Post-9/11 detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn
were held in lockdown twenty-three hours a day (anKeith Aoki and Garrett Epps
Post-9/11 detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn were held in lockdown twenty-three hours a day (an actual cell at MDC is pictured above). Detainees said that guards slammed them against walls, tripped them using their ankle chains, called them “Bin Laden Junior” and told them, “You’re going to die here.” Guards disrupted afternoon prayers for a “stand-up count.” Guards would not let the detainees keep toilet paper or toothbrushes in their cells. The lights were kept on at all times, day and night.
Facts, photographs and quotation above picture from The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks, Office of the Inspector General, Justice Department (April 2003).
Keith AokiKeith Aoki is a professor of law at the University of Oregon.
Garrett EppsGarrett Epps, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former reporter for the Washington Post, is a legal correspondent for The Atlantic Wire. He is the author of Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America.