"Mr. Bajracharya was finally returned to Nepal on Jan. 13, 2002. By then he had spent almost three months in a 6-by-9-foot cell kept lighted 24 hours a day. The unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was kept has become notorious for the abuses documented there by the Justice Department's own inspector general, who found a pattern of physical and mental mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees. Videotapes showed officers slamming detainees into walls, mocking them during unnecessary strip-searches, and secretly taping their conversations with lawyers."
--New York Times, June 30, 2004
Mr. Bajracharya, a "secret" detainee who was guilty of nothing more than overstaying his visa, slipped through the cracks of the post Sept. 11 maximum security system. Fortunately James P. Wynne, the F.B.I. investigator who first sent him to the Brooklyn detention center--and then less than a week later, cleared his release--didn't forget about him. If he had, it is possible, even likely, that Bajracharya would still be in secret detention today.
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