Government Case Collapses Against Man Jailed Indefinitely Under Patriot Act – By Spencer Ackerman (Daily Beast) / June 22 2020
From his conspiracy conviction to his landmark confinement after he served his prison time, Adham Amin Hassoun is a case study in the metastasis of the Forever War.
Just eight months after the Trump administration invoked an obscure provision of the 2001 Patriot Act to hold him indefinitely, Adham Amin Hassoun is on the verge of taking his first free breath in 18 years, after a federal judge raised “serious concerns about governmental conduct” in the now-junked case against him.
“There’s nothing that tastes better than freedom,” Hassoun, 58, told The Daily Beast from an immigration detention complex at Batavia, outside Buffalo in western New York.
The government conceded in court papers that it cannot prove Hassoun is a threat under the standards set by the judge in the case, Elizabeth Wolford. Late Monday afternoon, Wolford said that Hassoun “should be released on conditions.” Owing to a final government gambit for an appeal, that won’t happen until at least Saturday.
“This case makes clear as day that the government must never be given the sweeping power to imprison people indefinitely in the United States without charge and without a fair hearing,” said Hassoun attorney Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU, “because if given that power, the government is sure to abuse it.”
But Hassoun has heard he would be a free man before. In October 2017, he completed a federal prison sentence for charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. (He has denied any wrongdoing,) Instead of releasing Hassoun, however, the administration placed the Palestinian national in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement cell in the frustrated hopes of deporting him. There he has remained for nearly three years, as the administration has intensified its portrayal of Hassoun as a threat to national security, making him the Forever War’s first-ever post-conviction detainee.
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