Victims of the Gulag: Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri was Qatar born and educated in the US, who made the mistake of moving to the US with his family on 10 September 2001. After a visit from the FBI, he was arrested and charged with credit card fraud as well as lying to the FBI. He was due to go to trial to answer these charges, having pleaded not guilty on 21 July 2003.
However, on 23 June 2003, the prosecution requested the serving judge to drop the
charges, to which the judge agrees, “with prejudice”, meaning he cannot be indicted for these charges again. Once the charges were dropped and he should’ve been freed, al-Marri was instead detained on a presidential order, which stated that al-Marri was closely associated with al-Qa?ida and presented “a continuing, present, and
grave danger to the national security of the United States”. He was thus designated an “enemy combattant”. He was removed from the jurisdiction of the justice department and transported to a military prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He has been held there since, without contact with his lawyers or his family.
al-Marri is the third person to have been designated enemy combattant status by the Bush regime: the first was Jose Padilla, arrested in May 2002, the second Yaser
Esam Hamdi, arrested in Afghanistan in 2001. All three are supposedly such dangerous terrorist masterminds that they have to be held indefinately, without access to the legal system.
The nazis had a term for this: nacht und nebel, to let people disappear into night and fog…
More info
- Amnesty International summary of the case
- Short summary and legal documents at collegefreedom.org.
- Timeline, also at collegefreedom.org