The story was based on a report in the Washington Post, which quoted FBI and U.S. Justice Department investigators who said that they are "frustrated" by the lack of cooperation from some among the more than 800 people who have been detained since September 11. Although the government says they have been detained in connection with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, not one has yet been charged with any crime associated with the airplane hijackings and suicide flights. Most are being held on unrelated charges, such as immigration violations, traffic violations, or under vague "material witness" provisions.

In the October 21 Post article, unnamed FBI agents focused their comments on four men held in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center, the jail for several hundred people rounded up since September 11 in the federal manhunt. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan who was detained in August; Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, from India; and Nabil Almarabh, a former cabdriver in Boston have each exercised their Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer questions during weeks of interrogations.

Some FBI and Justice Department agents are raising that "traditional civil liberties may have to be set aside if they are to extract information," the Post wrote.

"Among the alternative strategies under discussion are using drugs for pressure tactics, such as those employed occasionally by Israeli interrogators, to extract information," reported the Post. "Another idea is extraditing the suspects to allied countries where security services sometimes employ threats to family members or resort to torture."

According to law enforcement officials, the FBI has already tried to bribe the four men, offering lighter sentences, money, jobs, and a new identity for themselves and their families in the U.S., to no avail. Under U.S. law, interrogators in criminal cases can also lie to try to pressure suspects, something that has also evidently failed.  
 
'Due process strangles us'
David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who earlier obtained the release of Middle Eastern clients after they had been detained for years based on "secret evidence," said that in the current crisis "the use of force to extract information could happen.... If there is a ticking bomb, it is not an easy issue, it's tough."

Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel during the Clinton administration, recently wrote that, in the Supreme Court, five justices in a recent deportation case recognized that the "genuine danger" represented by terrorism "heightened deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to matters of national security."

Former attorney general Richard Thornburgh said, "We put emphasis on due process and sometimes it strangles us.... [L]egally admissible evidence in court may not be the be-all and end-all." According to the Post, Thornburgh compared the intelligence-gathering approach that is needed in relation to the September 11 attacks to "brutal tactics in wartime used to gather intelligence."

The open discussion by FBI and Justice Department officials about using torture and threats are part of an attempt to win broader acceptance and public support for methods that local, state, and federal police agencies already use when they feel they can get away with it.

In 1997, Hani Abdel Rahim al-Sayegh, a Saudi citizen, was arrested in Canada and transferred to the U.S. for interrogation about the bombing of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Saudi Arabia. When he refused to cooperate with the U.S. investigation, the FBI threatened to send him back to Saudi Arabia, where he could have faced beheading.

"He called their bluff and went back, was not executed and is in jail," a government official told the Post.  
 
Four convicted in embassy bombings
In 1998, Mohammed Rashed Daoud Owhali was snatched near Nairobi, Kenya, and interrogated by the FBI and Kenyan authorities for two weeks before he "confessed" to participating in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that same year.

Owhali later said that one cop threatened to harm his family and that he was told by U.S. agents that if he demanded a lawyer he would be left in the hands of the Kenyans where "you will be hanged from your neck like a dog." U.S. government officials also maintained that Owhali did not have a right to an attorney during questioning in Kenya because they were operating under Kenyan law.

After the embassy bombings, four men--Mohammed Rashed Daoud Owhali, Wadih Hage, Khalfan Khamis Mohammed, and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh--were either charged with involvement in a "global plot" to kill Americans around the world or with directly assisting the bombings. Three were kidnapped from other countries to face trial in the U.S.--Odeh from Pakistan, Owhali from Kenya, and Mohammed from South Africa.

After frame-up trials and convictions the four were sentenced to life in prison without parole on October 18. All four had pleaded not guilty.

The New York Times reported October 19 that the government has "acknowledged that Mr. Hage, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Lebanon, had no role in the bombings." Prosecutors successfully pushed for a life sentence, claiming that he had raised money for Al Qaeda sometime before the bombings and that federal investigations had been delayed because he had twice committed perjury.

Some voices are beginning to be raised against the accelerated assault on democratic rights since September 11. Some who have been released from prison are telling their stories of abusive treatment, intimidation, and infringements upon their rights.

"We have only the slightest idea at this stage of how many people have been arrested, how many are still being held in jail, what they have been charged with," said Steve Shapiro, national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union. CNN reported that the government has thrown an unprecedented shroud of secrecy over the arrests and won gag orders barring most defense attorneys from even disclosing their clients' names.

The NAACP, which has given full support to the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan, issued a statement October 22 distancing itself somewhat from the government's domestic moves. A press release stated that the organization "strongly urges lawmakers and administrators to be mindful of the need to vigorously protect and strengthen the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans as new legislation or agencies are created."
 
 
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Defend workers' rights  
 
 
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