Ill-treatment on our shores.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Detainees arrested after terrorist attacks lodge allegations of abuse while in custody

On October 24, Muhammed Butt died of a heart attack at the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. Butt, a Pakistani national, was detained on September 19 by the FBI as a suspect connected with the September 11 attacks. He was then transferred to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which charged him with a visa violation.

The New Jersey state medical examiner conducted a preliminary autopsy that showed Butt "died of natural causes related to a heart ailment," Emily Hornaday, a spokesperson for the state Division of Criminal Justice, told The Washington Post. On October 1, reported The Nation, "Butt underwent a routine physical. His blood pressure and medical findings were normal." However, the dentist prescribed a five-day regimen of antibiotics for gingivitis. "That's all he complained about," county spokesman Jacob De Lemos told The Washington Post.

Butt's cell mate at the Hudson County facility tells a different story. On January 27, Cesar Munoz and Allyson Collins of Human Rights Watch visited the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Both say they met with the cell mate, whose name the group is not releasing. Munoz says he is concerned the prisoner could suffer retribution for speaking out.

Collins and Munoz say the cell mate told them Butt's collapse was anything but sudden. "Even days before, he wasn't feeling well," relays Collins, associate director of Human Rights Watch's U.S. program.

"What the roommate told us was he helped Butt fill out request forms" for medical attention, says Munoz, a Bloomberg Fellow with the group. "He told us Butt filled out five or six." Butt's written requests began about ten days before his death, Munoz was told. "He would fill out one and wait two days. When there was no answer, he'd fill out another one," Munoz says, paraphrasing the cell mate. Butt "never got any answer."

On the day he died, "at around 6 o'clock [A.M.], Butt said he was feeling pain," continues Munoz. "He banged on the door for five or ten minutes." Getting no response, "Butt went back to sleep. He never woke up." The cell mate, say both human-rights advocates, found Butt later that morning.

The INS denies the claims. "We have absolutely no information to substantiate any of the allegations being propagated by Human Rights Watch," says Kerry Gill, an INS public affairs officer in Newark. "This is the first we are hearing allegations like that."

The allegations of mistreatment are not confined to Butts case. Many others who were rounded up on orders of Attorney General John Ashcroft after September 11 claim to have been beaten, locked in solitary confinement, injected with substances against their will, or denied blankets, food, and toilet paper. Their allegations are generating media attention and prompting human rights organizations to demand that the U.S. government treat the detainees in a manner that conforms to international law.

In November, Amnesty International sent Ashcroft a document entitled "Memorandum to the U.S. Attorney General Amnesty International's Concerns Relating to the Post 11 September Investigations." Drawing on numerous interviews with detainees and their lawyers, the organization expressed concern "that many of those detained during the 11 September sweeps are held in harsh conditions, some of which may violate international standards for humane treatment." The memorandum cites "allegations of physical and verbal abuse of detainees by guards, and failure to protect detainees from abuses by other inmates," as well as "reports suggesting that immigration detainees arrested after 11 September are being subjected to more punitive conditions than before in some facilities" and "reports that people of Muslim or Middle-Eastern origin are treated more harshly than other inmates."

Traci Billingsley, spokesperson for the United States Bureau of Prisons, says she doesn't "have any public information on any individual detainee." But she denies that any prisoner in a federal institution has been mistreated. "All inmates are treated in a fair, impartial manner and are treated in a humane way," she says.

Russ Bergeron is the chief press officer for the INS. Regarding claims that some detainees at INS facilities were not fed during interrogations, Bergeron says such events are "the exception rather than the rule" and that "the policy of Immigration and those facilities is not to withhold meals."

In response to allegations that INS detainees were held in isolation, Bergeron says, "I don't even see that as an allegation." Isolation, he says, "is an appropriate and recognized process in a detention environment, especially if you have an individual who is a subject of an ongoing criminal investigation, and all these individuals are, or were at some point in time, the subject of a terrorist investigation." The INS...