Witness to Abuse - Human Rights Watch

Summary
After I got in the cell I went kind of crazy. I was calling the guards to find out exactly what was my
crime. Where’s my lawyer if I have a lawyer. Because nobody told us anything. What’s going to happen
or what’s going on. Nobody answered me so I kept banging on the door. Of course I start crying. … The
guard came, the supervisor or something. He starts yelling at me. I yelled back and I said [I] need to
know why I am here. I need to talk to somebody. He said we don’t know, once we know, we will let you
know. I felt he didn’t know why we were being held. I had nothing to do but sit and cry. That’s
technically all we did. Sit and pray and cry. Sit and pray and cry.
—Tarek Albasti, a U.S. citizen detained in October 2001 by the U.S. Department of
Justice as a material witness and held in solitary confinement in a federal prison in
Chicago. The Department of Justice later apologized to him.
Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every
nation.
—President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 2003
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, at least seventy men living in the United
States—all Muslim but one—have been thrust into a Kafkaesque world of indefinite
detention without charges, secret evidence, and baseless accusations of terrorist links.
They have found themselves not at Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib but in America’s
own federal prison system, victims of the misuse of the federal material witness law in
the U.S. government’s fight against terrorism.
Congress enacted the current material witness law in 1984 to enable the government, in
narrow circumstances, to secure the testimony of witnesses who might otherwise flee to
avoid testifying in a criminal proceeding. If a court agrees that an individual has
information “material” to a criminal proceeding and will likely flee if subpoenaed, the
witness can be locked up—but, in theory, only for as long as is necessary to have him
testify or be deposed.
Since September 11, however, the U.S. Department of Justice has deliberately used the
law for a very different purpose: to secure the indefinite incarceration of those it has
wanted to investigate as possible terrorist suspects. It has used the law to cast men into
prison without any showing of probable cause that they had committed crimes. The
Justice Department has also refused to respect fundamental constitutional and human
rights of detainees, including the rights to be notified of charges, to have prompt access
1 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH VOL. 17, NO. 2(G)