Last month's federal appeals court ruling in Cincinnati signaled the latest scathing rebuke for the Bush Administration's handling of civil liberties and public disclosure in 9/11 detainee cases. In terms of influencing public opinion, it will make a difference. But for the prisoners still isolated in America's Gulag--or already deported, or worse--the glories of our system of checks and balances have been kicking in much, much too slowly.

The Cincinnati ruling, issued unanimously by a three-judge panel for the 6th District Court of Appeals, applied only to a single case--that of Rabih Haddad, a Muslim clergyman who had overstayed his tourist visa. Four Michigan newspapers and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) had filed suit challenging a Sept. 21, 2001 order by chief immigration judge Michael J. Creppy, issued at the request of Attorney General John Ashcroft, that closed immigration hearings deemed by the INS to have national security implications. Next month in Philadelphia, a federal appeals court will hear a government appeal of a broader case on the same issues, in which a Newark judge ordered the government to open all such hearings to the public unless it could offer case by case proof of the need for secrecy.

The Sixth District case, the Newark ruling, and an Aug. 2 ruling by US District Judge Gladys Kessler ordering the release of the names of all people detained in post-9/11 investigations--an order Kessler later stayed pending government appeal--all directed unusually harsh language toward Bush Administration policies.

"Secret arrests are 'a concept odious to a democratic society,' and profoundly antithetical to the bedrock values that characterize a free and open one such as ours," wrote Kessler in her ruling. Judge Damon J. Keith, in the Cincinnati ruling, opined that "Democracies die behind closed doors."

An August 16 ruling in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Muslim captured in Afghanistan who is (along with Jose Padilla) one of two US citizens (that we know of) being held indefinitely without charges, drew even harsher language from US District Judge Robert Doumar. Doumar, in ordering the government to provide more information on why Hamdi should be considered an "enemy combatant" without the rights generally accorded citizens, noted that the case "...appears to be the first in American jurisprudence where an American citizen has been held incommunicado and subjected to indefinite detention without charges, without any finding by a military tribunal, and without access to a lawyer."

But despite these widely reported condemnations, Hamdi remains in prison. So does Rabih Haddad, and so do a minimum of 81 other men.

The current figure of 81 was in a July 3 letter to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and was the last public estimate given by the Justice Department. That same letter reported that as of May 29, 611 INS detainees had at least one closed hearing, out of a total of 752 detained in conjunction with 9-11 investigations. Those numbers are substantially at odds with earlier DoJ statements that up to 1,200 people had been detained.

Levin has yet to get answers to additional questions--such as why so many individuals were detained, whether any of them have been found to actually have links to terror organizations--let alone to the 9/11 attack--or what the status of the over 600 men brought before secret INS courts now is. Many are believed to have been deported to their native countries, mostly in the Middle East and South Asia.

For those scores still remaining--most facing deportation to authoritarian countries where they will have been labeled by the US government as having been the object of an anti-terrorist investigation--time is not on their side. As with "enemy combatants" being held in Guantanamo Bay, the INS detainees continue to be held in secrecy, without access to either counsel or the evidence against them, and often on the pretext of usually pedestrian visa violations.

Ashcroft and his spokespeople say they'll wait for the Philadelphia ruling before deciding whether to appeal the 6th District decision overturning Judge Creppy's Sept. 2001 memo. They can afford to wait; time is on their side, and their lives are comfortable.

Outside three states, Creppy's order remains in effect, essentially closing INS administrative hearings to anyone without national security clearance--which judges and INS prosecutors generally have, and which defense attorneys, reporters, and members of the public generally do not. For US citizens such as Hamdi, no court rulings have yet challenged indefinite detention, and the only way for the public to know how many additional detainees might exist is through information from the DoJ itself. Without exception, the DoJ has condemned the negative court rulings. In its appeal of Judge Kessler's public disclosure ruling, for example, DoJ lawyers argued that releasing the names of detainees "would give unfair advantage to terrorists."

Of course, not one person detained by the INS in the last year has actually been charged as a terrorist. In fact, the entire terrifying apparatus of enhanced state power--the USA PATRIOT Act, secret INS hearings, deportations, the Guantanamo abomination, and much, much more--hasn't turned up a single accused--let alone convicted--terrorist of any sort.

But aside from civil liberties and immigrant groups, congresspeople, and a remarkable array of federal appeals judges, hardly anyone seems to be quibbling.