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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