"Forgotten" Terror Suspects in US

US Muslims and Arabs have taken the brunt of sweeping federal powers applied in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

"He's kind of the forgotten man in the United States," Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told Reuters on Friday, July 14.

A dual citizen of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Marri is defined by the US as the sole remaining "enemy combatant" – the term used by the Bush administration to brand some terror suspects.

He has been held in solitary confinement in a military prison in Charleston, South Carolina, since June 2003 without charges or trial.

Marri was arrested three months after the 9/11 attacks in Peoria, Illinois, where he was a graduate student at Bradley University.

Initially charged with credit card fraud, he was held until the summer of 2003, when the US administration dropped the criminal charges and moved him to the military facility in Charleston.

Accusations against him, all apparently based on unidentified intelligence sources, include claims that he was trained by Al-Qaeda in the use of poisonous chemicals as weapons of mass destruction and that he was in contact in late 2001 with Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi, an alleged Al-Qaeda paymaster in the United Arab Emirates.

Hearsay

Andrew Savage, one of Marri's lawyers, said the accusations amount to little more than "hearsay which is based on hearsay."

Marri has filed a petition challenging the legality of his detention.

His lawyers believe it will take at least a year before the case finds its way through the courts and the US Supreme Court decides whether to hear it.

"We're working on the assumption that he's going to be housed under his current status for the remainder of his natural life," he said.

Lawyers have also filed a lawsuit alleging cruel and unusual punishment based on Marri's extended solitary confinement.

"Isolation is a very subtle psychological torture," said Savage.

In a major blow to US President George Bush's aggressive anti-terror policies, the US Supreme Court ruled on June 29 that the Geneva Conventions applied to the conflict with the Al-Qaeda.

The court ruled that Bush overstepped his power in ordering military trials for Guantanamo detainees.

Bush had previously insisted that Al-Qaeda and other terror suspects were only "enemy combatants" and not subject to the Geneva conventions.

The Pentagon on Tuesday, July 11, ordered the military to respect Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions which prohibits humiliating treatment of prisoners and requires trials "affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

But The New York Times reported on Thursday, July 13, that the Bush administration was pushing for a Congress legislation limiting the rights granted to hundreds of terror detainees in US custodies.

Non-citizen

Many foreigners had been held without charges in the United States but were later deported or transferred into the criminal justice system as legal challenges to their status emerged.

In January, Jose Padilla, US citizen and alleged "dirty bomber" who had been held in solitary confinement for three years at the brig as an enemy combatant, had his case transferred to a criminal court in Miami.

In 2004, detainee Yaser Esam Hamdi, another US citizen held at without charge for two years, was deported to Saudi Arabia after the Supreme Court ruled that the government had no right to hold him as such.

Savage said the case of Hamdi, who renounced his US citizenship prior to his deportation and who was picked up in Afghanistan, had no impact on Marri's case.

"Al-Marri is a non-citizen in the United States," Savage said.

"Hamdi was a citizen of the United States taken on the battlefield. Their legal status is different. We have less legal privileges with Al-Marri."

Thousands of Muslims and Arabs were rounded up and questioned in the weeks and months following the September attacks.

Some of the detainees have sued the US government after their release for inhumane and degrading treatment and a total blackout of communications in detention centers on the US soil.

The US government agreed in February to pay $300,000 to settle an illegal detention lawsuit brought by an Egyptian man who was among hundreds of Muslims rounded up in New York after the terrorist attacks in 2001.

Late March, two US federal officials were charged with hiding evidence to win conviction in a terrorism case against four Muslim men following the 9/11.

A May 2004 report released by the US Senate Office Of Research concluded that the Arab Americans and the Muslim community in the United States have taken the brunt of the Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.