Jails From Hell
Jails From Hell
By Joe Bob Briggs
May 30, 2003
For the 762 people held on visa violations--all of whom turned out to be unconnected to terrorism--it went like this. Once a week a guard would come to your cell and say the following words: "Are you okay?"
They had decided that this is all they needed to say in the "Do you want a lawyer?" department. If the guy said "Yes, I'm okay," then . . . no lawyer needed!
But it gets better. If you had already requested a lawyer, then "Are you okay?" served double duty. It meant, "Do you want to make your once-weekly legal phone call?" If you said, "I'm okay," that meant, "Doesn't want to call his lawyer this week, heh heh heh."
But let's say you were a little bit sharper than your run- of-the-mill inmate in the Metropolitan Detention Center, and so the next time they said "Are you okay?," you said, "Well, no, frankly I would like to talk to my family and get some legal help."
The official response was, "You can make one call to your family per month, and you can make one legal call per week. So next week, at your appointed time, you can make your legal call." But who would you call? Normally an inmate is either visited by a public defender or given the phone number of a public defender's office. In this case visits by anyone were out of the question--the feds weren't even revealing where the inmate was held. So if the prisoner insisted on a lawyer, he would be given a list of lawyers and their phone numbers. One problem, though: they were wrong phone numbers. Hey, it's the guy's own fault if he trusts any old lawyer list that's thrust into his hands.
Using his weekly legal phone call, the inmate would call a wrong number--and be told that he'd used up his call for the week.
But what if his family hired a lawyer for him? If they called the Metropolitan Detention Center, or the facility in Passaic, New Jersey, they would be told that their relative wasn't being held there--even when he was.
Want more? How about the standard Immigration & Naturalization Service rule requiring a detainee to be informed of why he's being held within 24 hours? It was changed to 72 hours, and then a week, and then, in some cases, a month or, just for variety, six months.
Or how about plain old habeas corpus? Didn't exist. The most fundamental right of all, recognized long before we were even a country, was simply . . . ignored. That right, insisted on in both our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, said that a man must be either charged or released--so that tyrants like George III couldn't hold people indefinitely in the name of security. (In all the commentaries on this scandal, I haven't seen any references to habeas corpus. Does no one take ninth- grade civics anymore? You can sum up this whole thing under the heading of "habeas corpus doesn't exist.")
So the Inspector General released his report this week, running down a list of abuses normally featured in Amnesty International reports from, say, Sierra Leone, and then the reaction was, "We should do better in the future."
Better in the future? What theory of criminology holds that you put people in 23-hour lockdown, shine bright lights in their faces 24 hours a day, move them in iron shackles with a four-man hold, lie to their families, and routinely say charming things like, "You're going to die here"--when you have no reason to think they've done anything wrong? Is this really something we can put in the category of "Whoops! Forgot a couple items in the rulebook!"?
And we knew this was going on. Everybody knew it was going on. We knew from the way the authorities refused to give up routine information to the media. We knew from the way they hid the locations of the inmates. To this day they won't reveal the names of the detainees, even though almost all of them have been deported back to their home countries. What's the harm in telling us who they are if they're not here anymore? An international news organization like UPI could contact them in their home countries and find out exact information. What would be so wrong with that? It makes you think there are worse things that we don't know yet.
The government policy was "hold until cleared," which meant someone picked up on the basis of gossip--he's Muslim and foreign and he's acting erratic--was considered a criminal even if no evidence turned up, and continued to be considered a criminal until the FBI said he was not a criminal. Which FBI agent is gonna sign the release form that says, "Abdul Wahabi al-Sharraf is definitely not a terrorist"? The answer is . . . none of them. This dogpile gang-tackling lock-em-up system is way they did it in the Soviet Union, for God's sake.
What the report does not say is that all this was done with the connivance of judges. It's one thing to have a police agency out of control. Executives since the beginning of time have wanted to use preventive detention--and our courts have always stepped in and said, "Our Constitution doesn't allow that. Let the man go."
Where were the courts? Where were the judges? They were signing these orders that left the inmates in jail, lawyerless and friendless, for the crime of improper papers. Improper papers? What about the papers used to hold them?
One of two things had to happen to get a court order for perpetual jail, with no lawyer, with no bail. Either the government had to lie and claim that the man was a terrorist, or the judge had to ignore the fact that there was no evidence. Either way, somebody violated their oath.
The other policy of the Justice Department was "no bonds." Okay, fine, that's a hardass position, but it's one a prosecutor could take. The only problem is: no defense attorney on the other side to argue for a bond, and no judge who would say "this justifies a bond hearing." These people had no friends in a celebrated legal system that is itself supposed to be their friend.
A few of the judges did act by issuing deportation orders-- and the inmate still remained in jail. In other words, he's deported, there's no reason not to put him on the next plane to Pakistan, but they kept him anyway! Why? To kick a little more dirt in his face?
The official response of the Justice Department is worth quoting here. "We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks," said Barbara Comstock, spokeswoman for the department. The key word there is "legal." These things are not legal. Suspending habeas corpus is not legal. Just the "ex parte" conversations alone should result in disciplinary action by the bar.
With this as background, we shouldn't be surprised by the recent events in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial. Moussaoui's lawyers says there are two Al Qaeda witnesses in U.S. custody who have information that could exonerate their client. The Justice Department refuses to present the witnesses. In this case the whole purpose of the trial is to determine whether Moussaoui was involved in 9/11 planning. What better witness than someone who was definitely involved in the planning?
The Justice Department's answer to that? If you're going to actually mount a real defense for this guy, then we're going to withdraw our prosecution and turn him over to a military tribunal.
Military tribunal? For a guy who was locked up in an American prison on 9/11 and has remained locked up every day since? Their theory is that, instead of 19 Al Qaeda operatives on 9/11, there were supposed to be 20 that day--19 Saudi Arabians and one Frenchman, Moussaoui.
All of this goes back to John Ashcroft, of course. Everyone agrees the draconian procedures were "approved at the highest levels." Wasn't it just two or three years ago that our government made a public apology to the Japanese and Japanese- American detainees during World War II? Haven't we gone on record as saying that, even though other countries will ignore the law in times of stress, America won't do that ever again?
Well, we did it. We did it with a wink and a nudge, the way southern sheriffs used to lock people up for being black and in the wrong part of town. It's part of that tradition, not the tradition of John Marshall's Supreme Court.
John Ashcroft's position, although he hasn't publicly stated it, is apparently this: If you have 762 foreigners who have visa violations, and you think that maybe, just maybe, one of them is a terrorist, then it's okay to secretly imprison all 762 for as long as necessary to get that one guy. If they all turn out to be innocent, then no big deal--you ship them home and be done with it.
We used to have more self-respect than that.
© 2003 Joe Bob Briggs All Rights Reserved