Writing for the editors of The Weekly Standard, David Tell asks, ” If it is true that John Ashcroft has assaulted our rights by arresting innocent people willy-nilly and detaining them ‘indefinitely’ without basic procedural protections, then surely one such person — among the thousand-plus the federal government has detained since September 11 — would by now have been identified. Where, after all this caterwauling, is the archetypically sympathetic victim of the war on terrorism, the man who has rotted away in jail for no good reason or has otherwise been obviously and badly abused?”
No one has found him. Oh, they have tried. And for one instructive example, we turn again to the Washington Post. ‘Suspect Held 8 Months Without Seeing Judge,’ ran the front-page headline June 12. What followed was the Post’s account of a certain Nabil al Marabh.
Al Marabh, sayeth the Post, is ‘a former Boston cab driver once identified by authorities as a major terrorism suspect’ — the implication being that it may all have been a horrible mistake — who was ‘kept in solitary confinement for more than eight months” without ever “seeing a judge or being assigned a lawyer.’ Back when he was arrested, in the post-World Trade Center chaos of last September, ‘news reports said authorities might have linked him to two of the September 11 hijackers and a third man who had been sentenced to death in Jordan for a millennium bombing plot sponsored by al Qaeda.’ But U.S. officials have lately ‘declined to say whether al Marabh is still a suspect in the terrorism probe,’ and his case ‘has provoked outrage among civil liberties advocates and criminal defense attorneys.’ Here we are shown al Marabh tottering around a federal detention center ‘in leg irons and handcuffs attached to heavy waist chains’ until he is belatedly charged with minor immigration violations which, should he plead guilty, will carry a sentence ‘shorter than the term he has already spent in jail.’
Sounds awful.
But it’s misleading to the point of absurdity.
Nabil al Marabh was born in Kuwait in 1966. In the late 1980s, he moved to Massachusetts and took a driver’s job at the Boston Cab Company. Using that city as a base of operations, he almost immediately began establishing multiple ‘residences’ — and acquiring multiple identification documents — there, in Florida, in Toronto, and eventually in Detroit. Al Marabh also, probably in 1994, spent some time in a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan; he later showed his sometime Boston girlfriend, Laura Phillips, photographs of the place. In Afghanistan al Marabh met Raed M. Hijazi, whom he brought back to Boston and found work for at the cab company. The two men lived together briefly, until Hijazi moved in with yet another Boston Cab employee, Bassam Kanj. Kanj would later be killed while leading an al Qaeda attack against a Lebanese army division in the mountains outside Tripoli. Hijazi is the millennium bomb plotter mentioned by the Post. Al Marabh is known to have made thousands of dollars in overseas wire transfers to Hijazi as that plot was being planned.
In January 2001, al Marabh fled Boston rather than comply with the terms of a six-month suspended sentence he’d received for stabbing his roommate. He moved first (illegally) to Canada, from which he’d been deported several years before. Six months later, he attempted to sneak back into the States in the back of a tractor-trailer, but was caught and returned to the Mounties, who arrested him for possession of false documents. During a brief confinement at Canada’s Niagara Detention Center, al Marabh was visited by a man named Hassan Almrei, whom the Canadian government has subsequently arrested as an agent of al Qaeda.
Al Marabh was released from the Niagara jail last July on $10,000 bail paid by his uncle, Ahmed Shehab. Shehab owns a Toronto copy shop whose paper stock, laminates, and ink, according to Canadian investigators, exactly match those used in identification papers left behind by the September 11 hijackers. Shehab is also the principal of Toronto’s Al-Qura Islamic elementary school. Al-Qura’s previous principal, ‘Mahmoud Jaballah,’ shares a set of fingerprints, according to Interpol, with one Mahmoud Said, a leading figure in Islamic Jihad, the Egyptian terrorist organization founded by Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s longtime number two man.
Telephone records link al Marabh with Nageeb Abdul Jabar Mohamed al-Hadi, the mysterious Yemeni man who was arrested on September 11 after attempting to fly into Chicago with three different passports and a Lufthansa flight crew uniform in his bags. Telephone and banking records link al Marabh with September 11 hijackers Ahmed Alghamdi, Satam al-Suqami, Marwan al-Shehhi, and even Mohamed Atta himself.
Nabil al Marabh, in short, is an extremely dangerous fellow — a terrorist, in fact. He is also, praise Allah, a prisoner of the United States government, and it seems to us that American civil liberties are more, rather than less, secure as a consequence. Happy Fourth of July.
Pshaw, David. Circumstantial evidence, all of it. Let him go until you’ve got something concrete on him. It’s inhumane to let an innocent man rot in Ashcroft’s gulag.
And free Mumia, while you’re at it, too. Fascists.
—–