Original Article Rights Groups Fault White House for Jailing of Terror Suspects By ERIC LICHTBLAU Published: June 26, 2005 WASHINGTON, June 26 - Two leading civil rights groups charge in a new study that the Bush administration has twisted the American system of due process "beyond recognition" in jailing at least 70 terror suspects as "material witnesses" since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the groups are calling on Congress to impose tougher safeguards. The report, which is to be released on Monday by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, found that the 70 suspects, a quarter of them American citizens and all but one Muslim men, were jailed often for weeks or months at a time in American facilities without being charged with a crime. Ultimately, only seven men were charged with supporting terrorism, with four convicted so far, the report said. The report charges that many of the men who were held as material witnesses were "thrust into a Kafkaesque world of indefinite detention without charges, secret evidence, and baseless accusations." With Congress now locked in a fierce dispute over the government's counterterrorism powers under the Patriot Act, the new report reflects an effort by civil rights groups to expand the debate to a range of other legal tools that the Bush administration is using in its campaign against terrorism. Aides to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee, said he would introduce legislation aimed at limiting the government's ability to detain a material witness indefinitely. The material witness law, enacted by Congress in 1984, allows federal authorities to hold a person indefinitely if they suspect he has information about a crime and may be unwilling to cooperate or poses a risk of fleeing. The law has been used for many years to compel the testimony of thousands of illegal immigrants whom authorities feared would flee the country rather than cooperate in investigations into border smuggling and other crimes. But since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has significantly expanded its use in terrorism investigations, and Bush administration officials acknowledge that they see the law as a valuable tool in detaining American citizens and others whom they view not merely as witnesses, but terror suspects. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, in a speech last year in Washington while he was still serving as White House counsel, said that when the authorities took into custody an American citizen who was a suspected terrorist, they would consider a range of options, "including the potential for a criminal prosecution, detention as a material witness, and detention as an enemy combatant." Justice Department officials defended their expanded view of the law in interviews and recent congressional testimony, saying that they have sought to use it sparingly and to follow all legal safeguards allowing those material witnesses who are jailed to contact lawyers and to challenge their detention. In testimony last month before a House subcommittee, Chuck Rosenberg, a former senior Justice Department official in Washington who is now interim United States attorney in Texas, called the material witness law "an important, constitutional tool to secure the testimony of a witness whose testimony might otherwise not be available." The only appellate court to rule on the law since the Sept. 11 attacks upheld its use in the case of a permanent resident from Jordan who had contact with a Sept. 11 hijacker while a student in San Diego. Kevin Madden, spokesman for the Justice Department, said in response to the report's accusations that "critics of law enforcement fail to recognize that material witness statutes are designed with judicial oversight safeguards and are critical to aiding criminal investigations ranging from organized crime rackets to human trafficking." But in their new report, Human Rights Watch and the A.C.L.U. charged that the Justice Department has abused the law in order to detain people as witnesses whom it does not otherwise have enough evidence to charge with terrorism. The Justice Department has essentially succeeded in setting a precedent for lowering the standard they have to meet to jail someone," said Anjana Malhotra, who wrote the report, which was financed in part by George Soros's Open Society Institute. Human rights groups have complained since soon after the Sept. 11 attacks that people regarded as terrorist suspects were being unfairly detained with insufficient evidence and mistreated while in American custody. But their findings and accusations have taken on greater prominence in the last year in the eyes of both critics and supporters amid evidence of abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Guantnamo Bay, Cuba. Amnesty International's recent characterization of Guantnamo Bay as a "gulag" drew particularly strong attacks from the Bush administration and other conservatives. The Justice Department has not given a public accounting of jailed material witnesses since early 2003, when it told Congress it had detained fewer than 50. The new study sought to catalogue and quantify the treatment of the witnesses, and it found that a third of the 70 material witnesses it identified were jailed for at least two months. The study found that there might well have been more than 70 material witnesses, but secrecy provisions prevented a definitive tally. Of the 70 who were positively identified, 42 were released without any charges being filed, 20 were charged with non-terrorist offenses like bank or credit card fraud, four were convicted of supporting terrorism, and three others are awaiting trial on terrorism charges. More than a third were ultimately deported. None are still known to be held as witnesses. Few of the material witnesses made national headlines. Among the notable exceptions were Zacarias Moussaoui, recently convicted of terrorism in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks; Jose Padilla, who was later declared an enemy combatant after authorities accused him of plotting to build a "dirty bomb;" and Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim lawyer in Portland who was jailed in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings after the F.B.I. mistakenly matched a fingerprint of his to the scene. In the end, government officials apologized to Mr. Mayfield and at least a dozen other material witnesses who they admitted had been wrongfully detained, the report said. "But," it added, "apologies are poor compensation for loss of liberty, as well as the emotional toll that incarceration has had on the detainees and their families."