Bush bashed for 'abusing law'
2005-06-27 16:14
Mark Sherman
Washington - President George W Bush's administration has misused a federal law to detain at least 70 terrorism suspects since the September 11 attacks, claimed two advocacy groups.
Administration officials defended the detentions by pointing out that judges had approved material witness warrants.
The material witness law, enacted in 1984, allowed the arrest and detention of witnesses who might flee before testifying in criminal cases.
According to the American civil liberties union and human-rights watch, only 28 of the suspects were eventually charged with a crime and most of those charges were not related to terrorism.
Seven were charged with providing material support to terrorist organisations.
All but one Muslim
The advocacy groups said in a report released on Sunday, that at least 30 detainees were never called to testify before a court or a grand jury. They said all, but one of those detained were Muslim.
Kevin Madden of the justice department said that "material-witness statutes are designed with judicial oversight safeguards and are critical to aiding criminal investigations, ranging from organised-crime rackets to human trafficking".
"The report was 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".
Train bombing in Madrid
The government had apologised to 13 people for their detention under the law. One in that group was 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.
The report said 23 people were held for two months or more without being charged.
Anjana Malhotra, the report's author said: "They threw witnesses in a black hole, where they didn't have access to the basis for their arrest.
"They 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."
Terrorism investigations
The justice department had refused to say how often it had used the law in terrorism investigations.
Senator Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee, said he was considering legislation to limit use of the law.
Leahy said: "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."
The report said the judges were willing to give the administration a lot of leeway right after the attacks of September 11 2001.
- SAPA