(Det som står om KFOR står lengre nede i teksten, men det som kommer først
er viktig kontekst. - Per)
© 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
26 February 2002
The Disappeared
Since 11 September last year, up to 2,000 people in the United States have
been detained without trial, or charge, or even legal rights. The fate of
most is unknown. Andrew Gumbel investigates a scandal that shames the land
of the free
They came for Rabih Haddad in the afternoon, as his family was getting
ready to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Three men from the Immigration and
Naturalization Service took him away from the apartment in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, that he shared with his wife and four children. His wife
frantically shoved a few dates into his pockets so that he would have
something to break his fast as he headed off to jail.
That was 14 December, more than two months ago. Since that time, Haddad, a
widely respected religious leader and founding member of one of the United
States' largest Muslim charities, the Global Relief Foundation, has been
held in solitary confinement, first in Ann Arbor and then at a federal
facility in Chicago. He is in his cell, alone, for 23 hours a day. Every
time he leaves, either to exercise in a special high-security cage or to
take one of his thrice-weekly showers, he is handcuffed.
At first he was allowed to see his family for four hours a week; now that
has been reduced to just four hours a month, and on one recent occasion
his wife and children were turned away without explanation. Personal phone
calls are restricted to 15 minutes per month.
And yet Haddad, a Lebanese citizen who was educated in the United States,
has been charged with no crime. According to the Treasury Department . the
only branch of government to give any explanation whatsoever . he and his
charity are suspected of links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida
organisation. But no evidence has been publicly forthcoming to
substantiate the claim and no formal accusation has been made against him.
On the day he was arrested, Global Relief's assets were frozen by the
Treasury Department and its headquarters in Bridgeview, Illinois . a
suburb of Chicago . was raided by 15 FBI agents, who seized every last
piece of computer and video equipment, as well as the entire archive of
office records. At the same time, the charity's field offices in Albania
and Kosovo were raided in similar fashion by Nato troops and two of their
operatives hauled off into custody for several weeks. The charity's
executive director, Mohamad Chehade, was questioned at his home for two
hours and, according to his lawyer, watched helplessly as field officers
stripped his dwelling of paperwork, ripped open the Ramadan presents that
were due to be opened that night, tore up the furniture and even
confiscated his daughter's computer games. Chehade has since stated in
court papers that he was never shown a search warrant.
After more than 10 weeks of investigation, neither Mohamad Chehade nor any
of Global Relief's other full-time employees in the United States has been
detained or accused of wrongdoing. In fact, the only ostensible reason for
Haddad to be behind bars is a minor visa irregularity. The tourist visa he
used to enter the country most recently in 1998 expired after six months,
and at the time of his arrest he and his wife were in the process of
applying for permanent resident status, in accordance with a visa amnesty
law passed in the dying days of the Clinton administration.
This is far from the first case of an Arab or south-Asian national being
rounded up and subjected to indefinite detention in the wake of the 11
September attacks on New York and Washington. The Justice Department
acknowledged the arrest of 1,200 people before it stopped releasing
numbers in November; human rights groups believe the total number could be
as high as 2,000. But Haddad's case is perhaps the most troubling of all
because of the sheer severity of his treatment and the shockingly abrupt
suspension of his rights to due legal process. Government lawyers have
refused to spell out what evidence, if any, they have against him, saying
that they do not have to under the Bush administration's stiff new
anti-terrorism law passed in late October, the so-called Patriot Act. The
US Attorney's office in Chicago refused all comment.
The court proceedings in his case have been so secret that even Haddad has
been barred from attending; he has had to watch them on video from his
jail cell, without the right of participation. And his visa irregularity
is so minor that most immigration experts agree it would, under any other
circumstances, be settled by an exchange of letters and the payment of a
modest fine.
