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The Bigger Picture
2.27.02
The US's 'DISAPPEARED'--First, They Came for the Muslims...
WHO'S NEXT??
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?dir=70&story=139913&host=3&printable=1
The Disappeared
Since 11 September last year, up to 2,000 people in the United States
have been detained without trial, or charge, or even legal rights. The
fate of most is unknown. Andrew Gumbel investigates a scandal that
shames the land of the free
26 February 2002
They came for Rabih Haddad in the afternoon, as his family was getting
ready to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Three men from the Immigration
and Naturalization Service took him away from the apartment in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, that he shared with his wife and four children. His
wife frantically shoved a few dates into his pockets so that he would
have something to break his fast as he headed off to jail.
That was 14 December, more than two months ago. Since that time, Haddad,
a widely respected religious leader and founding member of one of the
United States' largest Muslim charities, the Global Relief Foundation,
has been held in solitary confinement, first in Ann Arbor and then at a
federal facility in Chicago. He is in his cell, alone, for 23 hours a
day. Every time he leaves, either to exercise in a special high-security
cage or to take one of his thrice-weekly showers, he is handcuffed.
At first he was allowed to see his family for four hours a week; now
that has been reduced to just four hours a month, and on one recent
occasion his wife and children were turned away without explanation.
Personal phone calls are restricted to 15 minutes per month.
And yet Haddad, a Lebanese citizen who was educated in the United
States, has been charged with no crime. According to the Treasury
Department � the only branch of government to give any explanation
whatsoever � he and his charity are suspected of links to Osama bin
Laden's al-Qa'ida organisation. But no evidence has been publicly
forthcoming to substantiate the claim and no formal accusation has been
made against him.
On the day he was arrested, Global Relief's assets were frozen by the
Treasury Department and its headquarters in Bridgeview, Illinois � a
suburb of Chicago � was raided by 15 FBI agents, who seized every last
piece of computer and video equipment, as well as the entire archive of
office records. At the same time, the charity's field offices in Albania
and Kosovo were raided in similar fashion by Nato troops and two of
their operatives hauled off into custody for several weeks. The
charity's executive director, Mohamad Chehade, was questioned at his
home for two hours and, according to his lawyer, watched helplessly as
field officers stripped his dwelling of paperwork, ripped open the
Ramadan presents that were due to be opened that night, tore up the
furniture and even confiscated his daughter's computer games. Chehade
has since stated in court papers that he was never shown a search warrant.
After more than 10 weeks of investigation, neither Mohamad Chehade nor
any of Global Relief's other full-time employees in the United States
has been detained or accused of wrongdoing. In fact, the only ostensible
reason for Haddad to be behind bars is a minor visa irregularity. The
tourist visa he used to enter the country most recently in 1998 expired
after six months, and at the time of his arrest he and his wife were in
the process of applying for permanent resident status, in accordance
with a visa amnesty law passed in the dying days of the Clinton administration.
This is far from the first case of an Arab or south-Asian national being
rounded up and subjected to indefinite detention in the wake of the 11
September attacks on New York and Washington. The Justice Department
acknowledged the arrest of 1,200 people before it stopped releasing
numbers in November; human rights groups believe the total number could
be as high as 2,000. But Haddad's case is perhaps the most troubling of
all because of the sheer severity of his treatment and the shockingly
abrupt suspension of his rights to due legal process. Government lawyers
have refused to spell out what evidence, if any, they have against him,
saying that they do not have to under the Bush administration's stiff
new anti-terrorism law passed in late October, the so-called Patriot
Act. The US Attorney's office in Chicago refused all comment.
The court proceedings in his case have been so secret that even Haddad
has been barred from attending; he has had to watch them on video from
his jail cell, without the right of participation. And his visa
irregularity is so minor that most immigration experts agree it would,
under any other circumstances, be settled by an exchange of letters and
the payment of a modest fine.
