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Politics : FREE AMERICA -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (11524)	9/9/2006 9:01:10 PM
From: Mr. Palau	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14758

served in rush's, cheney's and newt's unit "Remembering Post-9/11 'Patriotism' by TChris We can speculate about Ronald Ferry's motive for lying to the FBI, but whatever his reasons were, they turned Abdallah Higazy into another victim of 9/11. Ferry, ex-cop turned hotel security guard, claimed he found an aviation radio in a hotel room safe with Higazy's passport while inventorying property left behind by guests when the hotel was evacuated. The radio had actually been left in a different room, but FBI agents believed Ferry and therefore disbelieved Higazy when he told them he'd never seen the radio. Higazy, an Egyptian graduate student, was arrested as a material witness. He knew he was in trouble when he was locked up in a maximum security wing with Zacarias Moussaoui. Being in Moussaoui's company -- and being strip-searched, shackled and insulted by guards -- was unnerving to a moderate Muslim who had never even read the Koran. Higazy submitted to a polygraph, but his story didn't square with the FBI's understanding of the "truth," so agents coerced Higazy into telling a story they liked better. [Higazy] stuck to the truth, he said, until an FBI agent made veiled threats against his family in Egypt. He broke down and responded with wild and contradictory tales: He found the radio in the subway. No, he stole it from the Egyptian military. Having induced Higazy to lie, the FBI promptly sought criminal charges for making a false statement -- that is, his original, truthful statement that he'd never seen the radio. Things looked bleak for Higazy until a pilot showed up at the hotel three days later looking for his aviation radio. Two days after that, Ferry admitted that the radio and Higazy's passport had been found in different rooms. The same day, with no explanation, a deputy U.S. marshal removed Higazy's shackles and told him, ''You're free to go.'' Welcome to America. As for Ferry: Ferry, who pleaded guilty on Feb. 27, 2002, to lying to the FBI about the radio, served his sentence of weekends in jail for six months, then faded back into obscurity. ... ''That was during a time of patriotism,'' he said at his sentencing, ''and I'm very, very sorry for that mistake.'' What kind of "patriot" knowingly fabricates a story that links an innocent man to a monstrous act of terrorism simply because of the man's nationality? What patriotic American values did Ferry think he was embracing? And what kind of American values do FBI agents exhibit when they rely on threats to induce false confessions? (Higazy's lawsuit against the FBI was predictably dismissed.) Or prosecutors who make misleading statements about the evidence? The only American values on display in this story come from the ordinary New Yorkers who apologized to Higazy. Now married and teaching computer courses, Higazy still blames Ferry for ''fooling the government.'' But he also has fond memories of New Yorkers who, after recognizing him from news accounts, greeted him with kind words after he was freed. ''Aren't you the Egyptian man?'' he recalled some saying. ''We're sorry.''