12Jan04-Anne Gearan-Court nixes appeal on Sept. 11 detentions
By ANNE GEARAN
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court said Monday it would not second-guess the government's holding in secret hundreds of foreigners after the Sept. 11 attacks.
None of the more than 700 illegal immigrants was charged as a terrorist, and the Justice Department's inspector general concluded last year that the government had trampled on a law stipulating such detentions be limited to 90 days.
The high court turned down a request to review the secrecy surrounding the detainees, nearly all Arabs or Muslims, who were picked up in the United States following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most were eventually deported for immigration violations. The government refused to disclose whom it held and why.
The court's action, taken without comment, was a victory for the Bush administration. Civil liberties and media organizations had sought access to the names and other basic information about the detainees.
A federal appeals court had sided with the administration and its argument that knowing the names or details of the arrests would give terrorists a window on the post-Sept. 11 terror investigation. By refusing to hear the case, the Supreme Court allowed that ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to stand.
"Until some other court says otherwise, the government can continue the policy of secret arrests that seems fundamentally inconsistent with basic American values, and that we know in this case led to a series of abuses," said Steven Shapiro, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had urged the court to hear the case.
The audit by the Justice Department's inspector general found significant problems with the detentions, including allegations of physical abuse by jail guards at a facility in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The report, released in June, found that many of the 762 illegal aliens were held until cleared by the FBI of any terrorism connections. Sometimes the process took many months despite the law requiring that most aliens be deported or released within 90 days.
A follow-up analysis last week cited progress in centralizing vital terrorist information databases so that authorities can more quickly assess who might be a threat, but warned the job is not done. The government has said that improvements since the Sept. 11 attacks make it easier for government agencies to share information about foreigners in the country.
"When the Sept. 11 investigation led us to those who had violated our nation's laws, we enforced those laws and detained those individuals," Attorney General John Ashcroft said Monday. "We are pleased the court let stand a decision that clearly outlined the danger of giving terrorists a virtual roadmap to our investigation that could have allowed them to chart a potentially deadly detour around our efforts."
Lawyers for the ACLU and other civil liberties groups argued the government grabbed people on thin suspicion, then moved to deport detainees who had no demonstrated link to terrorism but who had violated civil immigration laws.
The government sealed immigration records and omitted detainees' names from jail rosters, among other tactics, to make sure details of hundreds of arrests remained secret, the lawyers said.
The appeal raised constitutional questions under the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and legal questions under the federal Freedom of Information Act.
Twenty-three news organizations and media groups, including The Associated Press, joined in asking the high court to hear the case.
Last week, the high court disappointed the administration by agreeing to hear a broader anti-terrorism case that asks whether the government can indefinitely jail American citizens as "enemy combatants" without giving them access to lawyers or the courts. The Bush administration had argued strongly that it has authority to hold Yaser Esam Hamdi without charges.
The Hamdi case and another testing the legal rights of foreigners detained indefinitely at the Navy's prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, draw the court squarely into the debate over security and liberty after the terrorist attacks.
The justices earlier had rejected several cases that raised more oblique questions about the government's response to the terror threat. One involved an issue similar to Monday's secrecy case. It asked whether the government could keep reporters and the public away from closed-door deportation hearings.
The case is Center for National Security Studies v. Justice Department, 03-472.
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