NEW YORK, June 27, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Scores of US-based Muslim men were locked up by the US government without charge after the September 11, 2001 attacks, US human rights groups said in a report published Monday, June 27.

"The Justice Department relied on false, flimsy or irrelevant evidence to secure arrest warrants for the men," almost all of whom had cooperated with authorities prior to their detention, said the report compiled by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"Muslim men were arrested for little more than attending the same mosque as a September 11 hijacker or owning a box-cutter," said Anjana Malhotra, a researcher at HRW and ACLU.

Although the US Justice Department has declined to reveal how many Muslims it jailed in its counterterrorism investigations, the HRW and the ACLU confirmed 70 such detentions after a year of research.

The men were held behind a veil of secrecy under a US law permitting the arrest and detention of so-called "material witnesses" thought to have important information about a crime and considered likely to flee, both groups said.

The 101-page report said "a handful" of the Muslim men were later charged with crimes related to terrorism.

About half were never brought to testify, and the US government apologized to 13 of the men for wrongfully detaining them, it added.

Sixty-four of the detained men were of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent, 17 were US citizens, and all but one were Muslims, a statement accompanying the report said.

Amnesty International said in a report, on the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, that racial profiling by US law enforcement agencies has grown to cover one in nine Americans, mostly targeting Muslims.

Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney, said the Justice Department's "unlawful use of the material witness statute is perhaps the most extreme but least well-known of the government's post-September 11 abuses."

He went on: "The material witness abuses are a prime example of what happens when there is no public scrutiny of the government's actions."

Jamie Fellner, director of HRW’s US Program, told Pakistan's The Dawn daily that these men "were victims of a Justice Department that was willing to do an end run around the law".

He complained that "criminal suspects are treated better than these material witnesses were."

The men were typically taken at gunpoint, held in solitary confinement, harassed and in some cases physically abused, said the rights watchdogs.

Court documents were sealed, court proceedings were held behind closed doors, and the men were largely denied legal protection guaranteed by US law, they charged.

One-third were held at least two months, some were held six months and one man spent more than a year behind bars, said the groups.

"Many were not informed of the reason for their arrest, allowed immediate access to a lawyer, nor permitted to see the evidence used against them."

A May 2004 report by the US Senate Office Of Research concluded that Arab Americans and the Muslim community in the US have taken the brunt of the Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The report documents testimony from several Muslim men who were arrested, questioned and released by US federal authorities without apologies or explanation for their protracted detention.

"They treated us like professional terrorists. They put us in cars and had big guns - as if they were going to shoot people, as if we were Osama bin Laden," one detainee told ACLU and HRW officials.

Ayub Ali Khan, an Indian national, was arrested on September 12, 2001 in San Antonio, Texas, and held in solitary confinement for two months in Brooklyn, New York.

"I didn't sleep for one or two months. The guards would bang on the door all night. They would say, 'This is the guy, the Taliban guy,' or call me 'Khan Taliban,'" the report quoted Khan as saying.

"The guards said so many bad things. They told me: 'You won't ever see your family. You're going to die here. Do you smell the WTC (World Trade Center) smoke? You're gone. How would you like to die? With the electric chair?'"

Khan recalled that when taken to interrogations, "my feet were shackled and guards would step on chains. I got a deep cut on my feet".

He went on: "I was stripped too many times to remember and hit on the back. I would be pushed against the wall".

After release, the men were shunned by employers, customers and neighbors, even those who received apologies from the US government and exculpatory write-ups by media in their communities, said the ACLU and HRW.