Ashcroft Hails Supreme Court Action

He said the Justice Department now has successfully defended against repeated legal challenges to its post-Sept. 11 policies.

Since the attacks, "the Department of Justice has used all legal tools available to disrupt and neutralize potential terrorist threats by removing dangerous individuals who have broken our nation's laws from the streets of our communities," Ashcroft said in a statement released after the Supreme Court's action.

"Time and again, the department has successfully defended legal challenges to the tools we have used and actions we have taken to protect the American people. The Supreme Court today refused to disturb a 3rd Circuit ruling that is an important victory in support of our work to secure the nation."

A media consortium in New Jersey had argued in the lower courts that the public and the media had a First Amendment right to know what was going on in the deportation hearings for "special interest" aliens.

Though a federal judge in New Jersey agreed, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit disagreed. Tuesday, the Supreme Court let stand the appeals court decision without comment.

"The 3rd Circuit's decision recognized that open deportation hearings would reveal sensitive information about our ongoing terrorism investigation and aid terrorists targeting our nation and people," Ashcroft said. He cited the panel's finding that "since the primary national policy must be self-preservation, it seems elementary that, to the extent that open deportation hearings might impair national security, that security is implicated."

"Justice Department regulations dating from 1964 have expressly allowed select deportation hearings to be closed to protect public interest," Ashcroft said. "This authority to closed hearings is an important, constitutional tool in this time of war, when we face an unparalleled threat from covert and unknown foes spread across the globe."

Meanwhile, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations did not respond directly to the Supreme Court action, but cited Canadian media reports about a man, Mahmoud Jaballah, who has been in a Toronto jail for 27 months without charge. Jaballah is being held as a security threat.

The man's lawyer claims he is being held "solely because he is an Arab Muslim," CAIR said in a release.

The Canadian reports said a federal judge has ruled that Jaballah's long detention is an abuse of power, but the man cannot apply for bail because he was arrested on a "national security certificate" from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Bail is not allowed, CAIR said, until the courts rule on whether the certificate is reasonable.

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