US accused of illegally holding terror suspects
President George Bush’s administration has misused a federal law to detain at least 70 terrorism suspects since the September 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 organisations.
At least 30 detainees were never called to testify before a court or a grand jury – a type of jury that decides whether cases should go to trial – the advocacy groups said in a report released yesterday. All but one of those detained were Muslim, they said.
A US Justice Department spokesman, Kevin Madden, said that “material witness statutes were designed with judicial oversight safeguards and were critical to aiding criminal investigations ranging from organised-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 US government lacked sufficient criminal evidence to hold them. The groups said the law “has been twisted beyond recognition”.
The government has apologised 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 for two months or more without being charged, the report said.
The Justice Department has refused to say how often it has 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.
