Supreme Court rejects appeal over 9/11 detentions

The US Supreme Court refused today to consider whether the government properly withheld names and other details about hundreds of foreigners detained in the weeks and months after the September 11 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 Centre and the Pentagon.

Most of the more than 700 detainees at issue in the case have since been deported. Some picked up after September 11 were charged with crimes, and others were held as material witnesses.

Only Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who was detained before the September 11 attacks, is being prosecuted in connection with the attacks.

A Washington study centre critical of the Bush administration responses after September 11 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.

“The Justice Department is keeping the names secret to cover up its misconduct,” said Kate Martin, director of the Centre 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 organisations 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 lawyers 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 of Saudi origin 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 US post-September 11 terror investigation.