While the Justice Department denied any identifiable link of the law with the Patriot Act critics insisted that Bush administration designated suspects as material witnesses under the jurisdiction of section 412. According to Roza Pati, the government used extensively this measure to detain individuals for months as well as it denied them their “procedural guarantees” .
In this vein, the
“Human Rights Watch” report, argued that the justice department breached the constitutional conventions through violating the fifth and sixth amendments . In fact this investigatory tool has been misused since at least seventy men - all Muslims but one – were victims of indefinite detentions of which thirty were never brought before a grand jury or a court to testify .