HARMFUL MATERIAL

There Ought to Be a Law.  It Can’t Happen Here. Americans say both of these things regularly Their ought to be a law conveys our American sense of caution.  We have to watch out. It can’t happen here is a typical american dream. What happens when there is a law and yet things happen here is an american nightmare.  Most Americans believe you can only be arrested for a crime, or for suspicion of having committed a crime, but the truth is the government can arrest you for someone else’s crime if it believes you have evidence material to the case and needs you to provide it.  In the current political environment you are material ready for abuse.

Human Rights Watch has just published Witness to Abuse, which recounts in harsh detail what happens when an impatient government machinery anixous for results in an era of crisis crushes due process and fundamental rights to be informed of reason for arrest, evidence against the accused, and access to legal counsel.  In addition the current representatives have done this all in secret.

The Justice Department has refused to reveal how many material witnesses it has detained in connection with its counterterrorism investigations and has largely ignored repeated Congressional inquiries. After a year of extensive research, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU have confirmed 70 such material witnesses. Sixty-four were of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent; 17 were U.S. citizens, and all but one was Muslim.
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“It’s hard to argue about a national security argument. Anytime I ask[ed] what the basis was it would be a canned national security argument. I would ask: ‘What’s the justification?’ The government responds: ‘National security.’ I would say, ‘What does that mean?’ The government would say: ‘I can’t tell you.’”
—Susan Otto, an attorney who represented material witness Mujahid Menepta in Oklahoma.
--snip--
“I was transferred … to solitary confinement in the Special Housing Unit, or the ‘ninth floor hole.’ The room was maybe six-by-five feet. I was in a small cell for twenty-four hours a day with the lights on. Guards came every ten to fifteen minutes and banged on the door. They look through the hole and stare and looked at me. For two months, I left the cell only for interrogations. Later I was allowed outside after two months but they would leave me out in the freezing cold. I didn’t sleep for one or two months. The guards would bang on the door all night. They would say, ‘This is the guy—the Taliban guy,’ or call me ‘Khan Taliban.’ The guards said so many bad things. They told me: ‘You won’t ever see your family. You’re going to die here. Do you smell the WTC [World Trade Center] smoke? You’re gone. How would you like to die? With the electric chair?’ ... [Whenever I was taken out of my cell] they would twist my hands. My feet were shackled and guards would step on chains. I got a deep cut on my feet. I was stripped too many times to remember and hit on the back. I would be pushed against the wall. Whenever they took me to the FBI, guards would twist my hands and fingers and tell me to ‘Just shut up.’”
—Ayub Ali Khan, an Indian national arrested as a material witness on September 12, 2001 in San Antonio, Texas and held in the Special Housing Unit at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York

[HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH]

MORE ON THIS TO FOLLOW SOON
 

Comments

[Kate]

More absolutely frightening news. These guys really are fascists.