Apr 9, 2002 3 min read

Since Sept. 11, the Justice Department has detained hundreds of Arabs and Muslims for alleged immigration violations and possible terrorist links. In defiance of precedents, the department has refused to identify them and, since Sept. 21, ordered that their immigration hearings be closed – no family, no press, no public and, since the cases are kept off the dockets, no notice. The secrecy was automatic if the FBI identified a case as of “special interest.” Thanks to a federal judge in Michigan, that is likely to change. Judge Nancy Edmunds ruled that the policy of wholesale and indiscriminate secrecy was unconstitutional.

The instant case involves Rabih Haddad, a Lebanese living in Ann Arbor, Mich., who ran an Islamic charity that the FBI suspects of having terrorist ties. Haddad was taken into custody Dec. 14, and now the Justice Department is trying to deport Haddad, his wife and three of their four children for overstaying their visas. The department tried to do so in secret until Edmunds intervened.

The Justice Department’s reasons for the secrecy are unconvincing. By refusing to identify those it holds, the department says it avoids stigmatizing those who are innocent and avoids tipping off their fellow terrorists if they are not. Even the dimmest al Qaeda operative might suspect that a colleague gone missing for eight months might be in federal custody. And in Haddad’s case, his arrest was widely publicized but he was still subjected to three secret hearings until local news organizations, the ACLU and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., intervened.

A disinterested observer has to wonder how many of the detainees have been cowed or bullied by the authorities to remain silent, to refrain from seeking a lawyer – if they even know how – or from making a stink in the press.

There may be grounds for secret hearings, but those cases must surely be the exception and certainly not solely on the Justice Department’s say-so. The hearings should be, as Edmunds ruled, “presumptively open,” not arbitrarily secret.

“Openness is necessary for the public to maintain confidence in the value and soundness of the government’s actions, as secrecy only breeds suspicion as to why the government is proceeding against Haddad and aliens like him,” Edmunds wrote. It’s dismaying that this didn’t seem to be self-evident to Attorney General John Ashcroft

As for the hundreds of other Arab and Muslim detainees, the department should act expeditiously to clear them, deport them or charge them – and do so in public.