WASHINGTON : The Justice Department’s round-up of hundreds of illegal immigrants in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks was plagued with “significant problems” that forced many people with no connection to terrorism to languish in jails in unduly harsh conditions, an internal report released on June 3 found.

Justice Department officials said they acted within the law in pursuing terrorist suspects. “We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks,” said Barbara Comstock, a spokeswoman for the department.

But the inspector general’s report found that some lawyers within the Justice Department raised concerns about the legality of the aggressive tactics, only to be overridden by senior department officials. The report validated the concerns raised by some members of Congress and civil rights groups who charge that the Justice Department had cast too wide a net in the campaign against terrorism. The findings will likely provide both legal and political ammunition to those who have sought to curb the Justice Department’s counterterrorism tactics, officials said.

Justice Department officials said that despite their disagreements with some of the report’s conclusions, they have already adopted some of the 21 recommendations made by Glenn A. Fine, the department’s inspector general, including one to develop clearer criteria for the processing of such detentions. Fine, appointed in 2000 by President Bill Clinton to what was regarded as a largely nonpartisan position, said that while he recognized “the enormous challenges and difficult circumstances” that the Justice Department faced after Sept. 11, “we found significant problems in the way the detainees were handled.”

The inspector general, an internal watchdog, initiated the report last year, in part because of public reports of mistreatment of detainees. Most major agencies have inspector generals, who serve as independent watchdogs who periodically report on internal matters.

A total of 762 illegal immigrants were jailed in the weeks and months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as authorities traced tens of thousands of leads and sought to prevent another attack. Most of the 762 immigrants have now been deported, and none have been charged as terrorists.

The Justice Department had sought to maintain the secrecy of the arrests, fighting efforts by news media to gain access to deportation proceedings and for disclosure of more information about those detained. Public information about the arrests has been fragmented, and the inspector general’s report offers the most detailed portrait to date of who was imprisoned during the roundups, the delays many faced in being charged or getting access to a lawyer, and the abuse that some faced behind bars. (By Permission, The New York Times)

Following are excerpts from the conclusion of a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, on the detention of hundreds of immigrants after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks:

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Department of Justice used the federal immigration laws to detain aliens who were suspected of having ties to the attacks or terrorism in general. More than 750 aliens who had violated immigration laws were arrested and detained in connection with the FBI’s investigation into the attacks, called Penttbom. Our review examined the treatment of these detainees, including their processing, bond decisions, the timing of their removal or release, their access to counsel and their conditions of confinement. To examine these issues, we focused on the detainees held at the B.O.P.’s [Bureau of Prison’s] Metropolitan Detention Center (M.D.C.) in Brooklyn, N.Y., and at the Passaic County Jail in Paterson, N.J., because the majority of Sept. 11 detainees were held in these two facilities, and because many complaints arose regarding their treatment.

In conducting our review, we were mindful of the circumstances confronting the department and the country as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks, including the massive disruptions they caused. The department was faced with monumental challenges, and department employees worked tirelessly and with enormous dedication over an extended period to meet these challenges....

With regard to allegations of abuse, the eviden-ce indicates a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the M.D.C. agai-nst some Sept. 11 detainees, particularly during the first months after the attacks. Although most correctional officers denied any such physical or verbal abuse, our interviews and investigation of specific complaints developed evidence that abuse had occurred. We also concluded that, particularly at the M.D.C., certain conditions of confinement were unduly harsh, such as illuminating the detainees’ cells for 24 hours a day. Further, we found that M.D.C. staff failed to inform M.D.C. detainees in a timely manner about the process for filing complaints about their treatment....

In sum, while the chaotic situation and the un-certainties surrounding the detainees’ connections to terrorism explain some of these problems, they do not explain them all. We believe the department should carefully consider and address the issues described in this report, and we therefore offered a series of recommendations regarding the systemic problems we identified in our review.

They include recommendations to ensure a timely clearance process; timely service of immigration charges; careful consideration of where to ho-use detainees with possible connections to terrorism, and under what kind of restrictions; better training of staff on the treatment of these detain-ees; and better oversight of the conditions of confinement. We believe these recommendations, if fully implemented, will help improve the department’s handling of detainees in other situations, both larger scale and smaller scale, that may arise in the future.