During his tenure as a chief federal trial judge in Manhattan, Attorney General Michael Mukasey reported to The Wall Street Journal that the statute allowing the warrants “has its perils” and told The Washington Post that “the current legal system is not well-equipped to aid a largely military effort to fight terrorists.” The government has gone too far in its post-9/11 use of the statute by detaining these people with no evidence of their crimes, working only with a suspicion based on certain aspects of their lifestyle, especially their religion. I understand that after 9/11 the government has been trying to prevent another attack, but its current actions under the material witness statute have resulted in—and will unquestionably continue to cause—the uncharged detainment of innocent people. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt reasonably believes that “the Justice Department’s unlawful use of the material witness statute is perhaps the most extreme but least well-known of the government’s post-Sept. 11 abuses.”
Specifically, the government has intentionally misconstrued the statute’s use in order to thwart due process in two ways. Anti-terrorist officials have starkly decreased the evidentiary requirements for holding someone and have stretched the statute to apply to suspects rather than to witnesses as originally intended. ACLU legislative counsel Chris Anderson told The Washington Post, “The United States does not have a tradition of holding people … without charges.” However, the current actions of the U.S. government do not bode well for that tradition.
The Justice Department continues to defend its actions under the statute and refuses to search for different ways to detain its suspects, which could be more successful and less likely to apprehend innocent people. Even Mukasey, who supported such actions, admits that the current actions under this statute lead to mistakes and injure innocent people. Additionally, many witnesses were not told the reason for their confinement, allowed immediate access to a lawyer or even brought to testify in a court or grand jury proceeding. Most of the witnesses were held for more than two months, mostly because they were Muslim or simply because they were interested in planes, and only 13 received an apology. After they returned home to a family that struggled to stay afloat with one less adult and one less income contributor, the witnesses were still plagued by suspicion from their neighbors. After all, the government doesn’t throw an innocent person in jail, right? Senator of Vermont Patrick Leahy told the Associated Press “I am troubled by reports that this narrow law has been twisted from one of a specific statute to secure testimony, into a broad detention authority that has resulted in some notorious abuses.” Abuses that go against our central concept of the presumption of innocence should be deeply disturbing to all Americans.
Even though the abuse has been brought to the attention of Congress, still nothing has been done to prevent further problems. Several years ago, a bill was introduced to limit the statute to only that which Congress intended in 1984, the detention of witnesses and not suspects. However the bill did not make it to the Senate. Shouldn’t Congress be interested in the detention of innocent people? Is it not the job of Congress to pass legislation in order to protect the interests and rights of the people? As citizens we should not allow the government to mistreat our fellow citizens, especially since these harmful actions have been proven ineffective.