U. S. Administration Not Above The Law

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Not above the law

Judge condemns administration's hide-and-seek with prisoners.

(Updated Thursday, December 23, 2004, 5:30 AM)

In another blow to the Bush administration's efforts to keep terrorist suspects out of the U.S. legal system, a federal judge has ruled that a naturalized citizen now jailed in Saudi Arabia is subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. If the decision stands, it strikes another blow for the rule of law that even the war on terror must not be allowed to undermine.

While studying in Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Abu Ali was arrested 18 months ago, accused of having ties with several U.S. resident Arabs charged with plotting to aid a terrorist group abroad. Members of his family in Virginia filed documents that persuaded the judge the Saudis were holding him only at U.S. request.

Judge John Bates cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last June in which the high court ruled that prisoners held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, despite the foreign location, fell within U.S. jurisdiction and thus had a right to challenge their detention before a U.S. judge.

This case is but one example of an estimated two dozen "ghost prisoners" whom U.S. authorities are believed to have moved around to keep them from being visited by officials of the Red Cross, which under the Geneva Conventions must have access.

"In short," wrote Bates, "the United States is … arguing for nothing less than the unreviewable powers to separate an American citizen from the most fundamental of his constitutional rights, merely by choosing where he will be detained and who will detain him."

Worse, the likelihood in some cases — especially when the custodian is Saudi Arabia or Egypt — is that the detainee may be subjected to torture as part of the interrogation process.

That is not a fanciful idea, given the multiplying revelations about abuses of prisoners in U.S.-run detention facilities — in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Both the torture itself and the transfer of prisoners to countries where they may face torture violate the Convention Against Torture, which the United States has signed and incorporated into U.S. law.

Since last spring's revelations about mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, senior Bush officials have claimed the abuses were regrettable examples of "rogue" individuals acting against rules against such behavior.

Yet each new exposure — the latest: reports of FBI agents witnessing brutal treatment of prisoners in both Iraq and at Guantánamo — gives the lie to such claims. Pressure on the Bush administration must be unrelenting to ensure that the truth about the extent of prisoner abuse is fully spelled out.

It's too late to undo what's been done, but it's not too late to show that this country, which has always held itself up as a champion of human rights, is at least willing to tell the truth about its failure to measure up to its own standards.

http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/sto...10541340c.html

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