Haddad's case has caused barely a blip in mainstream public opinion or
the media in the United States, in part because of the prevailing mood
of unquestioning indulgence towards law enforcement agencies as they
seek to prevent further atrocities on US soil. When reports first
surfaced, last autumn, of Arab men being picked up on minor visa
irregularities, arrested, shackled, denied access to lawyers and
families for days on end and, in some cases, getting beaten or even
dying in custody, the general attitude was; this is an emergency,
mistakes will be made, it is the price we have to pay.
The extremity of Haddad's circumstances has nevertheless outraged
Michigan's 350,000-strong Arab community, who have rallied round
Haddad's wife, Salma al-Rushaid, and provided her with financial support
as she fights for her husband's freedom. It has also won Haddad some
sorely needed friends in high places.
"The treatment of Rabih Haddad by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service over the past several weeks has highlighted everything that is
abusive and unconstitutional about our government's scapegoating of
immigrants in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attack," the
Michigan congressman John Conyers said in a recent statement. Conyers,
the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was himself barred
entry to the courtroom during one of Haddad's recent hearings. He and
several dozen supporters were forced to sit out on the pavement outside
the courthouse.
It is hard not to draw parallels with the scandalous case of Wen Ho Lee,
the Taiwanese-born scientist accused of passing US nuclear secrets to
the Chinese, who spent 10 months in solitary confinement without charge
before the government admitted it had no case against him. Like Lee,
Haddad finds himself powerless before the great catch-all invocation of
national security. As with Lee, his detention threatens to be
indefinite. And, as with Lee, one has to ask: if this is not some
terrible miscarriage of justice, why is the government being so reticent
about its information?
"Unfortunately, this whole thing is very political," says Haddad's
lawyer, Ashraf Nubani. "Global Relief is still not on any list of
terrorist organisations. Its assets were only blocked pursuant to the
emergency powers granted to the President. They froze the assets, and
now they are trying to concoct the case."
Mrs al-Rushaid, who testified recently before Conyers's congressional
committee, is equally outspoken. "If they have no charges against my
husband, they should be done with him and let him go home," she said in
a phone interview from Chicago, where she travelled with her children to
see him last Friday for another Islamic holiday, the Eid al-Adha. "What
do they want with him? They should say it now or, at least, if it is
going to take some time to make their case, they should send him back to
Michigan so I can see him more often. Why torture him like this? The
inhuman aspect is amazing."
Mrs al-Rushaid described how she and her four children crowded around
the intercom phone to speak to Rabih Haddad, who was separated from them
by a thick glass partition lined with bars. She begged the guard on duty
at least to let her touch his hand, but he said no. "It wasn't the
guard's fault. He said there was a camera trained on us and he did not
want to jeopardise his job. But my question is, where's the harm? It is
getting really hard to keep seeing my husband like this."
The fear among immigration lawyers is that Haddad's treatment is only a
taste of things to come. Armed with the Patriot Act and a barrage of
other ad hoc rulings passed in the wake of 11 September, George Bush's
ultra-conservative attorney general, John Ashcroft, has shown he intends
to push the limits as far as he can. Because of the blanket of secrecy
Ashcroft has imposed, it is impossible to know exactly how many people
have been detained or deported, or even why. Of the total 2,000
detainees estimated by the American Civil Liberties Union and others,
the best guess is that the vast majority have been held on visa
irregularities, not terror-related criminal offences.
Full details have emerged of only a handful of cases. This newspaper
previously reported on the case of Al Badr al-Hazmi, a Texas-based Saudi
radiologist who was detained for two weeks, one of them without any
contact with the outside world, before the FBI acknowledged it had made
a mistake. The Washington Post recently wrote about two Pakistani
immigrants held for 49 days before being charged with overstaying their
visas, while the Wall Street Journal reported the case of Tarek Mohamed
Fayad, an Egyptian dentist living in California. He was arrested on 13
September and transferred to the Brooklyn Detention Centre in New York
City, where he was kept in conditions of such secrecy that it took his
lawyer a month to find him. He is believed to be there still.
