Dangerous Detentions

The story of how Qatari immigrant Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri landed in a military brig, stripped of his legal rights, may or may not be a case of government using naked muscle when the rule of law threatens a “wrong” outcome. It is a story with plenty of ambiguity, and if Al-Marri has the terrorist aims that the government alleges, he belongs in jail. But yanking his case out of criminal courts two years after his arrest makes prosecutors look fearful, not firm. When this is added to other stories of questionable open-ended detentions and reports of brutality against detainees, U.S. justice appears increasingly stained by its tactics against terror.

Like U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, who were also stripped of rights and declared enemy combatants, the government says Al-Marri is a terrorist, in his case a “sleeper cell operative” who helped Al Qaeda operatives settle in the U.S. As with the others, authorities can now hold Al-Marri as long as the war on terror lasts -- certainly for years, even for life -- and bar him from talking to his attorneys or family.

But unlike with Padilla, accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb,” and Hamdi, captured during the Afghan war, the feds appear to have seized on the enemy combatant idea when fraud and false statement charges against Al-Marri ran into hitches in court.

Al-Marri, arrested two years ago in Peoria, Ill., refused to cooperate or plead guilty. A criminal court judge dismissed the indictment against him. A Peoria grand jury returned a second criminal indictment, and had President Bush not declared him an enemy combatant last month, Al-Marri would probably be on trial today in Peoria, not incommunicado in a Charleston, S.C., naval brig.

Al-Marri’s lawyers say he lawfully returned to the U.S. on Sept. 10, 2001, to get a master’s degree at Peoria’s Bradley University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1991. Prosecutors say Al-Marri lied about phone calls to other alleged terrorists and that his computer held hundreds of stolen credit card numbers that were to be used to fund terrorism and anti-American literature.

Federal appellate courts have largely -- and unwisely -- condoned the president’s power as commander in chief to indefinitely detain and isolate suspects on grounds that they pose an imminent security threat.

A federal court hearing is scheduled Monday on Al-Marri’s petition asking that he be freed. His lawyers argue that Al-Marri poses no imminent danger. He landed in the brig, they insist, because prosecutors feared they’d lose in court. The bottom line, if Al-Marri’s detention stands, is that accusation becomes tantamount to conviction. And imprisonment comes without any of the basic rights that criminal convicts can take for granted.