Oops, never mind, says the FBI.

A year ago, Crazy Tomato was a popular restaurant in Evansville, Indiana, near the Kentucky border. Then its owner, Tarek Albasti, and seven other Egyptian-born men were arrested by the FBI and accused of plotting terrorist attacks against the U.S. They became known as the "Evansville Eight."

Pictured in prison stripes, the men were splashed across the front pages, ridiculed and shunned even after their release by people who assumed their guilt. Whispers about flying lessons and money trails from Evansville to Egypt spread rapidly.

But the FBI said it had all been a mistake. And at a meeting last month with more than 100 people in the Muslim community here, the FBI offered a rare apology because suspicion about the arrests -- which resulted from a bogus tip -- hung over the men's heads for so long and disrupted their lives.

Read the whole article to see how little justification there was for arresting the men on material witness warrants and holding them in isolation for over a week.

As part of a national roundup in the weeks after the terrorist attacks, the "Evansville 8" were among 50 people held as material witnesses in maximum security jails without being charged with a crime. Thousands of more men from Middle Eastern countries were questioned, some arrested and detained, allegedly for links to terrorism, only to be let go or deported on immigration violations. Civil liberties groups protested that the arrests amounted to racial stereotyping.

Yes, the FBI apologized. But that still doesn't undo the damage to these men.

"The situation that happened to you was horrible," Thomas V. Fuentes, the FBI's agent in charge in Indiana, said during a meeting at the Islamic Center of Evansville. "On behalf of the FBI, I will apologize. . . ."

They were wrongly accused," FBI Agent Fuentes said in a later interview. "They have almost lost their business. This is something that has affected them in every possible way. Anybody being accused falsely of something that serious is like a teacher being accused of molesting a child. It's hard to come back from that. You can see . . . months later, the tears are still ready to flow."