Bush rebuked on combatant
Appellate judges ruled 2-1 that a U.S. resident, held for alleged al-Qaeda ties, can't be detained indefinitely without charges.
RICHMOND, Va. - A divided panel from a conservative federal appeals court delivered a harsh rebuke yesterday to the Bush administration's antiterrorism strategy, ruling that U.S. residents may not be locked up indefinitely as enemy combatants without being charged.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled 2-1 that the government should charge Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident and the only suspected enemy combatant on U.S. soil, or release him from military custody.
The federal Military Commissions Act does not strip Marri of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court, the judges found. Marri, a Qatar native, has been held in solitary confinement in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., since June 2003.
"In the United States, the military cannot seize and imprison civilians, let alone imprison them indefinitely," the Richmond-based court said. "This is so even if [the president] calls them 'enemy combatants,' " the court added.
Such detention "would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution - and the country," Judge Diana G. Motz wrote in the majority opinion.
In a statement, Marri's lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, said: "This is a landmark victory for the rule of law and a defeat for unchecked executive power. It affirms the basic constitutional rights of all individuals - citizens and immigrants - in the United States."
Marri has been detained since his December 2001 arrest at his home in Peoria, Ill., where he moved with his wife and five children a day before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to study for a master's degree at Bradley University.
Federal investigators found credit-card numbers on Marri's laptop and charged him with credit-card fraud. Upon further investigation, the government said, agents found evidence that he had links to al-Qaeda terrorists and was a national security threat. Authorities shifted his case from the criminal system and moved him to indefinite military detention.
Marri has denied the government's allegations and seeks to challenge the government's evidence and cross-examine its witnesses in court.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the government intends to ask the full Fourth Circuit to hear the case. President Bush "has made clear that he intends to use all available tools at his disposal to protect Americans from further al-Qaeda attack, including the capture and detention of al-Qaeda agents who enter our borders," Boyd said in a statement.
The court said its ruling did not mean Marri should be set free. Instead, he can be returned to the civilian-court system and tried.
The decision is the latest in a series of court rulings against the Bush administration's antiterrorism program.
Marri is the only U.S. resident now being held as an enemy combatant within the United States.
Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was held as an enemy combatant for 31/2 years before he was added to a Miami case in 2005, a few days before a U.S. Supreme Court deadline for administration briefs on the question of Bush's powers to continue holding him in military prison without charge.
Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen captured in Afghanistan in 2001, was released to his family in Saudi Arabia in October 2004 after Justice said he no longer posed a threat to the United States.
The administration had urged the appeals panel to dismiss Marri's challenge, arguing that the Military Commissions Act stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear the cases of detainees declared enemy combatants.
The court ruled that the act did not apply to Marri, who was not captured outside this country or detained at Guantanamo Bay or in another country and who has not received a combatant-status-review tribunal.
The case is expected to reach the Supreme Court.
Bail Is Denied In JFK-Plot Case
A judge in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, denied bail yesterday for three men accused of plotting to bomb New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, ordering them
to remain in jail until an Aug. 2 hearing on a U.S. request for their extradition.
The three suspects - Kareem Ibrahim, Abdul Kadir and Abdel Nur - smiled and waved to about 20 supporters
and family members
in court but did not speak. A son of Kadir said FBI agents had questioned relatives over the weekend.
The suspects, arrested this month in Trinidad, are accused of participating in a Muslim terror cell that planned to blow up a jet-fuel artery that runs through neighborhoods and feeds Kennedy airport.
The alleged mastermind
of the plot, U.S. citizen Russell Defreitas, 63, is in custody in New York.
- Associated Press
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Read a transcript of the appeals court ruling via http://go.philly.com/almarriEndText