President Bush has declared Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri of Peoria, Ill., an enemy combatant.
Al-Marri was arrested shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, and indicted by a federal grand jury for lying to FBI agents about the dates he traveled in the U.S. and the dates he made certain telephone calls and for possession of false credit cards. When he refused to cooperate with the Justice Department in its investigation of terrorism, as is his right, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft asked a court to dismiss the indictment against him, which it did; asked President Bush to declare Al-Marri an enemy combatant, which he did Monday; and then whisked Al-Marri under cover of darkness from a federal holding facility in Chicago to a Navy brig in South Carolina.
Al-Marri could languish there for the rest of his life without ever having been convicted of a crime. He has no access to family, friends or lawyers, and he may never see a judge, a jury or a prosecutor. Under this administration's interpretation of the law, it's possible that he won't be charged, tried or convicted, and all the while he'll be held in solitary confinement.
The president -- using standards not legislated by Congress, not approved by any court and never made known to the public -- has claimed the right to incarcerate enemy combatants until the war on terrorism is over. But when will that be?
The president has also floated a plan to try enemy combatants before secret panels of American soldiers whenever he wants to -- such as in Cuba, where he claims the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply.
What's going on here? An end run around the Constitution.
The administration has done this before. Yaser Esam Hamdi, a 19-year-old American arrested in Afghanistan near a field of battle but without a weapon, and Jose Padilla, a 25-year-old American arrested at O'Hare Airport in Chicago after meeting with Muslim clerics in Pakistan, have both been declared enemy combatants.
In Hamdi's case, the U.S. Court of Appeals, after a partly secret argument, agreed that he could not see a lawyer. In Padilla's case, a federal district judge ordered the government to let him speak with his lawyer, but the government has refused to do so and has appealed. In both cases, the government made the ludicrous argument that because neither Hamdi nor Padilla was charged with a crime, neither was entitled to a lawyer.
