Abstract
Subsequent to the 11 September 2001, attacks former US Attorney General secretly initiated a new program to fight terrorism and prevent another attack. Along with pursuing leads about the hijackers, the FBI and then INS in conjunction with local police departments were instructed to arrest as many people as possible who fit the government’s profile of the 9/11 attackers: Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men from Middle Eastern countries. Those who were in the US in violation of the civil immigration law were to be detained and pressured to cooperate with officials. Law enforcement was told to treat those arrested as terrorists or men who might know terrorists. This article details what followed: massive sweeps of Arab and Muslim communities and widespread physical and verbal abuse at the hands of corrections officers based on little actionable intelligence that culminated in only one terrorism-related prosecution.
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Notes
Unless otherwise cited, all facts are based on information developed during Turkmen v Ashcroft.
FBI Deposition 2008 on file with author.
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Meeropol, R. Muslim until proven innocent: The post-9/11 Ashcroft raids. Secur J 28, 184–197 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sj.2015.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sj.2015.5