The U.S. government wants an Iraqi court to handle criminal charges against a naturalized American citizen who is being held in Iraq on suspicion that he is a senior operative of insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The man's lawyers said he is innocent and likely to be tortured if he is handed over to the Iraqis.
The case is the first known instance in which the government has decided to allow an American to be tried in the new Iraqi legal system. At least four other U.S. citizens suspected of aiding the insurgency are being held in Iraq, the Pentagon has said.
Shawqi Omar, 44, who once served in the Minnesota National Guard, has been held since late 2004 in U.S.-run military prisons as an enemy combatant. He has not been charged with a crime or been given access to a lawyer, said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer representing Omar's family in the United States.
The government said Omar, who also holds Jordanian citizenship, was harboring an Iraqi insurgent and four Jordanian fighters at the time of his arrest and also had bomb-making materials. He is described in court papers as a relative of Zarqawi who was plotting to kidnap foreigners from Baghdad hotels.
Separately, Omar, Zarqawi and 11 others have been indicted by a Jordanian court on charges they plotted a chemical attack against Jordan's intelligence agency.
Omar's family said he is a businessman who was seeking reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
The family is asking a U.S. judge to step in and force the government to charge Omar with a crime and put him on trial in the United States, or release him. They also are seeking to prevent Omar's transfer to Iraqi custody, which they said would subject the Sunni Muslim to torture by Shiite-dominated authorities.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina last week issued an order in Washington temporarily blocking Omar's transfer to Iraqi custody. The order is set to expire on Monday, but the judge could extend it.
The Justice Department weighed in on Tuesday, arguing that Urbina has no business intervening on Omar's behalf and denying that Omar is even in U.S. custody.
Instead, the department said in court papers, Omar was captured by the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq and remains in its custody. The multinational force is independent of the U.S. government, the department said.
In any event, Omar would not be handed over to the Iraqis unless he is convicted in an Iraqi court, the government said.
Hafetz, a lawyer at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, said the government is resorting to a legal gimmick to keep Omar's case out of American courts. "It's legally incorrect and factually incorrect to say the U.S. does not have control of him," Hafetz said.
In July, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said five unnamed Americans, including one who also had Jordanian citizenship, were in U.S. military custody in Iraq. Whitman said then that the government had not decided whether their cases would be turned over to the Justice Department or to the new Iraqi legal system, which has handled the prosecution of other foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight the U.S.-led occupation and Iraqi government.
In March, Matthew Waxman, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said a panel of three U.S. officers determined the Jordanian-American was an enemy combatant and not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention. The description provided by Waxman and other officials matches Omar's biography as contained in the government's court papers.
In its filing Tuesday, the Justice Department said the officers were part of the multinational force.
Omar became a U.S. citizen in 1986, two years after he served in the National Guard. Omar spent about 11 months in the Guard before being discharged in November 1984 without completing his training, said Shannon Purvis, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota National Guard. Omar received an "uncharacterized discharge," meaning he was discharged for such things as health problems or poor performance, Purvis said.
Non-citizens can serve in the Guard as long as they obtain citizenship within eight years of joining, Purvis said. |
WASHINGTON - Government attorneys said Monday that US courts have no authority to stop the military from transferring an American citizen to an Iraqi court to face charges he supported terrorists and insurgents. The case is the latest legal challenge to the Bush administrations authority to keep terrorism cases, even those involving US citizens, out of American courts.
According to a copyrighted article in the Salt Lake Tribune, counterterrorist agents arrested five men on Wednesday. One of the men was aprehended in the Cottonwood Heights area of Salt Lake, and the other for men were arrested in California. The men were arrested and idicted as part of an investigation into the U.S. connections of a suspected senior al-Qaida operative imprisoned in Iraq, according to the Tribune article.