Al-Qaeda Assistant Sentenced to Eight Years in Prison
Depending on who you ask, the sentencing yesterday of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri to eight years in prison is either evidence that the civilian federal judicial system can successfully handle terror cases, or evidence that it’s a dismal failure.
Yesterday, Jonathan Hafetz, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented Al-Marri in his challenge to military detention, told The New York Times that the sentence by a federal judge was “a powerful reminder that America’s civilian courts can deliver justice even in the most challenging circumstances.” But David Rivkin, a former Reagan-era Justice Department official and strong supporter of military commissions to try suspected terrorists had a different take. Criminal courts are “ill-suited” to terror cases because the sentences are “a crap-shoot,” he said, adding that military commissions “arrive at a better judgment, being comprised of warriors, as to what level of danger the person poses.”
Al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident living in Peoria, Ill., before his arrest in late 2001, spent almost six years in a U.S. Navy brig in South Carolina without charge, mostly in isolation. Shortly before his case questioning the legality of his indefinite detention on U.S. soil was set to reach the Supreme Court, the Obama administration transferred him to civilian custody, incarcerated him in a federal prison and prepared for his trial in federal court. But prosecutors agreed to accept a plea bargain, in which Al-Marri admitted that he’d been ordered by al-Qaeda official Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to move to the United States from his native Qatar and await instructions. Al-Marri moved his wife and five children to Peoria and he enrolled at Bradley University, where he had studied earlier. He admitted in his plea that he “researched online information related to various cyanide compounds” and communicated with other al-Qaeda operatives.
When al-Marri was arrested in December 2001 on charges of financial fraud, he hadn’t carried out any terrorist acts. But 18 months after his arrest, the government dropped the criminal charges and named al-Marri an “enemy combatant,” which in the Bush administration’s view, gave the government the right to hold him indefinitely in military custody. He remained at the Navy big, without charge or trial, until February.
Whether it’s legal for the United States to imprison indefinitely a lawful U.S. resident in a military prison on U.S. soil remains an open question, largely because the Obama administration did not give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule on it. That may have been a strategic move designed to leave open the possibility of using that power again, particularly since President Obama promised to close the Guantanamo Bay prison by January 2010, but hasn’t yet decided what to do with many of the detainees imprisoned there.
For Al-Marri, however, it means he will now serve another eight years in prison. (He faced up to 15 years, but the judge agreed to consider the time he’d already served.) Al-Marri yesterday tearfully apologized for helping al-Qaeda and said he no longer wants to harm the American people.
Notwithstanding Rivkin’s criticism of the federal court’s sentence, it’s worth noting that in the two contested cases where terror suspects were sentenced by military commissions for similarly assisting al-Qaeda, both received lighter sentences. Salim Hamdan, for example, Osama bin Laden’s driver, was sentenced by a military jury of “warriors” to just five and a half years in prison, and given credit for time served. He’s already back home in Yemen. In the other case, Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism and was sentenced to only nine months in prison. A former kangaroo-skinner, Hicks is now home.
