EDITORIAL – Settlement step in right direction

A man – one of several hundred to be rounded up, detained and generally ill-treated in the… A man – one of several hundred to be rounded up, detained and generally ill-treated in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001 – has just settled out of court. The federal government has admitted no wrongdoing, but it has awarded an Egyptian, Ehab Elmaghraby, $300,000.

Elmaghraby, 38, had lived in New York for 13 years, an article on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times reported. He ran a restaurant near Times Square and had a stand at a weekend flea market in Queens, the borough in which he lived. Shortly after the World Trade Center was bombed, he was apprehended; federal agents were investigating his landlord, who had applied for pilot training several years prior and who was, like Elmaghraby, a Muslim.

Elmaghraby was picked up and detained for nearly a year in a Brooklyn detention center. While there, he pleaded guilty to credit card fraud and served a further jail sentence before being deported, although he says he only pleaded that way to avoid further abuse. Currently, he is living in Egypt and in poor health, which he claims is partially because of his mistreatment in Brooklyn.

There are numerous witnesses, as well as videotapes, documenting the abuse the captive men received. Beatings, sexual humiliation, invasion of privacy, unnecessary body cavity searches – in short, the men were treated terribly. Many of them were being held on immigration law violations and have filed a class action lawsuit.

This settlement bodes well for them and will hopefully go far in repairing some of the distrust between America and the Arab world. It also establishes the potential for lawsuits to surface from detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and other sites.

It was not wrong for the United States to round up anyone and everyone it had reason to suspect after the bombings. In such an extraordinary situation, public safety has to be the primary issue.

Even so, it was entirely wrong for the United States to abuse people who had not been convicted of anything or who were being held for immigration violation. What’s more, the people who were not “high-priority” suspects were kept in custody for far too long; a greater effort should have been made to separate those suspected of terrorism from those held on cursory violations.

Subjecting someone to a year of abuse because his landlord wanted to fly a plane or because he hadn’t filled out the proper immigration paperwork is positively terrible. America made a mistake; the judge who upheld this case and the people who facilitated the settlement deserve to be commended for working to remedy the situation.