DOJ: Federal prison failed to turn over 9/11 interview tapes News
DOJ: Federal prison failed to turn over 9/11 interview tapes

[JURIST] The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York has failed to turn over videotapes [OIG report to Congress] showing interviews of aliens held on immigration charges during the investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine [official website] said Monday. The facility was required to turn over the tapes as part of a 2003 investigation into alleged abuse of detainees [final report; supplemental report] but the tapes were not discovered by the Bureau of Prisons [official website] until February of this year. The tapes contain recordings of detainees' conversations with their lawyers, and a lawsuit is now pending against officers at the facility for taping conversations that were assured to be confidential. The BOP incorporated evidence from the tapes into their review of the staff's treatment of detainees, and both the OIG and the BOP sustained the original finding that there was some abuse by some employees at the facility. In March, the OIG released a report [PDF text] which found, in part, that no MDC officials had yet been disciplined [JURIST report] in connection with the abuse of detainees. Fine stated his office will continue to look into MDC's failure to produce the tapes. AP has more.

THIS DAY @ LAW

President Johnson signed law against burning draft cards

On August 31, 1965, President Johnson signed a law making the burning of draft cards a federal offense subject to a five-year prison sentence and $1000 fine. In response to the law and in protest of the war in Vietnam, the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States on October 15, 1965. The constitutionality of the federal law was upheld in 1968 by the US Supreme Court in US v. O'Brien.

Gdansk Agreement reached

On August 31, 1980, the communist government of Poland and labor leaders settled the Gdansk Agreement. The accord settled a summer of labor strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. With the Agreement, Poland became the first communist country to allow the creation of an independent labor union, which was called Solidarity. Solidarity then became the driving force that ended communism in Poland. Learn more about the history of Solidarity.