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| Videos not turned over in probe |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 08/22/2005 |
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The Justice Department's inspector general said last week that a federal prison in Brooklyn 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 inspector general, Glenn Fine, 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, 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 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, which 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 inspector general's findings that some staff members abused some of the detainees there, Fine said. Among the complaints he 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 correction officer to confiscate his prayer rug and Koran and dispose of the items in a garbage incinerator. ? A Bureau of Prisons inmate alleged that a correction officer ordered him to drop his Koran on the floor outside his cell and then kicked it and walked away. |
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