Hundreds Of Videos Not Given To Justice

Hundreds of Videos Not Given to Justice

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlates...212450,00.html

Tuesday August 16, 2005 1:01 AM
By PETE YOST

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Justice Department's inspector general said Monday a federal prison center in Brooklyn, N.Y., failed to turn over hundreds of videotapes to investigators probing the treatment of detainees taken into custody after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons discovered the tapes in February, 14 months after the IG found some staff members abused some detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Some tapes from the Metropolitan Detention Center contain conversations between lawyers and their clients, IG Glenn Fine said in a report to Congress. Fine is looking into the detention center's failure to produce the tapes during his investigation.

Lawyers for the Legal Aid Society are suing detention center officers for secretly videotaping their conversations at the center. The lawyers say they were assured by the prison that the attorneys' conversations with their clients were not being taped, despite the video cameras on the walls of the facility.

An attorney in the lawsuit, Nelson A. Boxer, said he was unaware that hundreds of videotapes had been discovered in February. Boxer is a partner at the law firm of Alston & Bird who is representing the attorneys from the Legal Aid Society.

Evidence from the hundreds of tapes was incorporated into the Bureau of Prisons' disciplinary review of staff treatment of detainees.

The Bureau of Prisons has sustained many of the IG's findings that some staff members abused some of the detainees there, the IG said.

Among the complaints the IG is looking into at federal prisons regarding people taken into custody after the Sept. 11 attacks:

-While an inmate was at prayer services, an assistant warden allegedly entered his cell and ordered a corrections officer to confiscate his prayer rug and Quran and to dispose of the items in a garbage incinerator.

-A Bureau of Prisons inmate alleged that a corrections officer ordered him to drop his Quran on the floor outside his cell and then kicked the Quran and walked away.