Supreme Court rejects appeal over secret detentions

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court refused Monday to consider whether the government properly withheld names and other details about hundreds of foreigners detained in the weeks and months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The high court turned down a request to review the secrecy surrounding detainees, nearly all Arabs or Muslims, who were picked up in the United States following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Most of the more than 700 detainees at issue in the case have since been deported. Some picked up after Sept. 11, 2001, were charged with crimes, and others were held as material witnesses. Only Zacarias Moussaoui, who was detained before the attacks, is being prosecuted in connection with them.

A Washington study center critical of the Bush administration responses after Sept. 11, 2001, sued to learn names and other basic information about the detainees. The appeal raises constitutional questions under the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and legal questions under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Accused of misconduct

"The Justice Department is keeping the names secret to cover up its misconduct," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.

"The Justice Department is keeping them secret to cover up the fact that they rounded up innocent Arabs and Muslims instead of suspected terrorists."

Twenty-three news organizations and media groups, including The Associated Press, joined in asking the high court to hear the case.

The government grabbed people on thin suspicion, then moved to deport detainees who had no demonstrated link to terrorism but who had violated civil immigration laws, lawyers for Martin's Washington-based group argued to the court.

The government sealed immigration records and omitted detainees' names from jail rosters, among other tactics, to make sure that details of hundreds of arrests remained secret, the attorneys said.

The high court's decision not to review the case represents a victory for the Bush administration. Last week, the high court disappointed the administration by taking on a higher-profile terrorism case involving the rights of an American citizen captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The Bush administration had argued strongly that it has authority to hold the man, Yaser Esam Hamdi, indefinitely and without charges in a military prison.

The Hamdi case and another testing the legal rights of foreigners detained indefinitely at the Navy's prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, bring the high court into the debate over security and liberty after the terrorist attacks.

The justices had earlier rejected several cases that raised more oblique questions about the government response to the terror threat. One rejected case involved a similar issue to Monday's secrecy case. It asked whether the government could keep reporters and the public away from closed-door deportation hearings.

The Bush administration has argued that releasing names and details of the arrests would give terrorists a window on the U.S. post-Sept. 11 terror investigation.

"In any ongoing law enforcement investigation, requiring the police to open their investigative files and provide a comprehensive list of the persons interviewed and detained -- and by the same token to reveal which persons they have not interviewed and detained -- would necessarily interfere with the investigation by providing a roadmap of law enforcement's activities, strategies and methods," Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued in the latest detainee secrecy case.

A federal appeals court sided with the Bush administration last year.

An audit last year by the inspector general at the Justice Department found "significant problems" with the detentions, including allegations of physical abuse.

The report, released in June, found that many of the 762 illegal aliens were held until cleared by the FBI of any terrorism connections. That process sometimes took months despite a law requiring most aliens to be deported or released within 90 days.

A follow-up analysis in September said the Justice Department still has not adequately addressed how to separate these "special interest" detainees from aliens not suspected of terrorism ties.

The case is Center for National Security Studies v. Justice Department, 03-472.