In March 2003, Abdullah al Kidd, an American, a former college football player and a convert to Islam, was arrested at Washington's Dulles International Airport where he was en route to Saudi Arabia to study for an advanced degree in Islamic studies. He was jailed and, he says, treated badly -- forced to sit nude in a small cell. He was ferried about the country, finally coming before a judge in Idaho and finally released on the condition that he live with his in-laws and not travel outside a four-state area. In June, after 16 months in legal limbo, a judge lifted the conditions, but by then he had lost his wife and scholarship and, because employers assumed he was an ex-felon, unemployable. This is the story Kidd told the New York Times, and the Justice Department doesn't contradict it. Kidd, now 31, was never charged with a crime. He was held as a material witness. The material-witness laws allow the government to hold -- briefly -- people at risk of flight who have potentially valuable testimony for a grand jury or a trial. Kidd never appeared before a court or grand jury.[more
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