CASE GALVANIZES OPPONENTS OF U.S. SECRECY

The Supreme Court Will Consider A South Florida Immigrant's Challenge To
Government Secrecy About His Detention In The War On Terrorism.

An act of secrecy by a Miami judge last year, ''super-sealing'' a
lawsuit by a South Florida man detained after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks so that no trace of his case appeared in any public
record, has had the opposite of the intended effect.

Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel, a one-time country veterinarian who more
recently waited tables in Delray Beach, is fast becoming known in
civil libertarian circles. His challenge to government secrecy has
reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Federal agents detained Bellahouel in October 2001 and held him for
five months on the theory that he might have served food to hijackers
and maybe even went to a movie theater with one.

What began as a petition for his release has evolved into a battle
over the public's right to know what its government is doing.
Bellahouel, 34, alleges that a series of federal judges sealed the
entire case against him without giving any reason, without allowing
him or anyone else a chance to challenge the action.

All of which places Bellahouel, an unassuming immigrant living with
his wife, stepdaughter and mother-in-law in Deerfield Beach, at the
center of a legal storm.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and his prosecutors have warned
that releasing even the names of post-Sept. 11 detainees could
undermine national security. The Supreme Court last week refused to
hear an appeal by civil liberties groups, which contend that such
basic information should be public.

AMERICAN VALUES

Open-government advocates argue that the secrecy shrouding Bellahouel
and other detainees runs contrary to bedrock American values.

Attorneys in another prominent Miami case, that of convicted Colombian
drug kingpin Fabio Ochoa Vasquez, allege a larger conspiracy to hide
court proceedings from the public. They contend that the clerk of the
federal court in Miami maintains a secret docket of cases -- legal
proceedings whose very existence is cloaked.

They cite the case of Nicolas Bergonzoli, a drug smuggler sentenced to
37 months in federal prison on a plea agreement. No public record of
the case existed until Ochoa's lawyers persuaded a judge to unseal
portions of the record last year. The attorneys wanted access to the
file because of the possibility that Bergonzoli might testify against
Ochoa. (He never did.)

''When you put the case number in the computer system, it came up
empty,'' said Richard Strafer, an attorney for Ochoa. ``And the
clerk's office, when we approached them, refused to acknowledge it
existed.''

NO PUBLIC OVERSIGHT

Some measure of secrecy is accepted in the courts. A plaintiff or
defendant may ask that a matter be sealed; a judge considers the
request and rules. The request, the ruling and the rationale are all
disclosed to the public.

What sets these two cases, Bergonzoli and Bellahouel, apart is that
they were sealed without any such public legal dialogue and in their
entirety.

Neither the chief judge of the federal court in Miami, William Zloch,
nor its clerk, Clarence Maddox, could be reached for comment on the
sealed cases. A spokesman for the Justice Department, whose solicitor
general is handling Bellahouel's petition to the Supreme Court,
declined to comment.

Bellahouel has become one of the best known of the 1,200 people
detained after Sept. 11, 2001. He is identified in Supreme Court
documents only as M.K.B. The public version of his petition is heavily
redacted, meaning that entire pages are blank.

CHAIN OF SECRECY

U.S. District Judge Paul Huck sealed Bellahouel's lawsuit after his
fall 2001 detention, forging a chain of official secrecy that wasn't
broken until his appeal reached the Supreme Court.

His name might never have leaked out but for a clerical error that
briefly put his name on a list of March 2003 court hearings. A
reporter for The Daily Business Review, the legal-affairs newspaper,
became curious and tried to attend. The appellate judges closed the
courtroom.

Born in the Algerian city of Blida, Bellahouel worked as a rural
veterinarian before coming to the United States in 1996 to study
biology at Florida Atlantic University. Out of money a year later, he
left school and eventually took a job waiting on tables at the Kef
Room, a gyros-and-falafel restaurant on Federal Highway in Delray Beach.

Federal agents picked up Bellahouel at his home Oct. 15, 2001,
ostensibly on a violation of his student visa. At some point, he was
taken to Alexandria, Va., to testify before a grand jury investigating
post-Sept. 11 terrorism.

He apparently had nothing to add to the investigation. Authorities
released him on bond in March 2002, signaling that they no longer
considered him a potential threat.

Investigators targeted him because at least two hijacking suspects,
Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, were regulars at the Kef Room.

An employee at a movie theater near the Kef Room told investigators
that she ''specifically remembered'' seeing the waiter with a
hijacking suspect not long before the attacks.

GAG ORDER

Bellahouel cannot discuss his case or even be photographed because of
a gag order approved by a federal judge, according to Paul Rashkind,
his federal public defender.

Rashkind, too, has been gagged.

Earlier this month, a coalition of 23 news organizations, including
the parent companies of The Daily Business Review and The Herald,
formally asked to join the Bellahouel case to gain access to the
sealed documents.

Bellahouel is concerned mostly with his unresolved immigration status.
Until that is sorted out, he cannot work to support his
American-citizen wife and 12-year-old stepdaughter.

''He basically was a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong
time,'' said David Silk, Bellahouel's immigration lawyer. ``If he
weren't an Arab national, if he weren't a Muslim, we wouldn't be
sitting here now.''