ErichRaulfestone
10/17/01 05:50 PM
141.211.174.228
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Jailed without charges
Due process won't gather hordes of detainees, but it might ensure that the guilty get
arrested
Dateline: 10/15/01
Hundreds of people are detained for weeks on end. No charges are filed
against them, and they're lucky to get an occasional visit from lawyers who
are stymied in their efforts to offer help. What the detainees do get,
reportedly, are beatings and abuse. Says an anonymous government official
quoted in the Washington Post: "Some of these people have done nothing
more than give someone a ride in their car."
Where can this be? Afghanistan? How about Iraq, home of the Saddam
Hussein Bed & Breakfast?
Nope. The unfriendly host for these unhappy detainees is the United States.
Somewhere between 650 and 700 people (depending on your sources) have
been rounded up by federal law enforcement authorities in the wake of the
September 11 terrorist attacks. The detainees are held in unpleasant and
even dangerous conditions as "material witnesses" or for immigration
violations. Immigration law allows detainees to be held effectively forever, so
long as deportation hearings are supposedly in the works.
The law relevant to holding people as material witnesses is also enormously
vague, allowing the authorities to hold witnesses for a "reasonable period of
time." "Reasonable" is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and the
beholder in this case is the federal government itself. Since the detainees
are held effectively incommunicado, with even their identities kept secret
from the outside world, there's little chance that anybody will soon challenge
the Justice Department's interpretation of its authority.
Legal experts suggest that the government is abusing its authority to pursue
a "Casablanca" approach in its investigation of the terrorist attacks. That is,
the authorities are rounding up the usual suspects, then holding them while
they look for evidence that would justify jailing those people to begin with.
The usual suspects under the current circumstances are immigrants and
visitors of Middle Eastern extraction who have had some connection with a
terrorist or suspected terrorist. -- perhaps as fleeting an encounter as a
briefly shared apartment, or even a car ride.
In many cases, people are being held for no other reason than they fit a
profile and have committed a minor technical violation. According to the
Christian Science Monitor, "Many of the people detained -- some estimates
are as high as two-thirds -- are simply foreign visitors being held for items
such as expired visas and traffic misdemeanors."
These indefinite detentions, with little legal counsel and no charges, are
taking place under the law as it's now written. The American Civil Liberties Union warns that an
"anti-terrorism" bill passed by Congress just last week threatens to make matters worse. In
testimony before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the ACLU raised three important
objections to the new legislation:
First, they permit individuals to be imprisoned in INS facilities not on the basis of
evidence, but solely on the basis of an Attorney General certification of the kind of
reasonable suspicion that ordinarily would permit no more than a brief "stop and frisk"
encounter.
Second, these provisions still permit potentially indefinite detention of immigrants who
are not terrorists, despite press reports that this problem has been fixed.
Third, the Senate bill contains provisions [that] permit immigrants to [be] punished for
associational activity with groups our government later chooses to regard as terrorist
organizations or terrorist fronts without notice to the immigrant and without an effective
defense for truly innocent associations.
But is this so wrong? After all, most of these people aren't U.S. citizens -- not yet, anyway.
It's true that many Americans (including an otherwise apparently intelligent woman with whom I had
dinner last week) argue that immigrants aren't entitled to the legal protections of the U.S.
Constitution. Why not toss 'em behind bars, stick a red-hot poker where the sun don't shine, and
separate the guilty from the innocent the old-fashioned way?
But this thinking presupposes, first of all, that constitutional protections against unreasonable
search and seizure and unjustified detention are some kind of a dodge. Americans have a nice thing
going, for as long as it's convenient, but anybody unblessed by citizenship isn't entitled to the
privilege of due process.
In fact, though, the Constitution is supposed to protect "natural" rights -- that is, rights with which
all human beings are born. If you have a right to be charged or released, and to see a lawyer, so
does that poor Saudi immigrant rotting in a federal holding tank. If he doesn't have those rights,
neither do you.
Second, and perhaps more convincing to the whatever-it-takes crowd, is the doubtful effectiveness
of blanket arrests and the limited extent to which the authorities can be trusted to exercise such
power.
The FBI isn't made up of spit-and-polish philosopher-cops who are hobbled in their pursuit of
ne'er-do-wells by some silly 18th-century document. The FBI is the agency that has been implicated
in, among other shenanigans, covering-up the crimes of mob hitmen in Boston and letting innocent
men take the rap. Before taking office, the recently approved director of the FBI had to promise
Congress that he would reform his new charge from top to bottom.
Can such an agency be trusted with the power to indefinitely hold people behind bars and out of
sight? Do we want federal officials who have been implicated in years of screw-ups and corruption
to freely scoop people up and jail them secretly?
If we do grant such powers, can we be comfortable that the authorities are using them to catch
bad guys?
At best, law enforcers are fallible human beings. If we want to be sure that we're catching the
people who helped to crash those airliners into skyscrapers and murder thousands of people, we
have to make the authorities gather their evidence and prove their cases by rigorous standards.
Rounding up random suspects puts warm bodies into official custody, but it doesn't tell us if any of
them belong there. Requiring the authorities to meet traditional standards of evidence before making
arrests probably won't gather such an impressive tally of detainees, but the ones eventually jailed
will be more firmly linked to real crimes.
Then we might actually be comfortable in the knowledge that we're removing the bad guys from the
streets instead of taking out our anger on a few hundred confused taxi drivers, mechanics and
college students.
And we'll minimize the chance that anybody will confuse the United States with the people we're
fighting.
God and the soldier we adore, In time of danger, not before!
The danger passed, and all things righted, God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.
--unknown
Erich Raulfestone
Rangers, Lead the Way!
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?"
And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"
Isaiah 6:8
......and I went......
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