The vigil has drawn a mixed bag of supporters – some have their heads covered, a few are modestly concealed by hijabs, others are simply attired in jeans and T-shirts. Whatever their dress, they have gathered here for one reason – to protest the use of ‘lawfare’ on Muslim citizens accused of terror-related activity.

Sally Eberhardt, a researcher with Educators for Civil Liberties, tells IPS these monthly vigils began in 2009 to highlight legal irregularities in the case against Fahad Hashmi, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen who was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2005 and became the first citizen to be extradited to the U.S. under new laws passed after 9/11.

Hashmi spent three years in solitary confinement at the MCC before ever being charged with a crime. He accepted a government plea bargain of one-count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorist groups and, in 2010, began a 15-year sentence at the federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado.

Weekly vigils held in the autumn of 2009 through Hashmi’s sentencing gradually attracted civil liberties groups, including Amnesty International, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations and the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), along with family members of other incarcerated Muslims, who have now coalesced into a movement known as the No Separate Justice (NSJ) campaign.

“NSJ was an attempt to bring four key issues under one umbrella: surveillance and entrapment; conditions of confinement; fair trial and due process concerns; and free speech and material support charges,” Eberhardt told IPS.

Volunteers with independent advocacy organisations working on behalf of Muslim prisoners define preemptive prosecution – which is also known as preventive, predatory, pretextual or manufactured prosecution – as a post 9-11 strategy to target individuals or groups whose ideologies and religious practices raise ‘red flags’ for the government.

According to an upcoming study based on the Department of Justice’s 2008 list of domestic terrorists, the charges used to hound “suspects” are generally manufactured by the government, and can take many forms:

• Using material support for terrorism laws to criminalise activities that are not otherwise considered criminal, such as free speech, free association, charity, peace-making and social hospitality;

• Using conspiracy laws to treat friendships and organisations as criminal conspiracies, and their members as guilty by association, even when most members of the group have not been involved in criminal activity and may not even be aware of it.

• Using agents provocateurs to actively entrap targets in criminal plots manufactured and controlled by the government.

• Using minor “technical” crimes, which otherwise would not have been prosecuted or even discovered, in order to incarcerate individuals for their ideology (for example, making a minor error on an immigration form, which is technically a crime; lying to government officials about minor matters; gun possession based on a prior felony many years earlier; minor tax and business finance matters).”

“We feel that when it comes to Muslim terror suspects, the federal government applies a separate level of justice: there are things happening in their cases that are not happening in others, like the use of anonymous juries and secret evidence files that they have no access to.”

Muslim prisoners and pre-trial detainees are also subject to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), a Bill Clinton-era process designed to isolate potentially violent persons by severely restricting their ability to communicate with the outside world.