WASHINGTON, 1 March 2005 — Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a US citizen arrested in Madinah, Saudi Arabia, and accused of conspiring to assassinate President Bush, is scheduled for a detention hearing today in a Virginia federal court — weather permitting as snow storms have hit much of the region — on charges of providing material support to Al-Qaeda.

Abu Ali was charged Feb. 22 with conspiracy and providing material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization — Al-Qaeda.

According to the six-count indictment, Abu Ali “did knowingly and unlawfully conspire to knowingly provide material support and resources...knowing and intending that they were to be used in preparation for, and for carrying out, the assassination of the president of the United States.”

The 23-year-old Abu Ali is not charged with a conspiracy to assassinate Bush, but for supporting terrorists and, as part of that, discussing Bush’s possible assassination. The indictment offered no evidence that the discussions ever advanced into a plan.

He was denied bail last Tuesday.

Abu Ali is charged with meeting with a man called the second-ranking Al-Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia, Sultan Jubran Sultan Al-Qatani, also known as Zubayr Al-Rimi. Al-Rimi was killed in a Sept. 23, 2003 shootout with Saudi security forces during a raid on a hospital housing complex in Jizan.

Abu Ali’s attorney, Edward MacMahon, has denied any wrongdoing by his client, and said he “intends to plead not guilty to all of these charges.”

The charges against Abu Ali have also infuriated members of Northern Virginia’s Muslim population and increased ill-will with federal law enforcement authorities over terrorism investigations into religious leaders, mosques, businesses and private Islamic schools in the region.

“Our whole community is under siege,” Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, a spokesman for the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, where Abu Ali and his family worshiped, recently told journalists. “They don’t see this as a case of criminality. They see it as a civil rights case. As a frontal attack on their community.”

The particulars of Abu Ali’s case, especially that he was detained 20 months in Saudi Arabia before being suddenly returned to the US, has caused widespread criticism in the media.

An editorial in New York’s Newsday states: “An American citizen jailed...in Saudi Arabia for 20 months, possibly at the behest of the US government, is the latest outrage in a litany of detention excesses in the war on terror...That list of shame includes ghost detainees kept off the books by the CIA, captives abused in US-run prisons abroad and prisoners designated enemy combatants and denied basic due process.”

President Bush should show more respect for the Constitution, said Newsday. “Ceding the moral high ground on rights will do little to help the war effort and much to destroy the nation’s standing as a champion of freedom...It erodes important elements of what makes this nation special: Its respect for the rule of law and individual rights.”

Bob Herbert in yesterday’s New York Times is equally outraged: “As a nation, does the US have a conscience? ...If torture and denial of due process are OK, why not murder? When the government can just make people vanish — which it can, and which it does — where is the line that we, as a nation, dare not cross?

“President Bush spent much of last week lecturing other nations about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was a breathtaking display of chutzpah,” writes Herbert. “He seemed to me like a judge who starves his children and then sits on the bench to hear child abuse cases.”

Michael Isikoff in the March 7 issue of Newsweek, writes: “US law-enforcement officials admit there is a good chance Abu Ali could eventually walk out of prison a free man. The indictment of Abu Ali shows how the administration’s aggressive pursuit of the global war on terror is increasingly getting tangled up in legal constraints at home...”