The trail of the enemy combatant the left wants to set free

The Washington Post has a long story on the journey of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri.

The 37-year-old computer science student was racing against a deadline. Just one day after picking up his visa from the U.S. Embassy in Qatar, he boarded a plane with his wife and five small children. The family flew to Chicago, caught a night's sleep at an airport hotel, then squeezed into a taxi for a 200-mile ride through farm country to Peoria.

That morning in New York, the twin towers were comin g down.

Within weeks, a string of tips would lead FBI agents to the doorstep of the student, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. They eventually came to believe that he was al-Qaeda's senior operative in the United States, a sleeper agent who made an unexplained one-day trip to New York City in the summer of 2000 and who was planning a second wave of attacks.

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What was behind his travels between Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and the United States? What was the purpose of his computer research on hacking, and on how to buy and mix large quantities of chemicals into deadly hydrogen cyanide gas? Why did he possess more than 1,000 stolen credit card numbers? Does he have a connection to Dhiren Barot, the now-jailed British al-Qaeda leader who plotted to blow up buildings in the United States and England, and who may have inspired last month's attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow?

And was he rushing to the American heartland on Sept. 10, 2001, on orders from Osama bin Laden, or to beat the cutoff date for college enrollment?

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U.S. intelligence officials believe that Marri trained for two years in Afghanistan, among other things receiving instruction in the use of poisons and toxins at the Derunta camp near Jalalabad, sources said. He is believed to have trained under Abu Khabab al-Masri, an Egyptian specialist in chemical and biological weapons who was killed in an airstrike in Pakistan last year.

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Airline records show that on Aug. 18, 2000, "Almuslam" flew from Peoria to New York.

What he was doing in the city that day is not known. But the coincidences are suggestive. Dhiren Barot, al-Qaeda's chief operative in Britain, was already in New York. He had flown in from London a day earlier to case the stock exchange and other financial targets, according to a 2005 indictment in U.S. District Court in New York.

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Barot, who was arrested in Britain in 2004 and sentenced to life in prison last fall, confessed to what the judge in the case called a plot of "colossal and unprecedented scale" to blow up London subway cars, detonate radioactive "dirty bombs" and use limousines packed with gas cylinders to destroy luxury hotels.

He and his accomplices also admitted conducting elaborate videotaped reconnaissance on the stock exchange, the World Bank and other financial centers in New York and Washington in 2000 and 2001, obtaining building plans and security procedures. The discovery of those plans and videos in a 2004 raid on an al-Qaeda house in Pakistan prompted U.S. officials to raise the terrorism threat level and led to Barot's arrest.

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In a hijacker's car left at Dulles International Airport, authorities had found an express-mail receipt; it led them to a phone number that belonged to Hawsawi. The FBI learned that some calls to that number were made from cellphones and pay phones in the wee hours of the night from central Illinois, by someone using prepaid phone cards and PINs.

Investigators discovered that on Nov. 4, someone using a Qwest card and PIN called the Hawsawi number from a Chicago pay phone. On Nov. 7, someone used the same calling card from Marri's home phone, according to a criminal complaint later filed against him. The FBI then confirmed through cellphone records that Marri had been in Chicago at the time of the pay-phone call.

Marri had been calling other numbers, in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, according to the complaint. Intelligence and law enforcement sources say he was calling senior al-Qaeda operatives.

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Prosecutors said they would seek a sentence of up to 20 years because Marri's alleged crimes were intended to further terrorism. In response his attorneys withdrew approval for moving the cases to New York. That sent the matter back to Illinois, where the lawyers would have gotten a second chance to persuade a judge to suppress evidence from Marri's laptop and his statements to Zambeck and Brown.

But before that happened, a series of events took place that would culminate in Bush's ordering Marri into military custody. On March 1, 2003, Mohammed was captured in a safe house in Pakistan, along with a treasure-trove of material from his computer and telephones. He revealed several "second wave" plotters and facilitators who were dispatched before the 2001 attacks, according to the Sept. 11 commission. Marri was among them, counterterrorism sources said.

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He apparently was plotting a poison gas attack among other things. The maneuvering over this case shows the dangers of the liberals use of lawfare in the fight against terrorist. While the story gives some details of Marri's activities, many of the sources remain confidential. That information would have to be revealed in a trial. This guy needs to be in Gitmo and if he is tried at all it should be before a military commission and not in public. The best course would be to hold him as an enemy combatant until the end of the conflict with al Qaeda, if he lives that long.