In New Jersey, a Pakistani truck driver called Anser Mehmood had no
contact with his family for three months after he was picked up in early
October. Deprived of their only source of income, his wife and four
children have been forced to sell every last household appliance and are
now heading back to Karachi out of financial necessity even before they
know the outcome of Mehmood's case. Another detainee, 55-year-old
Mohammed Rafiq Butt, died of heart failure at the Hudson County jail in
Kearny, New Jersey, on 23 October.
In some ways, things have calmed down since those panicked days in
September and October. A private support group for detainees in
Washington called Solidarity USA reports that most of those who manage
to hook up with lawyers are gradually managing to get out of detention,
either winning the right to stay in the United States or getting the
deportation procedure carried out swiftly and efficiently. Things remain
grim, however, for those who either cannot afford legal representation
or cannot make contact with the outside world from their holding cells.
"I just got a call from an Egyptian gentleman who has been held in the
county jail on immigration charges for three months," Nubani says. "He
doesn't know when they are going to deport him. He is just one of those
'unnamed persons'. There are literally dozens of people like that."
The Justice Department said recently that the immigration authorities
were still holding 327 people in custody in connection with 11
September, well down from the peak last autumn. But that number is
likely to go back up again. Last month, Ashcroft issued a so-called
"absconders apprehension initiative", in which he earmarked 6,000 Arab
men known to have outstayed their visas for immediate deportation � a
moved denounced by immigration lawyers as blatant discrimination since
there are more than 300,000 other people known to be in the United
States on expired visas who have not been targetted. Last week, The New
York Times reported that the Justice Department had blocked the
deportation of 87 detainees cleared for departure by the immigration
authorities so it could continue to carry out background checks. No
evidence has emerged that any of the 87 was involved in the attacks on
the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon.
This heightened prosecutorial zeal has left immigration lawyers and
Muslim and Arab lobby groups deeply concerned. Particularly alarming is
the increasing reliance on judicial secrecy � something that has been a
feature of immigration cases since 1996 but was considered, until
recently, highly controversial and of dubious constitutional validity.
John Ashcroft's department has not only made use of secret evidence in
case after case in the past few months; it has also issued an executive
ruling, independent of any act of Congress, authorising the immigration
courts to close their proceedings to the outside world.
"[This ruling] is absolutely an outrage, it's got no authority
whatsoever," says Marc Van Der Hout, one of the leading immigration
lawyers in the United States, based in San Francisco. "As the federal
appeals courts have ruled again and again, secret evidence is inherently
untrustworthy. The Justice Department is really taking advantage of 11
September to put forward a lot of proposals that it had in its hip
pocket beforehand: restrict the rights of immigrants; keep people
detained for long periods of time; bypass a lot of the rulings of
immigration judges; and ultimately have the Attorney General dictate
what happens."
One of the changes of recent months, Van Der Hout says, was to make the
Attorney General the final arbiter of immigration cases as well as their
chief prosecutor. "He is basically deciding, 'Do I like what I'm
saying?' It's an absurd system that eviscerates the rights of immigrants."
The pessimism and anger are echoed in the Arab American community,
particularly among those who have brushed up against the immigration
courts in the past. "Before 11 September, there was room for debate and
challenge," says Imad Hamad of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination
Committee, who fought and eventually won a case based on secret evidence
that sought to tar him as a radical Palestinian militant. "Now it is
more dangerous and more complicated. The general mood around the country
is that anything is permissible as long as it is justified in the name
of safety and security. It's a very unfortunate situation for anyone who
is caught in the middle, such as Mr Haddad."