Haddad's case has caused barely a blip in mainstream public opinion or the
media in the United States, in part because of the prevailing mood of
unquestioning indulgence towards law enforcement agencies as they seek to
prevent further atrocities on US soil. When reports first surfaced, last
autumn, of Arab men being picked up on minor visa irregularities,
arrested, shackled, denied access to lawyers and families for days on end
and, in some cases, getting beaten or even dying in custody, the general
attitude was; this is an emergency, mistakes will be made, it is the price
we have to pay.
The extremity of Haddad's circumstances has nevertheless outraged
Michigan's 350,000-strong Arab community, who have rallied round Haddad's
wife, Salma al-Rushaid, and provided her with financial support as she
fights for her husband's freedom. It has also won Haddad some sorely
needed friends in high places.
"The treatment of Rabih Haddad by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service over the past several weeks has highlighted everything that is
abusive and unconstitutional about our government's scapegoating of
immigrants in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attack," the Michigan
congressman John Conyers said in a recent statement. Conyers, the senior
Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was himself barred entry to the
courtroom during one of Haddad's recent hearings. He and several dozen
supporters were forced to sit out on the pavement outside the courthouse.
It is hard not to draw parallels with the scandalous case of Wen Ho Lee,
the Taiwanese-born scientist accused of passing US nuclear secrets to the
Chinese, who spent 10 months in solitary confinement without charge before
the government admitted it had no case against him. Like Lee, Haddad finds
himself powerless before the great catch-all invocation of national
security. As with Lee, his detention threatens to be indefinite. And, as
with Lee, one has to ask: if this is not some terrible miscarriage of
justice, why is the government being so reticent about its information?
"Unfortunately, this whole thing is very political," says Haddad's lawyer,
Ashraf Nubani. "Global Relief is still not on any list of terrorist
organisations. Its assets were only blocked pursuant to the emergency
powers granted to the President. They froze the assets, and now they are
trying to concoct the case."
Mrs al-Rushaid, who testified recently before Conyers's congressional
committee, is equally outspoken. "If they have no charges against my
husband, they should be done with him and let him go home," she said in a
phone interview from Chicago, where she travelled with her children to see
him last Friday for another Islamic holiday, the Eid al-Adha. "What do
they want with him? They should say it now or, at least, if it is going to
take some time to make their case, they should send him back to Michigan
so I can see him more often. Why torture him like this? The inhuman aspect
is amazing."
Mrs al-Rushaid described how she and her four children crowded around the
intercom phone to speak to Rabih Haddad, who was separated from them by a
thick glass partition lined with bars. She begged the guard on duty at
least to let her touch his hand, but he said no. "It wasn't the guard's
fault. He said there was a camera trained on us and he did not want to
jeopardise his job. But my question is, where's the harm? It is getting
really hard to keep seeing my husband like this."
The fear among immigration lawyers is that Haddad's treatment is only a
taste of things to come. Armed with the Patriot Act and a barrage of other
ad hoc rulings passed in the wake of 11 September, George Bush's
ultra-conservative attorney general, John Ashcroft, has shown he intends
to push the limits as far as he can. Because of the blanket of secrecy
Ashcroft has imposed, it is impossible to know exactly how many people
have been detained or deported, or even why. Of the total 2,000 detainees
estimated by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, the best guess
is that the vast majority have been held on visa irregularities, not
terror-related criminal offences.
Full details have emerged of only a handful of cases. This newspaper
previously reported on the case of Al Badr al-Hazmi, a Texas-based Saudi
radiologist who was detained for two weeks, one of them without any
contact with the outside world, before the FBI acknowledged it had made a
mistake. The Washington Post recently wrote about two Pakistani immigrants
held for 49 days before being charged with overstaying their visas, while
the Wall Street Journal reported the case of Tarek Mohamed Fayad, an
Egyptian dentist living in California. He was arrested on 13 September and
transferred to the Brooklyn Detention Centre in New York City, where he
was kept in conditions of such secrecy that it took his lawyer a month to
find him. He is believed to be there still.
