Eight Weeks in Jail: Life on Ashcroft's Enemies List

Things Ali Al-Maqtari might have expected in America, especially after Sept. 11:

- Attracting suspicion because he's a young Middle Eastern male.

- Funny looks because his American wife wears a Muslim head scarf.

- Doubts about his marriage because the couple wed soon after they met, in accordance with Muslim tradition, which frowns on extended dating.

Things Ali Al-Maqtari probably never expected to happen:

- Spending nearly eight weeks in Tennessee prisons, based on the above suspicions.

- Becoming the star witness at a U.S. Senate hearing last week.

Al-Maqtari, a Yemeni immigrant, and his lawyer, Michael Boyle, testified Dec. 4 before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The subject was "DOJ Oversight: Preserving Our Freedoms While Defending Against Terrorism."

DOJ is the Department of Justice -- the head of which, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, has been dropping daisy-cutters on the Bill of Rights ever since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Al-Maqtari told of being interrogated for 12 hours straight, lied to by the FBI, accused of beating his wife, then locked up with little ability to contact his wife or attorneys, all because Tiffinay Al-Maqtari wore a head scarf to a recruiting center where she enlisted in the Army, and because soldiers found box cutters and New York City postcards in their car.

Boyle testified about new rules and practices that the Justice Department has cooked up, aimed largely at Middle Eastern or Muslim immigrants. All go far beyond the measures that Congress adopted in the post-September 11 USA PATRIOT Act. And all, Boyle says, are both illegal and unnecessary.

The two got a friendly reception at the Senate hearing, Boyle says, and Al-Maqtari's story made headlines in USA Today, the Boston Globe and National Public Radio. But you have to wonder whether anyone was listening, besides reporters: Although technically a hearing of the full Judiciary Committee, the session drew just four senators -- two of whom, according to Boyle, made only token appearances.

Two days later, Ashcroft appeared before the same committee and blasted his critics. His policies preserve civil liberties, he said, and those who disagree are pitting "Americans against immigrants, citizens against non-citizens. ... Your tactics only aid terrorists. ... They give ammunition to America's enemies."

Ashcroft's enemy list is evidently quite long. Through the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, his Justice Department has detained more than 1,100 people for questioning in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.

Samir Khalaf was one of those 1,100. A Palestinian who worked at a gas station in Greenwich, Conn., he had a bad heart and bad timing. He went to the hospital with chest pains on Sept. 12. People thought he was acting suspicious. They called the police, who called the FBI. After his emergency angioplasty, the feds took him -- against doctors' advice, his friends told the Hartford Courant -- to the Hartford lockup.

There he remained, charged with failure to get a work permit. He was in the country legally and was quickly cleared of terrorism suspicion, Khalaf's lawyer told the Courant. (The lawyer, Michael Moore of Springfield, Mass., didn't return phone calls.) An immigration judge ruled on Oct. 3 that he could go home to his family in Gaza. But the INS wouldn't let him go until November.

Moore says that he is involved with four other men -- three Pakistanis and an Indian -- who are also among the 1,100. They were arrested Nov. 25 after a guy told police he'd overheard two "Arab" men talking in a bar about delivering letters to "Kathy," a Vietnamese woman in New York. Vietnamese immigrant Kathy Nguyen had recently died of anthrax inhalation.

The informant flunked a lie detector test. Moore, who represents the two men allegedly involved in the conversation, says it never happened. Two other men were arrested because they happened to be present when the feds came for the first two, Moore told the Associated Press.