The News - International
CHARLESTON, S.C: To the government, he is an al-Qaeda “sleeper” agent sent to the United States by Osama bin Laden to help sow more terror after the Sept 11 attacks.
As his lawyers and human rights groups see it, however, Ali Saleh Mohamed Kahlah al-Marri is just one more victim of the many indefinite and seemingly arbitrary detentions carried out in the name of the US war on terrorism. Marri is the sole remaining “enemy combatant”-the term the administration of President George W Bush has used to brand some terrorism suspects-held on US soil without charges or a trial. The others have been deported or transferred into the criminal justice system as legal challenges to their status emerged.
A dual citizen of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Marri, 40, has been held in solitary confinement in a military prison in Charleston, South Carolina, since June 2003, after spending a year and a half in a normal jail charged with credit card fraud. Tangled up in a legal limbo, since he lacks the rights traditionally granted to criminal defendants or prisoners of war, he faces the prospect of many more years in detention. “We’re working on the assumption that he’s going to be housed under his current status for the remainder of his natural life,” said Andrew Savage, one of Marri’s lawyers.
The Bush administration has faced a rising outcry over the detention centre at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where about 450 foreign terrorism suspects, including a brother of Marri, are held in conditions similar to his. But Marri’s case has received little public attention.
“In a way he’s been disadvantaged because so much attention has been focused elsewhere,” said Eugene Fidell, an expert on military law who is president of the National Institute of Military Justice. “He’s kind of the forgotten man in the United States.”
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