Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
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http://www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=6466
June 28, 2005
Rights Groups Detail Growing Police State
by William Fisher
The FBI is carrying out "unwarranted investigations for
religious or political reasons," according to the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which charges that "the agency
has sunk back into the kind of political monitoring it did
in the 1960s and 1970s."
The Washington-based advocacy group said a series of FBI
inquiries across the country shows that the agency is
conducting investigations based on the targets' political
activities or religious affiliations.
Representing 14 individuals and nine organizations, the ACLU
has filed requests under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act
seeking access to any investigative files the FBI may have
on them. The ACLU also has filed a separate request for
information on FBI investigations, particularly on Muslim
individuals and organizations Although most of the requests
were filed in St. Louis, ACLU affiliates and branches in
Rhode Island, Idaho, and Kentucky also have filed similar
requests.
Among others who filed the information requests are peace
activist Bill Ramsey, peace activist and Holocaust survivor
Hedy Epstein, and American Muslim magazine editor Sheila Musaji.
Organizations include those that were opposed to the Iraq
invasion, a group advocating for workers' rights and
environmental issues, as well as the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The ACLU says the FBI's conduct is "eerily reminiscent" of
the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the agency's controversial
first director. In the 1950s, the FBI went after alleged
communists and "fellow travelers." In the 1960s, the target
was the anti-Vietnam peace movement.
Meanwhile, the ACLU and another advocacy group, Human Rights
Watch (HRW), charged in a new study that the George W. Bush
administration has perverted the system of due process
"beyond recognition" in jailing at least 70 terror suspects
as "material witnesses" since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The groups are calling on Congress to impose tougher safeguards.
The report, released Monday, found that the 70 suspects --
25 percent of them U.S. citizens and all but one Muslim men
-- were jailed for weeks or months at a time in U.S.
facilities without being charged with a crime.
Seven men have since been charged with supporting terrorism,
and four have been convicted to date, the report said.
It charges that many of the men who were held as material
witnesses were "thrust into a Kafkaesque world of indefinite
detention without charges, secret evidence, and baseless
accusations."
The new report reflects an effort by civil rights groups to
expand the current PATRIOT Act debate to a range of other
legal tools that the Bush administration is using in its
campaign against terrorism.
The current material witness law, enacted by Congress in
1984, allows federal authorities to hold a person
indefinitely if they suspect he has information about a
crime and may be unwilling to cooperate or poses a risk of
fleeing.
The law has been used for many years to compel the testimony
of thousands of illegal immigrants whom authorities feared
would be deported before they testify in investigations into
border smuggling and other crimes. But since the Sept. 11
attacks, the FBI has significantly expanded its use in
terrorism investigations.
The Justice Department (DoJ) defends its use of the law,
saying that it has sought to use it sparingly and to follow
all legal safeguards allowing those material witnesses who
are jailed to contact lawyers and to challenge their detention.
However, Lee Gelernt, senior staff attorney for the ACLU
Immigrants' Rights Project, told IPS, "The Justice
Department did not provide all of these individuals with the
legal protections," adding, "More importantly, all of these
individuals should not have been subjected to arrest and
prolonged detention in the first place."
In their new report, HRW and the ACLU charge that the DoJ
has abused the law in order to detain people as witnesses
whom it does not otherwise have enough evidence to charge
with terrorism.
The DoJ has not given a public accounting of jailed material
witnesses since early 2003, when it told Congress it had
detained fewer than 50.
The new study found that a third of the 70 material
witnesses it identified were jailed for at least two months.
Of the 70 who were positively identified, 42 were released
without charges, 20 were charged with non-terrorist
offenses, four were convicted of supporting terrorism, and
three others are awaiting trial on terrorism-related
charges. More than a third were ultimately deported.
Brian Foley, a professor at Florida Coastal School of Law,
told IPS, "To detain a person as a material witness
presupposes that there is a legal proceeding where the
person's testimony is required. In many of the 9/11
detentions, the 'witnesses' never testified in the months
they were held."
"Depriving the person of his liberty is supposed to be a
last resort, because there are usually other, less draconian
ways to secure testimony: the person can be subpoenaed, that
is, required to come under pain of possible imprisonment if
he fails to show up; the person's testimony can be recorded
in a deposition," he continued.
"These alternatives were not used in the 9/11 lockups. The
government has perverted these laws to jail people the
government thinks, but can't prove, are criminals. The
threat of terrorism shouldn't change our principles. To say
we can't risk investigating people before we lock them up is
to say we can no longer risk having a republic instead of a
police state."

 
Certo, certo... :)
*pat pat*
-Stefano