[I think that what we have seen since 9-11 has proven the statement that immigrants and people who are here without nationality are perhaps the weakest link in the civil liberties chain in this country.

On the 18 of September, The New York Times ran a headline: "United States Widens Its Policy of Detaining Suspects." Prior to 9-11 the immigration service had a rule, a regulation, that a person who was detained had to be charged within 24 hours. That was immediately extended to 48 hours after 9-11, and then in the PATRIOT Act extended to seven days but with unlimited detention on the say so of the Justice Department and Immigration Service in the case of a national emergency.

After 9-11, between 1,200 and 2,000 non-immigrant aliens, Muslims and Arabs, a few Sikhs and some Israelis were taken into custody. They were taken into custody on the basis of tips from ex-spouses, ex-girlfriends or boyfriends, neighbors, employers, fellow employees.

The FBI fanned out across the country interviewing thousands of people, taking them into custody and sending them off, the bulk of them, here to New York and to two county jails in New Jersey. No names were released, no location of detention, no charges of what was pending against these people. They came from all walks of life. News stand operators, taxi drivers, doctors.

Some of them were placed in so-called Special Housing Unit, which is really solitary confinement with 23-hour solitary lockdown. Many of them had lack of access to lawyers or friends or family since they had been moved from the point of arrest to different parts of the country so they would be denied that access.

Dogs patrolled in the corridors in some of the county jails. They were served religiously inappropriate food. And they had lights on for 24 hours. Some of them were subjected to beatings by their guards.

The Department of Justice indicated that 548 people were being held on immigration charges while another 93 of these people were being charged with various criminal offenses, all of which were unrelated to the terrorist attack of 9-11. The offenses concerned driver license fraud, and other generally non-serious violations.

The difficulty here is that these immigrants did not have the same kind of rights as a person who is charged with a crime. They are not entitled to appointed counsel. They are only entitled to retain counsel of their choice if they can afford it. And they were also being transferred to these county jails in various parts of the country where they were isolated from any contact with anybody they might know who could assist them.

Some of these detainees were designated not as immigration violators, not as criminals, but as "material witnesses." A material witness is a person who the government says has information that may be material to a trial concerning 9-11.

A person is held on the basis of being a material witness when an FBI agent files an affidavit that is a basis for the detention and all proceedings relative to that material witness are also held in a closed proceeding, closed to the media. Moreover, there's a gag order on every attorney who is appointed to represent, or is retained to represent, a material witness.

It was also announced that 5,000 non-citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 who had entered the United States from January 2000 would be called in for "voluntary interviews." And because the FBI was so over stretched they said we will ask police departments around the country to conduct these interviews for us.

They announced several weeks ago that this first interview process had been completed and that half of the 5,000 had been interviewed; 20 of whom had been charged with some criminal law violation, none of which related to 9-11.

And in issuing this order Ashcroft said information is the best friend of prevention. The national FBI information center database is used by 650,000 local, state and federal law enforcement officials. The FBI began entering thousands of names into the system before the winter Olympics. Now, with this announcement, thousands more people who have not committed any crimes, have no criminal history, are now going to be entered in this system so that if you're driving in some back road up in North Dakota and you're speeding you'd better watch out. The Department of Justice has admitted that it has no set standard to determine why someone is placed on the list. And that the names would only be removed if the terrorism suspicions proved to be unfounded. And this is not just a hypothetical situation. One could go on and on. The measures and procedures used to date demonstrate to people, that they're sending out this message of profiling of the worst sort, that Arabs and South Asian Muslims are under a cloud of suspicion in this country. All of this on the basis of their religion and national origin.

Given the fact that not one single person of those detained post 9-11 has been charged with any crime connected to either the terror attack of 9-11 or any other act of terrorism, can the government's policy of jail first and ask questions later, be justified? Thank you.

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