Justices Allow Policy of Silence on 9/11 Detainees
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal challenging the secrecy surrounding the arrest and detention of hundreds of people, nearly all Muslim men, in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Without comment, the court let stand a ruling by a federal appeals court here that had accepted the Bush administration's rationale for refusing to disclose either the identities of those it arrested, most of whom have since been deported for immigration violations unrelated to terrorism, or the circumstances of the arrests.
A complete list of the names "would give terrorist organizations a composite picture of the government investigation," a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a 2-to-1 ruling last June. "The judiciary owes some measure of deference to the executive in cases implicating national security," the majority said.
The dissenting judge, David S. Tatel, said the majority had "converted deference into acquiescence" by accepting a categorical secrecy policy without requiring the government to show why the names of those who had been cleared of terrorist connections could not be made public. Of the nearly 1,000 people arrested, the government eventually released the names of 129 against whom it brought criminal charges.
The Supreme Court's action on Monday brought an end to one of the biggest court cases related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Even though the justices gave no reason for declining to take the appeal, the development was undoubtedly a welcome one for the administration after several recent judicial setbacks.
Over the administration's opposition, the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear appeals on behalf of 16 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay and an American citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, confined to a naval brig in South Carolina, all designated "enemy combatants" by the government.
The case the court turned down on Monday had in fact been the occasion for one of those judicial setbacks when a federal district judge, Gladys Kessler, ruled in August 2002 in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by a coalition of civil liberties groups that the government had to disclose most of the names. This was the ruling that the appeals court overturned nearly a year later.