In New Jersey, a Pakistani truck driver called Anser Mehmood had no
contact with his family for three months after he was picked up in early
October. Deprived of their only source of income, his wife and four
children have been forced to sell every last household appliance and are
now heading back to Karachi out of financial necessity even before they
know the outcome of Mehmood's case. Another detainee, 55-year-old Mohammed
Rafiq Butt, died of heart failure at the Hudson County jail in Kearny, New
Jersey, on 23 October.
In some ways, things have calmed down since those panicked days in
September and October. A private support group for detainees in Washington
called Solidarity USA reports that most of those who manage to hook up
with lawyers are gradually managing to get out of detention, either
winning the right to stay in the United States or getting the deportation
procedure carried out swiftly and efficiently. Things remain grim,
however, for those who either cannot afford legal representation or cannot
make contact with the outside world from their holding cells.
"I just got a call from an Egyptian gentleman who has been held in the
county jail on immigration charges for three months," Nubani says. "He
doesn't know when they are going to deport him. He is just one of those
'unnamed persons'. There are literally dozens of people like that."
The Justice Department said recently that the immigration authorities were
still holding 327 people in custody in connection with 11 September, well
down from the peak last autumn. But that number is likely to go back up
again. Last month, Ashcroft issued a so-called "absconders apprehension
initiative", in which he earmarked 6,000 Arab men known to have outstayed
their visas for immediate deportation . a moved denounced by immigration
lawyers as blatant discrimination since there are more than 300,000 other
people known to be in the United States on expired visas who have not been
targetted. Last week, The New York Times reported that the Justice
Department had blocked the deportation of 87 detainees cleared for
departure by the immigration authorities so it could continue to carry out
background checks. No evidence has emerged that any of the 87 was involved
in the attacks on the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon.
This heightened prosecutorial zeal has left immigration lawyers and Muslim
and Arab lobby groups deeply concerned. Particularly alarming is the
increasing reliance on judicial secrecy . something that has been a
feature of immigration cases since 1996 but was considered, until
recently, highly controversial and of dubious constitutional validity.
John Ashcroft's department has not only made use of secret evidence in
case after case in the past few months; it has also issued an executive
ruling, independent of any act of Congress, authorising the immigration
courts to close their proceedings to the outside world.
"[This ruling] is absolutely an outrage, it's got no authority
whatsoever," says Marc Van Der Hout, one of the leading immigration
lawyers in the United States, based in San Francisco. "As the federal
appeals courts have ruled again and again, secret evidence is inherently
untrustworthy. The Justice Department is really taking advantage of 11
September to put forward a lot of proposals that it had in its hip pocket
beforehand: restrict the rights of immigrants; keep people detained for
long periods of time; bypass a lot of the rulings of immigration judges;
and ultimately have the Attorney General dictate what happens."
One of the changes of recent months, Van Der Hout says, was to make the
Attorney General the final arbiter of immigration cases as well as their
chief prosecutor. "He is basically deciding, 'Do I like what I'm saying?'
It's an absurd system that eviscerates the rights of immigrants."
The pessimism and anger are echoed in the Arab American community,
particularly among those who have brushed up against the immigration
courts in the past. "Before 11 September, there was room for debate and
challenge," says Imad Hamad of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination
Committee, who fought and eventually won a case based on secret evidence
that sought to tar him as a radical Palestinian militant. "Now it is more
dangerous and more complicated. The general mood around the country is
that anything is permissible as long as it is justified in the name of
safety and security. It's a very unfortunate situation for anyone who is
caught in the middle, such as Mr Haddad."
