AG TODD BLANCHE / ATRC
"This first-ever case before the ATRC shows how the Department will use every tool at its disposal to protect our country."
"working presumption that defense counsel is going to be able to review the classified information" — — ATRC Chief Judge Joan N. Ericksen, July 30
Congress built the Alien Terrorist Removal Court in 1996 and no administration touched it for thirty years. Nazira Haji Zada, 47, a lawful permanent resident in Fort Worth, was the first: application certified by Blanche and filed July 15, the day his confirmation hearings opened, first hearing July 30, removal order signed August 20, sealed until September 11 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks — and unsealed only after she was back in Afghanistan. The government proved its case with classified material she was not allowed to read and, unlike a criminal defendant, could not challenge the collection of; her lawyers got half a terabyte of documents and an unclassified summary her attorney said ran barely two paragraphs, some of it already public from her son's Oklahoma case. She had intended to fight, and had challenged the court's constitutionality. Then she conceded she is an alien terrorist and waived appeal. So the tribunal issued a removal order and no ruling, and the due-process question about a court that hides its evidence died with the only case that ever raised it. Judge Ericksen had been pushing DOJ toward giving defense counsel the classified file when it ended. Nobody engineered that. It is simply what happens when the person who could test the machine is the person it is pointed at. The press covered the novelty. The next application gets filed into the same silence.