Issue No. 599
International
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15 - 21 August 2002 Issue No. 599 International |
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No more keeping secrets
The US's internal "war on terror" was challenged in a Washington courtroom last week, as secret arrests -- many of them involving Arab and Muslim detainees -- were declared illegal. Mukul Devichand reports from New York City
"Things were double-difficult here," says Ahmed Essam, an Alexandrian who runs a falafel restaurant in downtown Manhattan, less than a mile from where the World Trade Centre towers once stood. He is talking about both the 11 September attacks and the wave of arrests that followed. "Arabs and Muslims who didn't have a green card were quickly arrested and kept in secret," Essam continues. "No one knew where they went. I myself have legal migrant status and my American customers are my friends, so I had less trouble."
Justice has indeed been slow for the approximately 1,200 people who, according to American State Department figures, were rounded up here after the attacks were attributed to Islamist group Al-Qa'eda. They were held for months and tried secretly, their names and charges undisclosed. But last Friday, in a major embarrassment for the Bush administration, a federal judge ordered that the names of those arrested after 11 September be disclosed within 15 days.
"Secret arrests are a concept odious to a democratic society," wrote Judge Gladys Kessler, delivering the ruling in Washington DC.
The government had argued that releasing even small pieces of information would be a clue for terrorists planning to attack again.
Judge Kessler's decision mainly applies to suspects being held on immigration violations. The weeks after 11 September saw hundreds of suspects, largely Arab and Muslim men, being arrested under this charge -- but with the unexplained and unorthodox twist that their identities were kept secret. Officially, 752 people were detained in this way and all but 81 have now been released or deported.
In the United States, immigration hearings are not regarded as full-blown trials, with the result that none of these suspects had guaranteed access to lawyers.
But the ruling does not mean all terrorism suspects will now be named. The identities of up to 120 more suspects will remain secret, because they are being held as material witnesses -- in other words, people who are not guilty but deemed close enough to a crime to be holding crucial information. It is also possible for the government to re-classify some of those being held as material witnesses.
Civil liberties groups have welcomed the decision regardless. "It's a very important victory," Ken Gude, of the Centre for National Security Studies which helped bring the case, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "It will prevent the government from operating under a veil of secrecy," he said
In the US, a small but growing number of liberal voices have been incensed by the secret arrests policy, which has been compared to the forced detentions of Japanese Americans during World War II. Then, as now, it seems a particular minority group is being targeted.
"It certainly appears that the burden has fallen largely on Arabs and Muslims," Gude said. "We have no figures, but the anecdotal evidence raises crucial questions. The suspects were held under conditions normally used for severe offenders, despite the fact that most of them have now actually been acquitted of all charges."
"The US government has turned the presumption of innocence on its head," he said.
The result has been an extremely difficult period for Arab-Americans and other Muslims here. "I have just been keeping my head down," Hejaz Khan, an Afghan taxi driver in New York City, told the Weekly. "I understand the anger here and I feel it myself, but they don't really understand that not all of us are terrorists."
Last Friday's ruling is the latest in a series of liberal judgments opening up secret government proceedings in Newark, Detroit and New York City. But higher courts have reversed some of these judgements, despite calls from senior judicial figures to stop the rot.
William G Young, a federal judge presiding over the case of British "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid, summed up this sentiment during the trial in Boston. "This is the most profound shift in our legal institutions in my lifetime," he said. "But most remarkable of all, it has taken place without engaging any broad public interest whatsoever."
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