A change in presidents hasn't changed the U.S. position that a Muslim scholar accused of funding terrorism was properly barred from entering the United States to speak to several groups that invited him, a government lawyer said Tuesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney David Jones told the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals that he recently asked Department of State and Department of Justice officials if there was any change. He defended the U.S. position against arguments by the American Civil Liberties Union that the U.S. had wrongly excluded the scholar, Tariq Ramadan, based on his beliefs.
Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, has opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and said he sympathizes with the resistance there and in the Palestinian territories. He also has said he has no connections to terrorism, opposes Islamic extremism and promotes peaceful solutions.
Ramadan, a visiting fellow in Oxford, England, has spoken at Harvard University, Stanford University and elsewhere and has been invited to speak before several groups in the coming months.
On Sept. 16, 2005, he requested a nonimmigrant visa that would permit him to attend more speaking engagements. But in 2006 the government said he was excluded from the country on the grounds that he had aided a terrorist group years earlier by making charitable contributions.
He has said he never intended to assist terrorism when he gave $1,336 to a group the U.S. government says has funded Hamas, designated a foreign terrorist organization.
ACLU National Security Project director Jameel Jaffer said after arguments before a three-judge panel in Manhattan that he was disappointed to hear Jones saying the same things he had said when President George W. Bush was in office. He said he had hoped there "would be a clear break with the Bush administration's national security policies."
Jaffer urged the appeals court to reverse a lower court judge's ruling in favor of the government and to declare unconstitutional a portion of the law that lets the government exclude people from the country on ideological grounds when it relates to terrorism.
Jaffer said he disagrees with the language of a law excluding aliens who endorse or espouse terrorism or persuade others to do so. He said the words "endorsing, espousing and persuading" are "red flags for anybody who cares about the First Amendment."
Jaffer said the ACLU does not oppose excluding those seeking to incite terrorism.
He said outside court he was "certainly disappointed" to hear the administration of President Barack Obama "making the same sweeping arguments relating to executive power that the Bush administration made."
Jaffer said it was not uncommon for presidents to aggressively assert authority on issues of national security, but he said the effort to keep the courts restrained on such issues was something the "Bush administration had put on steroids."
"Unfortunately, the Obama administration, at least in this case, does not seem to be backtracking," Jaffer said.
Jones told the appeals court that the Supreme Court has made it clear that a consular officer's decision to exclude someone was not subject to judicial review as long as a legitimate reason was given for the exclusion. He invited Ramadan to reapply to enter the country at a U.S. consular office in Switzerland, where he originally was denied entry.