Breaking: FBI Interrogated Gulet Mohamed Without Counsel at DC Airport

[marmar]

from Mother Jones:



UPDATE: Gulet Mohamed was released by the FBI over two hours after he was detained at Dulles airport by government agents. He left Dulles for his home in Alexandria, Virginia, without saying much about the questioning (at his lawyer's suggestion). But as he was entering a taxi, a reporter asked, "What everyone wants to know is, are you a terrorist?" Mohamed replied, "I am not a terrorist."


FBI agents have detained and are interrogating Gulet Mohamed, an American teen who was detained in Kuwait for a month, without counsel at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC, Mohamed's lawyer said Friday morning.

Mohamed's entire family was waiting for the teen, who says he was beaten and harshly interrogated in Kuwait by unknown officials and intimidated and repeatedly interrogated by the FBI despite asking repeatedly for his lawyer and invoking his right to remain silent. But a customs official called Mohamed's lawyer, Gadeir Abbas, on an airport phone around 7:30 a.m. and informed him that Mohamed would not be emerging. When Abbas demanded to represent his client, he says the customs official suggested he call the FBI's 1-800 number and then hung up. (I witnessed Abbas' end of the phone conversation.)

"It's outrageous that after the manifestly objectionable treatment that the US government has visited upon Gulet that they continue to violate his rights and cause his family distress," Abbas tells Mother Jones. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/01/breaking-fbi-interrogating-gulet-mohamed-without-counsel-dc-airport

[burnsei sensei]

1. They call this decent police work?

The harrassment of one man is a waste of public time and money.
To harrass is not to investigate, collect information or understand what is happening or what is not happening.
The FBI is obtuse in its approach.

[leveymg]

2. When you're passing through Immigration, you're in legal no-man's land. No right to an att'y there.

That's why, if you are facing hostile questioning, it's a really bad idea to answer any substantive questions without counsel other than to insist that one is a U.S. Citizen with a lawful passport and are thus entitled, by law, to admission.

They can take you into custody at the Port-of-Entry, but they can't detain or interrogate you for a prolonged period without charges or a warrant. If they do detain a US Citizen or Lawful Resident without charges, one's lawyer should file an Emergency Habeas Corpus with a U.S. District Judge. CBP may threaten one with a period of detention pending a hearing before an Immigration Judge on the issue of citizenship, but counsel may still go immediately to US District Court to seek release.

This is without reference to the particulars of Mr. Mohamed's case. If I were with the FBI, I would also try to question him at the airport, but would have to release him after a couple hours if he didn't incriminate himself and there wasn't enough to charge him with anything.

However, if they really want to hold onto you, the feds will do as they did in the Jose Padilla case: remove you to another federal facility without giving your family or lawyer notice. A kind of internal rendition. In the Rumsfeld v. Padilla case, SCOTUS found by a 5-4 that the habeas petition had been misfiled because it was filed in NY and named Def. Sec. Rumsfeld instead of the brig commander in S. Carolina where Padilla had been moved without notice. That presumably remains a legal tactic.