Distorted Intelligence?
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek, 25 June 2003

...

The Qatar Connection

What prompted President Bush’s decision this week to declare a Qatari computer student living in Peoria, Ill. an “enemy combatant” in the war on terrorism?

Administration officials insist it was new information showing that the Bradley University student, Ali Saleh Kahlah Al Marri, was an Al Qaeda “sleeper agent” who had been dispatched to the United States at the behest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks who was captured in Pakistan last March.

But administration officials took the step only after Marri began mounting an aggressive legal defense to criminal charges filed by the Justice Department—a legal defense effort that was engineered by a high powered New Jersey law firm that was being paid, NEWSWEEK has learned, by the Government of Qatar.

Marri’s indictment appears to have been at least one factor in the administration’s extraordinary decision to yank the Qatari citizen out of the criminal-justice system and dispatch him to a military brig in Charleston, S.C., where he will be held indefinitely—with no access to his lawyers or any opportunity to contest the government’s charges against him in a trial.

At the time of Bush’s decision Monday morning, Marri was facing a July 21 trial date in Peoria, Ill. on charges involving the use of bogus credit cards and lying to FBI agents about several phone calls he allegedly made to a phone number in the United Arab Emirates that had been used by Mustafa Ahmed Al Hawsawi—one of the suspected financiers of the September 11 attacks. (A calling card used by Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, had called the same number.)

But court records in the case show that Marri’s new lawyers, Larry Lustberg and Mark Berman of Newark, N. J., had filed a motion last month seeking to suppress key evidence in the case. They argued that federal agents had failed to read their client his Miranda rights and obtained his computer files through a warrantless- search of his apartment.

Standard defense lawyers tactics, perhaps, but in this case effective. In an apparent setback for the Justice Department, the federal judge overseeing the case on Friday ordered a hearing on the motion, giving Marri’s lawyers the right to call their own witnesses and cross-examine federal agents.

It was only after that ruling that Justice Department officials, in consultation with White House lawyers, hastily pulled the plug on the entire proceeding and had Marri declared an enemy combatant on Monday. Was the Justice Department worried that much of the evidence against Marri might get tossed? Officials insist not. But Marri defense lawyer Berman insisted it’s hard to draw any other conclusion that the looming evidentiary hearing ordered by the judge was “their true incentive.”

Berman is less talkative about how he and his co-counsel, Lustberg, came to be brought into the case in the first place. Both are prominent defense lawyers in New Jersey who had previously been retained by the Saudi Embassy to represent Saudi students in New Jersey accused of hiring imposters to take English language proficiency tests needed to get into college or graduate schools.

The widespread practice of the Saudi Government, and now the Qatari government—another purported ally of the U.S. in the war on terror—of retaining U.S. lawyers for their own citizens being prosecuted by the Justice Department on terrorism-related charges has angered some Justice officials. It has led, sources tell NEWSWEEK, to recent talks between Justice and State Department officials about possibly requesting these allied governments to put a stop to the practice.