|
ABC News – June 26, 2005
U.S. misuses material witness law
Administration misuses law to detain terrorism
suspects, advocacy groups say; Justice Disagrees
By MARK SHERMAN
Jun. 26, 2005 - The Bush administration has misused a federal law to detain at least 70 terrorism suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks, two advocacy groups contend. Administration officials defend the detentions by pointing out that judges approved material witness warrants.
The material witness law, enacted in 1984, allows the arrest and detention of witnesses who might flee before testifying in criminal cases.
Only 28 of the suspects were eventually charged with a crime, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, and most of those charges were not related to terrorism. Seven were charged with providing material support to terrorist organizations.
At least 30 detainees were never called to testify before a court or grand jury, the advocacy groups said in a report released Sunday.
All but one of those detained are Muslim, they said.
A Justice Department spokesman, Kevin Madden, told The Associated Press that "material witness statutes are designed with judicial oversight safeguards and are critical to aiding criminal investigations ranging from organized-crime rackets to human trafficking."
The report is the first comprehensive look at how the administration has used the material witness law to detain terrorism suspects when the government lacked sufficient criminal evidence to hold them. The groups said the law "has been twisted beyond recognition."
The government has apologized to 13 people for their detention under the law. One in that group is Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield. The FBI arrested Mayfield in connection with the train bombings in Madrid, Spain, in 2004 after wrongly matching his fingerprint to one found on a shopping bag in Spain.
Twenty-three people were held two months or more without being charged, the report said.
"They threw witnesses in a black hole where they didn't have access to the basis for their arrest, weren't provided with lawyers, weren't allowed to talk to family members and were held in complete secrecy with no concrete end to their detention," said Anjana Malhotra, the report's author.
The Justice Department has refused to say how often it has used the law in terrorism investigations.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he is considering legislation to limit use of the law. "I am troubled by reports that this narrow law has been twisted from one of a specific statute to secure testimony, into a broad detention authority that has resulted in some notorious abuses," Leahy said.
Judges were willing to give the administration a lot of leeway right after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the report said. This was particularly so when government lawyers argued that the witnesses were needed for grand jury investigations, for which less stringent legal standards apply.
In some cases, authorities obtained the arrest warrants even when the witnesses were cooperating and had strong ties to the community…..
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=883005&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312
USA TODAY – June 26, 2005
Rights groups detail 'Kafkaesque' U.S. detentions
By Kevin Johnson
WASHINGTON — The government detained at least 70 men, all but one a Muslim, as material witnesses and abused their civil rights in a largely secret operation launched by the Justice Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU allege in a report out today.
The civil rights groups say that in many cases the detainees were not told why they were arrested and did not get immediate access to lawyers, and that the Justice Department often would not confirm whether they were being held.
Federal law allows the government to temporarily detain people who are suspected of having knowledge of a crime to ensure they testify. But the report accuses the government of operating in "a Kafkaesque world of indefinite detention" for many people who were never linked to terrorism.
Of the 70 men identified in the report, 42 were released without any charges filed. Seven were charged with terrorism-related offenses. At least 13 received apologies from the government for being wrongfully detained, says the report, which relies heavily on interviews with witnesses, their lawyers and available court records.
"Muslim men were arrested for little more than attending the same mosque as a Sept. 11 hijacker or owning a box-cutter," it says.
Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden said that the department has not seen the report and that he would not comment on its identification of the witnesses. Madden referred instead to congressional testimony of Chuck Rosenberg, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey.
Rosenberg said last month in written testimony that a judge approved every arrest. Under the law, judges are to supervise detentions, and prosecutors must give biweekly reports to support continued detention.
However, Jamie Fellner, director of Human Rights Watch's U.S. Program, says judges failed to aggressively question prosecutors about the need for detention.
The report gives one of the most exhaustive reviews of the use of the material-witness law in domestic terrorism investigations.
Among the witnesses the report identifies are Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield and Virginia physician Tajammul Bhatti.
Mayfield was detained for about two weeks in spring 2004 after train bombings in Madrid. He was released after the FBI acknowledged that it misidentified a fingerprint lifted at the bomb scene.
Bhatti was held for about a week in 2002. The report says that the government used evidence recovered during a secret search of his apartment to get a material-witness warrant. It says the evidence included a New York Times story on Bhatti's computer about a man suspected of exploring a "dirty bomb" attack. Bhatti was released without being charged.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-06-26-detentions_x.htm
|
