Secret Evidence

Camille Taiara has a very interesting article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on the use of secret evidence against suspected terrorists -- a practice that didn't begin with 9/11, though it's become much more common since then. The center of the story is a Sikh man named Harpel Singh Cheema, imprisoned since 1997 for reasons the reporter does her best to discern. But he's not the only one:

In one such case, a stateless Palestinian by the name of Hany Kiareldeen spent 19 months in jail -- much of it in solitary confinement -- based on secret evidence alleging he was a member of a terrorist organization. Once finally revealed, it turned out the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "evidence" consisted of uncorroborated allegations that terrorists convicted of planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had regularly communicated with Kiareldeen by telephone at his home prior to carrying out their goal. Yet the phone calls had been made months before Kiareldeen had moved into the residence. Kiareldeen didn't even know the group he was accused of corroborating with.

In another case, the INS held seven Iraqis it said entered the country without valid visas -- although they had participated in a failed Central Intelligence Agency plot to overthrow Saddam Hussein and were evacuated from Iraq by U.S. government forces in October 1996 and, indeed, had suffered persecution and torture under Hussein's regime before that.

The article reads like a dark and bitter comedy. One of those Iraqis spent a year in prison, for example, after an incompetent translator "confused KLM, the acronym for a Dutch airline the man had traveled on, with a terrorist group."