'Enemy Combatant' Languishes in a South Carolina Brig

How to describe Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri? The basic bio is easy. He’s a native of Qatar, a member of a prominent Arab tribe. Forty-one-years-old with a mess of coal hair and a beard speckled with gray. Married with five children. Holds a degree in business administration from a small university in Illinois.

And since 2001, when U.S. government agents grabbed al-Marri and accused him of plotting heinous crimes against America, he’s been one of the Bush Administration’s prize prisoners, a trophy captured during the War on Terror.

After reciting these facts, rendering a portrait of the man becomes a challenge -- the U.S. government has thrust him into a vortex, a place from which only minuscule fragments of information dribble out.

Some three-and-a-half years ago, the Pentagon effectively disappeared al-Marri, dubbing him an "enemy combatant," confining him to a solitary cell in the military brig at the Charleston Naval Weapons Station in South Carolina. For seventeen interrogation-heavy months, they barred him even from talking to his attorneys. Now they are the only ones he can talk to.

Citing security concerns, the Defense Department refused to let this reporter interview al-Marri, or even visit the brig to get a sense of how the facility operates. "There are no media visits due to the unique circumstance that an alleged Al Qaeda operative is being held there," says Defense spokesman Navy Lieutenant Commander J. D. Gordon. "There are a wide variety of operational security concerns."

Thus we know very, very little about al-Marri. What does his voice sound like? Is it smooth or raspy? Is it a deep baritone or whiny and high-pitched or somewhere in between? What about his eyes? Do they flit around anxiously? Do they lock onto the person he’s conversing with? Does he cast them sullenly towards the floor?

We can’t tell you.

Is he, as the government contends, an Al Qaeda operative connected to the 9/11 attacks, a guy who surreptitiously moved around money for jihadists and cooked up chemical warfare recipes on his home computer?

We can’t tell you.

Could he be innocent, a victim of this paranoid age?

We can’t tell you.

Despite the informational blackout, we can tell you this: Experts outside the armed forces characterize the conditions of al-Marri’s incarceration -- along with those of a handful of better known prisoners, including alleged dirty-bomb schemer Jose Padilla -- as a subtle brand of torture. Pentagon investigators found problems with the treatment of enemy combatants at the South Carolina brig, according to an internal report obtained by The Progressive.

Now, thanks to recent moves by the administration of George W. Bush -- moves that reflect a drastic restructuring of the American justice system -- al-Marri could languish in this purgatory for decades to come without facing any sort of trial.

The Defense Department has "never admitted that he has any rights, including the right not to be tortured," says Jonathan Hafetz, one of al-Marri’s lawyers. "They’ve created a black hole where he has no rights."

The Arrest

With the government gagging al-Marri and disseminating little information about him, we've got to rely heavily on the court record -- hundreds of pages of paperwork filed in four different federal courthouses -- to tell his story.

One key document is an affidavit written up days after September 11, 2001, by Nichols Zambeck, a special agent with the FBI. That document makes for chilling reading, accusing al-Marri of running a sophisticated credit card fraud operation, and implying he may have somehow been involved in raising or circulating money for the world’s most notorious terrorist group.

At the time in question, al-Marri was dwelling in Peoria, Illinois, and working on a master’s in computer science at Bradley University, the same school he’d attended while earning a BA in business in the 1991.