US releases Qatari held as 'enemy combatant'

Ali al-Marri, the only non-citizen “enemy combatant” held on U.S. soil, was released from federal criminal custody Friday and deported back to Doha, Qatar.

“His case demonstrated one of the most extreme and lawless exercises of presidential power since 9/11, and it’s been a long, hard struggle, but it’s finally over, and he has returned to his family,” said Jonathan Hafetz, Marri’s lead counsel in the habeas corpus challenge to his military detention.

In 2001, the FBI arrested Marri in Peoria, Illinois. He had traveled to the U.S. on a student visa to study at Bradley University. He arrived one day before the 9/11 attacks. Two months later, he was arrested and initially held on a material witness charge.

“They used the military witness statute after 9/11 to hold people that they couldn’t charge [with what] they were suspicious of,” Hafetz, said. “If he [had] been [picked up] outside of the country, he would have gone to a CIA prison or to Gitmo.”

At the time of his arrest, Marri’s wife and five children were with him — including his baby boy who was six months old, according to Andrew Savage, another of Marri’s lawyers. 

In early 2002, the government criminally charged Marri with financial fraud. But just before his trial in 2003, President George W. Bush said he was an “enemy combatant,” alleging that Marri “was closely associated with Al-Qaeda,” and Marri was put in military custody in Charleston, South Carolina — where he was afforded many fewer rights than if he was held by the criminal justice system. 

“When he was declared an ‘enemy combatant,’ it was the height of the Bush administration’s belief that the president could do anything in the ‘war on terror,’” said Hafetz, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law.

When Savage first saw Marri in October 2004 in the Navel Brig in Charleston, Marri had gone through a “pretty uncivil interrogation process,” including one alleged incident of dry boarding.

“He had a cloth stuck in his mouth and then he was wrapped in duct tape,” Savage said. “The first time I saw him, he was handcuffed, belly chained, leg irons … awful conditions.”

Savage added, “The first six months, nobody talked to him. ... The guards wouldn’t talk him.” 

Marri spent at least 16 consecutive months in isolation, both lawyers said. “His isolation was total,” Hafetz said. “His isolation was unique. It was unprecedented — even [Jose] Padilla got to call his mother. Al Marri got nothing. He was totally alone.”

Marri also experienced sensory deprivation in “order to induce a sense of learned helplessness, that he would feel like things were totally futile,” Hafetz added. 

Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi were also held as enemy combatants. Hamdi was been picked up in Afghanistan, sent to Guantanamo and then onto to the U.S. in 2002 when the U.S. learned he was an American citizen.

Marri was held at the Naval Brig for more than five years when in December 2008, the Supreme Court agreed to hear his case. But by that time a new president was coming into office, and Barack Obama ordered the executive branch to review the basis for Marri’s detention “and identify and thoroughly evaluate alternative dispositions.”

In 2009, Marri was charged in the criminal justice system with material support of terrorism — which meant his habeas ‘enemy combatant’ case in front of the high court was rendered irrelevant.

His revolving door detention “was a failed experiment,” Hafetz said. Following Marri’s designation as an enemy combatant, no other detained person was labeled as such. Instead the Bush administration prosecuted suspects in federal court — never admitting to the failure of Marri’s case, Hafetz noted.  

Marri pleaded guilty and received an eight-year sentence, which took into consideration the time he had already spent in prison and the treatment he received at times during his detention.

“He pled guilty because he wanted to go home at a definite date,” Savage said. 

Marri was released two days early from the last prison where he was held in Florence, Colorado — which caught Savage by surprise. Savage was bringing Marri clothes for his release and arrived at the prison only to be told Marri had already left at 6 a.m. that morning. “I had no idea where he was, it was like 2003 all over,” Savage said, adding that he was worried. 

But Savage soon sound found out that Marri was home in Qatar with his family.