Global Relief was the third major US-based Islamic charity to be caught
up in President Bush's anti-terrorist dragnet in the wake of 11
September. In contrast to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, which
had been investigated by federal authorities for years for suspected
links to suicide bombers in the Israeli-occupied territories, its
operations had appeared to most observers to be entirely above board. It
had a donor base of 20,000 people and disbursed about $5m [�3m] a year
to 22 countries, supporting hospitals and schools and providing
emergency relief to victims of earthquake, drought and war across the
Islamic world. The only question mark came about 18 months ago, when
Global Relief's treasurer was questioned by the FBI about a fund-raising
event at a Texas mosque that was suspected of having links to Osama bin
Laden. According to some reports, Global Relief was temporarily put on a
White House list of organisations that are suspected of terrorist links.
But the matter went no further at the time.
After the 11 September outrage, Rabih Haddad went out of his way to
condemn the attacks, earning praise from Christian and Jewish leaders in
Michigan for his stance. That appeared to count for nothing, however,
when the authorities pounced in December. According to Nubani, the
immigration service claimed its decision to arrest Haddad had nothing to
do with the asset-freezing operation, which just happened to fall on the
same day. There was no word on Haddad's whereabouts for 48 hours after
his arrest; according to his lawyers, the judge's decision to deny him
bail was subsequently justified by the fact that immigration officials
found a hunting rifle � fully licensed � in his apartment.
The co-ordinated Nato swoops on Global Relief's Balkan outposts were
even less tender. In Kosovo, KFOR troops in Pristina entered the
charity's field office � used as a school to teach women English and
word processing � and arrested two Iraqi nationals, one a doctor and the
other an administrator. "One of them was beaten senseless by KFOR
troops. For a week he could not control his urine," the Washington
lawyer who is representing Global Relief, Roger Simmons, alleges. "It
got so bad he asked permission for a holy man to allow him to commit
suicide. The request was denied."
The men were held in solitary confinement, Simmons says, spoken to only
in English, which they do not understand, and talked into signing
documents, also in English. "We don't know what they signed. We were not
given a copy, and nor were they." Then, after six weeks in custody, the
two men were exonerated and released. There was no apology. Just a few
days ago, Simmons adds, KFOR returned Global Relief's documents and said
it had permission to resume operations in Kosovo � a logistical
impossibility as long as the organisation's funds remain frozen by the
US government.
A KFOR spokesman confirmed the broad timeline of the men's detention,
although he insisted they had not been mistreated. "The detainees were
held in a secure facility and had access to representation and visitors.
All their rights were carefully respected... No one was beaten," the
spokesman, Gottfried Salchner, said. In December, a KFOR news release
boasted that the Global Relief operation was "another example of KFOR
ensuring a safe and secure environment... through dynamic,
intelligence-led military operations". Yesterday, even as Lt-Col
Salchner acknowledged that KFOR would take no further action against
Global Relief, he insisted on Nato's right to use "all means" to combat terrorism.
"To my knowledge, there was no basis for what they did at all," Simmons
says. "What has happened to Global Relief is a horrendous story. And
from Rabih Haddad's standpoint, it is even worse."
It is far from clear where the US government is going with the case.
According to Nubani, government prosecutors at Haddad's most recent
hearing last week even acknowledged that they had no criminal charges to
bring against him or against the charity, leaving only a deportation
proceeding to pursue. Mrs al-Rushaid, meanwhile, has been served with a
deportation order of her own, along with three of her four children (the
fourth was born in the United States and has citizenship).
Lawsuits are flying in all directions. Global Relief is suing several US
media organs for defamation, and has gone to court to press for the
return of its assets. Congressman Conyers and the American Civil
Liberties Union, meanwhile, have filed a lawsuit to try to open Haddad's
trial hearings to the public. "We have not seen a shred of evidence
linking the charity in any way to terrorism," Conyers says in a direct
challenge to the Justice Department. "If the government has evidence,
they should produce it."
Mrs al-Rushaid says her husband's morale remains strong, despite
everything, and that they still believe in America as a country and an
ideal. "When we came, it was because of what it stood for � equality and
freedom for all," she says. "There is a big factor of disappointment, of
course. But I still want to live here, still want to be part of this
land. Hopefully, it's going to change."
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