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Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri

Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri

al-Qaeda

20031231

Home Front: WoT

US: Immigrants May Be Held Indefinitely

2006-11-14

WASHINGTON (AP) - Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism and may not challenge their imprisonment in civilian courts, the Bush administration said Monday, opening a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees. In court documents filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to foreigners captured and held in the United States. Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was arrested in 2001 while studying in the United States. He has been labeled an ``enemy combatant,'' a designation that, under a law signed last month, strips foreigners of the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. That law is being used to argue the Guantanamo Bay cases, but Al-Marri represents the first detainee inside the United States to come under the new law. Aliens normally have the right to contest their imprisonment, such as when they are arrested on immigration violations or for other crimes. ``It's pretty stunning that any alien living in the United States can be denied this right,'' said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney for Al-Marri. ``It means any non-citizen, and there are millions of them, can be whisked off at night and be put in detention.'' That's one of the protections of being a citizen -- you enjoy the rights of the Constitution. We're magnanimous enough to extend those protections to permanent residents and certain other non-citizens, but we're not obligated to do so. The new law says that enemy combatants will be tried before military commissions, not a civilian judge or jury, and establishes different rules of evidence in the cases. It also prohibits detainees from challenging their detention in civilian court. In a separate court filing in Washington on Monday, the Justice Department defended that law as constitutional and necessary. Government attorneys said foreign fighters arrested as part of an overseas military action have no constitutional rights and are being afforded more legal rights than ever. In its short filing in the Al-Marri case, however, the Justice Department doesn't mention that Al-Marri is being held at a military prison in South Carolina - a fact that his attorneys say affords him the same rights as anyone else being held in the United States. The government says differently; but we'll see what the Supremes say. The Justice Department noted only that the new law applies to all enemy combatants ``regardless of the location of the detention.'' The Bush administration maintains that al-Marri is an al-Qaida sleeper agent. The Defense Department ordered a review of Al-Marri's status as an enemy combatant be conducted if, as requested, the case is thrown out of court.

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Home Front

Court to Rule on ’Enemy Combatant’ Label

2003-11-18

A federal appeals judge said Monday it would be "a sea change" in the Constitution to allow the Bush administration to designate a U.S. citizen suspected in an alleged dirty bomb plot as an enemy combatant. What'd they call 'em at Andersonville? In a critical showdown between the government and civil rights lawyers, two members of a three-judge federal panel seemed hesitant to embrace the government’s reasoning for why Jose Padilla, 33, should be held indefinitely without access to a lawyer and without being charged. Padilla, a Muslim, is accused of plotting with al-Qaida to detonate a "dirty bomb," which uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials. The former Chicago gang member was taken into custody in May 2002, and has spent most of the time since then in a naval brig in Charleston, S.C. In the two-hour hearing before the appeals panel Monday, Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement suggested that the urgency of the war against terrorism necessitated such moves. "Al-Qaida made the battlefields the United States and they’ve given every indication they’re trying to make the United States the battlefield again," he said. The hearing marked the first time a U.S. government official has said a limited number of enemy combatants could eventually have access to an attorney. Clement told the judges that combatants such as Padilla — a U.S. citizen being held on U.S. soil — could get a lawyer once their value as intelligence sources has been exhausted. But Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. said he believed the power to designate a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant rested with Congress, rather than the president. That’s shaky, the Constitution makes the President the commander of the armed forces and thus director of the war effort. Giving such power to the executive branch with only limited review by the courts, he said, would be "a sea change in the constitutional life of this country and ... unprecedented in civilized society." Said Judge Rosemary S. Pooler, another member of the panel: "If, in fact, the battlefield is the United States, I think Congress has to say that, and I don’t think they have yet." Later, she added, "As terrible as 9/11 was, it didn’t repeal the Constitution." Doesn't sound like it nudged certain judges into deep thought, either... Specifically, the government was asking the court to overturn a finding by U.S. District Court Chief Judge Michael Mukasey that Padilla is entitled to meet with his lawyers and contest being designated as an enemy combatant. Jenny Martinez, a Stanford Law School professor who argued on Padilla’s behalf, said the government believed it could designate anyone, even a citizen, an enemy combatant at any time. "This new power government is looking for is entirely unprecedented," she said. So was 9/11, Jenny. The third judge on the panel, Richard C. Wesley, suggested the case shouldn’t have been brought in Manhattan. "This should be litigated in South Carolina," Wesley snapped. "Too hot for me to handle. Let somebody else get lynched for letting a dirty bomber off after somebody manages to pop a dirty bomb." The judges weren’t expected to issue their ruling for weeks if not longer. While two of three judges expressed doubts about the government’s arguments, they could still opt to refer the case to another court, as Wesley suggested. Or they could hear it en banc. Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport as he returned from Pakistan. The government said he had proposed to Abu Zubaydah, then al-Qaida’s top terrorism coordinator, to steal radioactive material to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States. Only two other people have been designated enemy combatants since the 2001 terrorist attacks: Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who has been accused of being an al-Qaida sleeper agent, and Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana native captured during the fighting in Afghanistan. I’m torn by this. Proper thing to do (says me) would be to charge Padilla with treason, give him a lawyer, and put him on trial. I don’t think folks would be fooled by his excuses.

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Qatari Man With Al-Qaeda Link Pleads Innocent in US Court

2003-05-31

PEORIA, Illinois — A Qatari native who is alleged to have run a credit card scam to help fund the Al-Qaeda terror network denied misleading FBI agents in federal court here Thursday and was ordered held without bond. Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri pleaded not guilty to making false statements to FBI agents and five other counts relating to identity and credit card fraud and making false statements to banks. The 38-year-old was arrested in December 2001 after being repeatedly quizzed by FBI agents investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. According to the indictment, Al-Marri lied to FBI agents when he said that he did not call a phone number used by Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi, the alleged moneyman behind the Sept. 11 hijackings, several times in the fall of 2001. Prosecutors claim that Al-Marri also lied to the agents about when he was last in the United States. In interviews with the authorities, Al-Marri said that he had been outside the US for some 10 years, since he graduated from Peoria’s Bradley University with a business degree in 1991. But authorities claim Al-Marri was in the United States in the summer of 2000, when he allegedly used fake names and social security numbers to open three bank accounts in Macomb, central Illinois and set up a dummy postal address for a ghost business “AAA Carpets.” For his part, Al-Marri said he returned to the United States on Sept. 10 — one day before the attacks on New York and Washington — to study for a masters degree in computer science at Bradley.

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