The Daily Beast – by Spencer Ackerman
For the 18-year lifespan of the war on terrorism, an obscure provision of the PATRIOT Act permitting the indefinite detention of non-citizens on U.S. soil has gone unused. But to keep a Palestinian man behind bars even after he finished serving his sentence, the Trump administration has fired this bureaucratic Chekhov’s gun.
Adham Amin Hassoun, now in his late 50s, has spent nearly the entire war on terrorism in cages. First picked up on an immigration violation in June 2002, he ended up standing trial alongside once-suspected “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla. But Hassoun was never accused of any act or plot of violence. His crime was cutting checks to extremist-tied Muslim charities operating in places like Kosovo and Chechnya that Congress outlawed after the 9/11 attacks. Hassoun wrote all but one of those checks before 9/11.
Sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, Hassoun should have been a free man in 2017. Instead, he found himself in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which locked him up in western New York. It was there that Hassoun’s case turned extraordinary.
ICE wanted to deport Hassoun, but his statelessness as a Palestinian got in the way. No country—not the Lebanon of his birth, not the Israel that occupies the West Bank and Gaza—was willing to take him. Aided by attorneys at the University of Buffalo Law School, Hassoun in January won what should have been his freedom, on the grounds that his deportation was unlikely.
The Trump administration instead declared him a threat to national security. It did so at first using an also-obscure immigration regulation designed to sidestep a 2001 Supreme Court ruling imposing a six-month detention limit. And it was aided by a testimonial, under seal, of Hassoun’s alleged misdeeds behind bars as related by what his attorneys describe as jailhouse snitches who provided second- or third-hand accounts. But as the government fought what had become a habeas corpus case for Hassoun’s release, the Department of Homeland Security invoked, for the first time in U.S. government history, section 412 of the PATRIOT Act.
Section 412 gives the government broad powers to detain non-citizens on American soil whom it can’t deport but deems, on “reasonable grounds,” to be engaged in “activity that endangers the national security of the United States.” It makes that determination for a six-month period that it can renew without limit. To little fanfare, the former acting secretary of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan, informed Hassoun on Aug. 9 that “you will therefore remain in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pending your removal from the United States or reconsideration of this decision.”
Attorneys for Hassoun, who were in federal court on Friday to argue for his freedom, are stunned at the invocation of Section 412. They noted that the PATRIOT Act provision is written to “take [a non-citizen] into custody,” not to retroactively designate someone already in detention as a threat.
“If the government were to prevail in its claim of extraordinary and unprecedented executive power, the government would be free to lock up non-citizens indefinitely based solely on executive say-so, even after they completed serving their sentences,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
ICE, citing the ongoing litigation, declined comment. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
McAleen claimed in his August invocation of the PATRIOT Act that he did so because Hassoun “assumed a leadership role in a criminal conspiracy to recruit fighters and provide material support to terrorist groups, and because you pose a continuing threat to recruit, plan, participate in, and provide material support for terrorist activity.”
Yet the federal judge in his criminal case, Marcia G. Cooke, painted a far different picture of Hassoun during his 2008 sentencing. There was “no evidence that these defendants personally maimed, killed or kidnapped anyone in the United States or elsewhere,” and the government could find “no identifiable victims” as the result of their actions, she said.
Cooke, a George W. Bush appointee, specifically rejected the life sentence the Justice Department sought for Hassoun, noting that years of government surveillance on him never resulted in his criminal arrest. “This fact does not support the government’s argument that Mr. Hassoun poses such a danger to the community that he needs to be imprisoned for the rest of his life,” Cooke ruled.
American Nationals are ‘non-citizens’ as we are sovereigns
ICE wanted to deport Hassoun, but his statelessness as a Palestinian got in the way. No country—not the Lebanon of his birth, not the Israel that occupies the West Bank and Gaza—was willing to take him. Aided by attorneys at the University of Buffalo Law School, Hassoun in January won what should have been his freedom, on the grounds that his deportation was unlikely.
THIS MAN HAS NO “COUNTRY” BECAUSE THE JEWS HAVE TAKEN HIS LAND. THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO AMERICA, IF IT ISNT STOPPED.
YOU WILL EVENTUALLY BE DESTITUTE. EVEN THE SPOT WHERE YOU PLANT YOUR ASS TO REST EACH EVENING WILL BE SUMMARILY “POSTED”, WITH A GATE AND PADLOCK PROVIDED FOR PROTECTION. YOU CAN STAND AS YOU EAT YOUR FISH HEAD, PEERING OVER THE RIM OF THE BOWL IN ANGER, IMAGINING, “WHAT IF WE HAD DEFENDED OUR HONOR? WHAT IF WE HAD DEFENDED OUR LAW…….????????????”
TIME GROWS SHORT FOR YOUR PROGENY AMERICA!!
WILL YOU HONOR HER LAW? OR WILL YOU ALLOW YOURSELVES TO BE DESTROYED?
Sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act dictate the military arrest and indefinite detention of American nationals without due process of the law. We will not even get an admiralty court hearing. The fact that they even wrote this treachery is a declaration of war. It would seem the declarations of war are piling up like the infringements. How much are we going to take?
YA GOT ME HENRY. IVE HAD TO UP MY BLOOD PRESSURE MEDS TWICE LAST MONTH.
ALL I CAN SAY, IS AFTER COMING HERE, AND LEARNING THAT I WAS NOT “ALONE”, THESE ASSHOLES BETTER THANK GOD THAT I AM A CRIPPLE….