Not. Short story: an American citizen is jailed while studying in Saudi Arabia, and has bee held for 18 months, and apparently tortured. His family sues, claiming that the US government requested the arrest. US goverment doesn’t deny it, but says they have no jurisdiction over foreign custodians. Judge (appointed by Bush Sr.) throws out the government argument, pointing out that the policy would allow the US to cause any citizen it chooses to be arrested in a foreign country without due process, thereby doing an end-around of the Constitution (“In short,” he wrote, “the United States is, in effect, arguing for nothing less than the unreviewable powers to separate an American citizen from the most fundamental of his constitutional rights merely by choosing where he will be detained or who will detain him.”). From the NYTimes. U.S. Asserts Authority Over American in Saudi Jail
**By NEIL A. LEWIS **
ASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - A federal district judge ruled Thursday that United States courts had jurisdiction in the case of an American citizen jailed in Saudi Arabia as a terrorism suspect, whose family alleges that he is being kept there and mistreated at the behest of United States law enforcement officials.
The ruling by Judge John D. Bates is the latest in a series of court decisions that have rebuffed the Bush administration in its efforts to keep detention policies and actions connected to fighting terrorism beyond the reach of the judiciary.
Judge Bates ruled in the case of Ahmed Abu Ali, 23, of Falls Church, Va., who was arrested by Saudi authorities while attending the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia in June 2003.
The issue in the case was whether the United States government bore some responsibility for him because of credible allegations that American officials had been responsible for his arrest, detention and interrogation.
Mr. Abu Ali’s family submitted affidavits providing some evidence that the Saudi government had no interest in him, that it was keeping him at the behest of American law enforcement authorities and that American prosecutors had boasted to other terrorism suspects that his fingernails had been torn out.
The administration did not respond to most of the allegations. Instead, government lawyers argued that federal courts lacked jurisdiction to require the government to answer questions about someone’s detention in cases “where the prisoner is being held by a foreign custodian, even where the United States allegedly has been involved in the prisoner’s incarceration in the first place.”
In his 69-page ruling, Judge Bates said the administration’s argument was too sweeping, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling on June 28 that the government may not deny a citizen the right to federal court review of his detention.
“The full contours of this position would permit the United States, at its discretion and without judicial review, to arrest a citizen of the United States and transfer her to the custody of allies overseas in order to avoid constitutional scrutiny,” he wrote. Accepting that, he said, would even allow the government “to deliver American citizens to foreign governments to obtain information through the use of torture.”
“In short,” he wrote, “the United States is, in effect, arguing for nothing less than the unreviewable powers to separate an American citizen from the most fundamental of his constitutional rights merely by choosing where he will be detained or who will detain him.”
Judge Bates, who was named to the Federal District Court here by President Bush’s father, told the government to respond to the specific allegations of complicity in Mr. Abu Ali’s detention and treatment, a procedural order that might not be appealable.
Mr. Abu Ali was investigated by the F.B.I. about his connections to a group of Virginia men who had spent weekends playing paintball in what prosecutors said was preparation to help Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic group trying to force India out of the disputed Kashmir region.
Although the ruling on Thursday was largely tied to Mr. Abu Ali’s United States citizenship, some of the judge’s language applies to noncitizens. The ruling could thus have an impact on an unacknowledged practice of the United States government to keep as many as two dozen “high value detainees” in the formal custody of foreign governments, under which they are interrogated harshly.
The Convention Against Torture, which the United States has signed and which is reaffirmed by American law, prohibits transferring detainees to a country where there is reason to believe that they may be maltreated.
Critics say cases like the high-value detainees’ and Mr. Abu Ali’s represent the government’s effort to make it appear that they were always in the custody of some other government and not transferred there from the United States.