White House Seeks Secrecy on Detainee

What a surprise. The Administration is trying to keep everything
pertaining to an immigrant's treatment during the 9/11 roundup :under wraps and out of the public eye. Hopefully they won't get away with it:

In an extraordinary request, the Bush administration asked
the Supreme Court on Monday to let it keep its arguments secret in a
case involving an immigrant's challenge of his treatment after the
Sept. 11 terror attacks. Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel wants the high court
to consider whether the government acted improperly by secretly jailing
him after the attacks and keeping his court fight private. He is
supported by more than 20 journalism organizations and media companies.
Solicitor General Theodore Olson told justices in a one-paragraph
filing that "this matter pertains to information that is required to be
kept under seal."
Justices sometimes are asked to keep parts of cases private because of
information sensitive for national security or other reasons, but it's
unusual for an entire filing to be kept secret.

Check out what he was arrested for:

Bellahouel, an Algerian who worked as a waiter in South
Florida, came under FBI scrutiny because hijackers Mohamed Atta and
Marwan al Shehhi dined where he worked in the weeks before the Sept.
11, 2001, attacks.

This guy was a waiter fer chrissakes. He's from a different continent
than Atta and al Shehhi. He's definitely got merit in a wrongful arrest
suit, and I can only imagine what the Administration's top secret
reasons are for wanting to keep it secret.
Maybe they don't want to reveal the intricacies of their ultra
top-secret "he looks pretty brown to me" criminal identification
algorithm.

Posted by flow Frazao on January 7, 2004 at 12:58 PM | Permalink