The U.S. Justice Department has been ordered by three separate courts to ease the obsessive, illegal secrecy it has employed since Sept. 11. The message has yet to sink in. Instead, Attorney General John Ashcroft dismisses the rulings as "anomalies" and goes on his merry way.
Today, about 1,000 immigrants – many of them here legally – remain imprisoned incommunicado. Nobody knows what their names are; nobody knows what, if any, charges have been filed against them. Civil libertarians, media outlets and members of Congress as diverse as conservative Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) and liberal Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) have pressured the Justice Department to release information about those prisoners, but to no avail.
When a New Jersey Superior Court judge ordered that the names of immigrants jailed in that state's prisons be made public, the Justice Department instead appealed.
In another case, a panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the unsealing of documents and an open hearing for Rabih Haddad, a Lebanese man held eight months mostly in solitary confinement. The supposedly incriminating documents proved to hold no hard evidence, only a vague accusation that Haddad was observed during the 1980s and '90s "at locations overseas that housed members connected to al-Qaida."
In the third case, this one out of Brooklyn, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin released a Jordanian man held in jail as a potential material witness before a grand jury.
"Since 1789, no Congress has granted the government the authority to imprison an innocent person in order to guarantee that he will testify before a grand jury conducting a criminal investigation," Scheindlin noted.
Ashcroft recently told graduates at Catholic University in Washington that freedom is "not the grant of any government or any prince or any king, but is in fact the gift of God."
If so, Ashcroft is denying God's gift to hundreds of people in this country without due process or legal authority. By doing so, he is defying the U.S. Constitution as well.
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