

Mark Hewitt wrote:
"A Mate" wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/ny....final.html?hp

As that requires signing up to read (which I'm not going to do). Your
message is meaningless.

You'll be wanting this site then: http://www.bugmenot.com/

miguel
--
Hit The Road! Photos and tales from around the world: http://travel.u.nu

A Mate wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/ny....final.html?hp



Yes, the man was a criminal. All he had needed to do
to avoid his problem was to NOT BECOME A CRIMINAL ...
i.e. leave before hios visa ran out. How simple.

Doug McDonald