Last week, I blogged about a federal appeals court decision which could make former Attorney General John Ashcroft personally liable for decisions leading to the detention of a US citizen as a material witness after 9/11.
John Schwartz at the New York Times has filed a more thorough report than the AP item I blogged. His piece includes details about the Kansas-born man who filed the lawsuit, with representation from the ACLU. Snip:
The lawsuit was brought in 2005 by Abdullah al-Kidd, who was born Lavoni T. Kidd in Kansas and converted to Islam in college. He was arrested in 2003 at Dulles Airport as he prepared to fly to Saudi Arabia for graduate work in Islamic studies, and was held for weeks under a law that allows the indefinite detention of material witnesses to a crime. After his detention, he was ordered to stay with his in-laws in Las Vegas; his travel was restricted over the next year.
Mr. Kidd, who was not called as a witness in the case in which he was detained and was never charged with a crime, sued Mr. Ashcroft and other officials in 2005, challenging his detention as unconstitutional and saying it cost him his marriage and his job. His lawyers argued that he was held as part of a secret Bush administration policy to use the material witness statute as a tool to detain and interrogate people when there was insufficient evidence to charge them with a crime.