Global Relief was the third major US-based Islamic charity to be caught up
in President Bush's anti-terrorist dragnet in the wake of 11 September. In
contrast to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, which had been
investigated by federal authorities for years for suspected links to
suicide bombers in the Israeli-occupied territories, its operations had
appeared to most observers to be entirely above board. It had a donor base
of 20,000 people and disbursed about $5m [£3m] a year to 22 countries,
supporting hospitals and schools and providing emergency relief to victims
of earthquake, drought and war across the Islamic world. The only question
mark came about 18 months ago, when Global Relief's treasurer was
questioned by the FBI about a fund-raising event at a Texas mosque that
was suspected of having links to Osama bin Laden. According to some
reports, Global Relief was temporarily put on a White House list of
organisations that are suspected of terrorist links. But the matter went
no further at the time.
After the 11 September outrage, Rabih Haddad went out of his way to
condemn the attacks, earning praise from Christian and Jewish leaders in
Michigan for his stance. That appeared to count for nothing, however, when
the authorities pounced in December. According to Nubani, the immigration
service claimed its decision to arrest Haddad had nothing to do with the
asset-freezing operation, which just happened to fall on the same day.
There was no word on Haddad's whereabouts for 48 hours after his arrest;
according to his lawyers, the judge's decision to deny him bail was
subsequently justified by the fact that immigration officials found a
hunting rifle . fully licensed . in his apartment.
The co-ordinated Nato swoops on Global Relief's Balkan outposts were even
less tender. In Kosovo, KFOR troops in Pristina entered the charity's
field office . used as a school to teach women English and word processing
. and arrested two Iraqi nationals, one a doctor and the other an
administrator. "One of them was beaten senseless by KFOR troops. For a
week he could not control his urine," the Washington lawyer who is
representing Global Relief, Roger Simmons, alleges. "It got so bad he
asked permission for a holy man to allow him to commit suicide. The
request was denied."
The men were held in solitary confinement, Simmons says, spoken to only in
English, which they do not understand, and talked into signing documents,
also in English. "We don't know what they signed. We were not given a
copy, and nor were they." Then, after six weeks in custody, the two men
were exonerated and released. There was no apology. Just a few days ago,
Simmons adds, KFOR returned Global Relief's documents and said it had
permission to resume operations in Kosovo . a logistical impossibility as
long as the organisation's funds remain frozen by the US government.
A KFOR spokesman confirmed the broad timeline of the men's detention,
although he insisted they had not been mistreated. "The detainees were
held in a secure facility and had access to representation and visitors.
All their rights were carefully respected... No one was beaten," the
spokesman, Gottfried Salchner, said. In December, a KFOR news release
boasted that the Global Relief operation was "another example of KFOR
ensuring a safe and secure environment... through dynamic,
intelligence-led military operations". Yesterday, even as Lt-Col Salchner
acknowledged that KFOR would take no further action against Global Relief,
he insisted on Nato's right to use "all means" to combat terrorism.
"To my knowledge, there was no basis for what they did at all," Simmons
says. "What has happened to Global Relief is a horrendous story. And from
Rabih Haddad's standpoint, it is even worse."
It is far from clear where the US government is going with the case.
According to Nubani, government prosecutors at Haddad's most recent
hearing last week even acknowledged that they had no criminal charges to
bring against him or against the charity, leaving only a deportation
proceeding to pursue. Mrs al-Rushaid, meanwhile, has been served with a
deportation order of her own, along with three of her four children (the
fourth was born in the United States and has citizenship).
Lawsuits are flying in all directions. Global Relief is suing several US
media organs for defamation, and has gone to court to press for the return
of its assets. Congressman Conyers and the American Civil Liberties Union,
meanwhile, have filed a lawsuit to try to open Haddad's trial hearings to
the public. "We have not seen a shred of evidence linking the charity in
any way to terrorism," Conyers says in a direct challenge to the Justice
Department. "If the government has evidence, they should produce it."
Mrs al-Rushaid says her husband's morale remains strong, despite
everything, and that they still believe in America as a country and an
ideal. "When we came, it was because of what it stood for . equality and
freedom for all," she says. "There is a big factor of disappointment, of
course. But I still want to live here, still want to be part of this land.
Hopefully, it's going to change."
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