A year after the deadliest attacks on U.S. soil, at least 147 people remain in custody in this country, and the Pentagon wants to add 200 cells to the 600 nearly filled with foreign detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The detainees — many Muslim noncitizens living permanently or temporarily in this country — were among an estimated 1,200 rounded up under the government’s post-Sept. 11 secret arrests, detentions and interrogations, a policy that worries civil liberties advocates and human rights groups.
Al-Badr Al-Hazmi, a Saudi-born doctor, was picked up Sept. 12. The government initially refused to let him seek legal counsel. Then Immigration and Naturalization Service agents moved the San Antonio resident to New York for intensive questioning to find out if he was involved with the attacks. Two weeks later, the FBI cleared him of terrorism and set him free, his lawyer, Gerald Goldstein, told Congress.
Federal agents “not only violated my client’s rights, they deprived themselves of valuable information and documentation that would have eliminated many of their concerns,” he said. “The government’s current dragnet-style investigation — characterized by ethnic profiling, selective enforcement of criminal and immigration laws, and pretrial detention for petty offenses — heightens the important role counsel plays.”
Like Al-Hazmi, most domestic detainees were questioned and released. Many were deported. The government won’t say how many.
Nearly a year after the attacks in New York and suburban Washington, 74 noncitizens still were in custody on immigration violations, an additional 73 people on secret federal criminal charges, and an undisclosed number as “material witnesses,” according to recent Justice Department court filings.
Internationally, nearly 600 people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and 30 other nations were captured by U.S. soldiers and taken to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay where they remain, and an undisclosed number are being held at a U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan. Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Burfeind, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said the military wants to add more than 200 cells at Guantanamo by October because space is running out.
Secrecy criticized
Critics say a nation that lectures the rest of the world about civil and human rights shouldn’t be engaging in secretive arrests and indefinite detentions. None of the 1,200 domestic detainees has been charged with a terrorism-related crime, they note.
Geoffrey Stone, a constitutional scholar at the University of Chicago law school, said he understands why federal authorities targeted Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants inside this country. Fundamentalist Muslims affiliated with Saudi native Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network are believed to have carried out the attacks.
But, Stone asked, why were so many immigrants detained for weeks and months if it was clear they had nothing to do with terrorism?
“We don’t know if these people have been allowed to consult lawyers. We don’t know how many of them have been deported. It’s hard to understand why any of that has to be secret,” Stone said. “I think that’s pretty disturbing. That is difficult to square with responsible government.”
Separately, a six-member panel of the American Bar Association issued a report in August criticizing the Bush administration for detaining some U.S. citizens as enemy combatants and denying them the right to lawyers.
At least two U.S.-born people are being designated as enemy combatants. They are Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S.-born Taliban prisoner being held in Virginia, and Jose Padilla, suspected of plotting to explode a bomb with radioactive materials, sometimes called a dirty bomb, and being held in South Carolina.
The Justice Department has said identifying the detainees is not a good idea. They say suspects would be reluctant to cooperate if they knew their names would be publicized, innocent people could be linked unfairly to Sept. 11, and terrorists would know which of their associates were in U.S. custody.
Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh said government agents are making sure all detainees are afforded the “full panoply” of rights under the Constitution.
“We try to accommodate the media and the public’s need for information,” he said. “But at the same time, we will not allow the information to be misused by the terrorists. ... I don’t see this as a tradeoff between liberty and security.”
Judges’ verdicts mixed
However, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler agreed with civil rights groups that the names don’t need to be secret.
In an Aug. 2 ruling, she ordered the government to identify domestic detainees and their lawyers before the end of the month. The Justice Department has appealed.
The government’s interest in preventing future attacks and finding all those connected with the past attacks is understandable, Kessler wrote.
However, “the first priority of the judicial branch must be to ensure that our government always operates within the statutory and constitutional restraints, which distinguish a democracy from a dictatorship,” she wrote. “Difficult times such as these have always tested our fidelity to the core democratic values of openness, government accountability, and the rule of the law.”
In another legal blow to the Bush administration, a Cincinnati-based federal appeals court Aug. 26 ordered the government to open deportation hearings.
A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unconstitutional the government’s policy of barring the public and media from deportation hearings deemed a “special interest” to the anti-terrorism campaign.
The government was considering whether to appeal the ruling, which came in a case involving Rabih Haddad, a Michigan activist identified as a terror suspect in the government’s legal filings.
Critics of the Guantanamo detentions lost a legal round Aug. 1 when another U.S. district judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, ruled that the Cuba detainees don’t have a right to U.S. court hearings. That decision, which came in two lawsuits filed on behalf of 14 of the detainees, allows the military to hold them indefinitely without filing charges.
While that issue is played out in the courts, human rights organizations say the Bush administration should classify the foreign fighters as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Those international pacts say prisoners of war must be treated humanely and shouldn’t be forced to divulge more than their name, rank and serial number.
“The U.S. government cannot choose to wage war in Afghanistan with guns, bombs and soldiers and then assert the laws of war do not apply,” Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch said on the group’s Web site. “To say that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to a war on terrorism is particularly dangerous, as it is all too easy to imagine this ’exception’ coming back to haunt U.S. forces in future conflicts.”
In a battle over semantics, the Bush administration argues that al-Qaida and Taliban fighters weren’t part of a conventional army but a loose-knit terrorist militia. Therefore, they aren’t prisoners of war, but “enemy combatants.”
“No detainee has been harmed. No detainee has been mistreated in any way,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said with characteristic bluntness in January. “And the numerous articles, statements, questions, allegations, and breathless reports on television are undoubtedly by people who are either uninformed, misinformed or poorly informed.”
