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, 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. Kidd was never charged with a crime. He was
held as a material witness. Civil-liberties groups accuse the Bush
administration of misusing the material-witness statutes to arrest and
hold people the Justice Department finds suspicious but can't prove
anything. [more ]
Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.
]