Newsweek magazine's My Turn column has an inspired submission this week, We're Fighting Terror, But Killing Freedom, by a Mr. Randall Hamud, an American-born Palestinian-descended attorney in San Diego who has suffered numerous threats against his life for defending many Arab-Americans; Americans whose rights of Habeus Corpus, among others, have been suspended in the wake of the so-named U.S.A. Patriot Act.

Among his case load was the fate of three San Diego natives of middle-eastern descent who were arrested despite full-cooperation with the FBI for being briefly acquainted with two of the September 11th hijackers. The testimonies of the FBI agents were ruled "not credible" and "misleading" by New York federal district court Judge Shira Scheindlin, and one of the clients released. They were claimed to be incooperative so as to, in Mr. Hamud's words, "be spirited away to New York."

Other references are made in the short essay to the 1200 Arab and Muslim men who suffered secret arrests and are still being held in military prison indefinitely and without representation, forgotten by a fickle public. "Since when does the Constitution allow citizens arrested on U.S. soil to be held beyond the reach of the courts?"

Mr. Hamud ends his piece with the eerily poignant quote of Benjamin Franklin's, "Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither."