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Judge orders U.S. to ID detainees
sabri
08/03/02 at 09:50:16
[slm]

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — A federal judge gave the government 15 days Friday to disclose the names of people detained in the investigation of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In an extraordinary attack on the judiciary, the Justice Department denounced the judge, saying her order “increases the risk of future terrorist threats to our nation.”

       “THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S power to arrest and hold individuals is an extraordinary one,” U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said in a 45-page ruling. “Here, the government has used its arrest power to detain individuals as part of an investigation that is widespread in its scope and secrecy.”
      Kessler said she would allow only two exceptions. On a case-by-case basis, she will consider allowing the government to keep a detainee’s name secret if the detainee is a material witness to a terror investigation. And she said she would allow the government to withhold a name if the detainee requested it.
      Kessler also ordered the government to release the names of attorneys representing the detainees. She said lawyers, unlike suspects, have no expectation of privacy and are well equipped to “handle their own affairs.”
      But Kessler did uphold the government’s right to keep secret the locations where detainees are being held. She said there was a significant risk that those prisons could be targeted by people angered by the detentions.

SECRET ARRESTS WRONG
      Kessler wrote that government affidavits “nowhere declare that some or all of the detainees have connections to terrorism,” meaning it was “pure speculation” that identifying them would harm an investigation of alleged terrorist activity.
      Such secret arrests are “a concept odious to a democratic society,” Kessler wrote, quoting from a ruling in a 1969 case.
      She found that while Sept. 11 was “truly a day of infamy in our national history,” the judicial system was obligated to “ensure that our government always operates within the scrutiny and constitutional constraints which distinguish a democracy from a dictatorship.”
      The Justice Department did not not immediately say whether it would appeal the ruling. But in a remarkably pointed statement it released late Friday afternoon, government lawyers excoriated Kessler’s order.
      “The Department of Justice believes today’s ruling impedes one of the most important federal law enforcement investigations in history, harms our efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the heinous attacks of September 11 and increases the risk of future terrorist threats to our nation,” the department said.  

        It accused Kessler of opening the door for lawyers to “provide valuable information to terrorists seeking to cause even greater harm to the safety of the American people.”
      By contrast, the ruling was welcomed by the lead attorney bringing the lawsuit, Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.
      “The ruling is a vindication of our basic liberties: The government may not arrest people in secret, the courts will stop government abuses, and the tragic events of September 11 may not be used as an excuse to suspend basic rights and round up the most vulnerable members of our society,” she said.  

RIGHTS GROUPS DEMAND INFORMATION
      Kessler, who was appointed to the D.C. Circuit bench by President Bill Clinton, ordered the Justice Department in May to update and clarify data about the detainees after civil liberties groups sued for more information. The groups, which included the Center for National Security Studies and the American Civil Liberties Union, demanded the names of all those being held and information on where they were being held.
      More than 1,100 people, most of them Arab and Muslim men, have been rounded up since the Sept. 11 attacks, most on immigration violations. In a court filing in May, the government said it was still holding at least 147 of them. More recent numbers have not been released.
      The detainees at issue in this case are separate from the 600 or so being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Another federal judge ruled Wednesday that they had no right to trial before the U.S. courts because Cuba is outside the United States.
     
www.msnbc.com

[wlm]

     




08/03/02 at 09:52:20
sabri


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