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US lawyers challenge clampdown on immigrant rights



· Terrorist suspects could face indefinite detention
· 'Enemy combatant' may be applied to any foreigner

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday November 15, 2006
The Guardian

American civil rights lawyers expressed outrage yesterday at a justice department court motion arguing that immigrants living in the US could be held indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism and had no right to challenge their imprisonment in court.
The motion was filed by the administration on Monday in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a Qatar citizen studying in the US who was arrested in 2001 and accused of being an al-Qaida sleeper agent. He is being held in a military prison in South Carolina.


The six-page justice department motion argued that under an anti-terrorist law passed last month, he was an "unlawful enemy combatant" who had no right to challenge his imprisonment in civilian courts.
Instead, the motion said, his imprisonment would be reviewed by a military tribunal. But critics of the law, the military commissions act, said that the tribunals did not meet American or international standards of justice. Monday's motion made it clear that the US government intended the term "enemy combatant" could apply to immigrants living legally in the US as much as to gunmen captured on distant battlefields.
The justice department also noted that the new law applies to all enemy combatants "regardless of the location of the detention". It makes no distinction between prisons in the US and Guantánamo Bay.
"They have now, for the first time in the history of the United States, said that non-citizens in this country have no habeas [corpus] rights," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer for Mr Marri from the Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University. "It means millions of non-citizens could be whisked off in the dead of the night and held indefinitely in a military brig."
Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, said: "This move by the government illustrates how dangerous the law is. It really is frightening."
The act was passed during an election campaign in which the Bush administration attempted to portray the opposition Democrats as being soft on terrorism.
"The law was hurried through Congress with only a few hours of debate," Mr Dixon said. But he said it would become far more controversial if more immigrants were rounded up under its loose definition of "unlawful enemy combatant".
The military commissions act defines an unlawful enemy combatant as "a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant." Any suspect who falls under that definition is not protected by the Geneva convention, nor by habeas corpus rights under US law, which allow prisoners to challenge the legal basis of their incarceration.
Since the law was passed, the justice department has called on US courts to dismiss several hundred habeas corpus petitions filed by Guantánamo Bay prisoners, on the grounds that the law took their cases out of US civilian jurisdiction.
The law is being challenged as unconstitutional by lawyers for many of the approximately 440 inmates in Washington, and the issue is expected to come before the supreme court. Meanwhile yesterday, civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in a German court seeking war crimes charges against Donald Rumsfeld, the outgoing US defence secretary, for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and in setting up the Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Attorney general Alberto Gonzalez and former CIA director George Tenet were also named.

Damn civil liberties lawyers

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