Randall B. Hamud
On September 10, 2001, Randall, a graduate of UCLA Law
School, was a civil lawyer in San Diego specializing in
medical malpractice and insurance bad faith cases. On 9/11,
his practice and his life underwent a sea change. In
representing three young, Arab-Moslem men who were arrested
in San Diego shortly after 9/11 because they had been
acquainted with two of the hijackers who had visited San
Diego, Randall became one of the nation’s most ardent
critics of the Bush administration’s domestic war against
terrorism. He was the first to raise the alarm about the physical and
psychological abuse of post-9/11 detainees. He was an early critic of the abuse of the material witness
statute and the immigration laws in rounding-up thousands
of Arab and Moslem men, including his clients, and holding
them in secret custody. None of the detainees was ever
charged with any roll in 9/11 or with planning any
terrorist attacks here in the United States. He has also vehemently criticized the on-going racial and
ethic profiling of Arabs and Moslems as counter-productive
to the war against terrorism. It increases hate crimes
against those groups, and it diminishes their willingness
to cooperate with government investigations. And he was an early and vocal critic of the Patriot Act,
which he calls the Anti-Bill of Rights Act, and the
administration’s contention that it could hold "enemy
combatants" in secret custody with no recourse to the
constitutional courts. Across the country, city after city
enacted resolutions criticizing the provisions of the
Patriot Act. And last year the United States Supreme Court
told the administration that, indeed, "enemy combatants" do
have recourse to the courts. Time and again, in both the print media and broadcast
media, Randall had hammered home Ben Franklin’s prescient
words of caution: Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither!
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Series
Books:Osama Bin Laden: America's Enemy in His Own Words, September 2005
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