by TChris

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a student from Qatar, was arrested in the US in December 2001. Shortly before his trial was to begin in 2003, the Bush administration declared him an enemy combatant. He has been detained without trial ever since at a naval brig in Charleston. Yesterday, he filed a lawsuit challenging the conditions of his confinement. (An earlier challenge to the fact of his detention is pending.)

The prisoner maintains that he has been regularly denied access to basic necessities like a toothbrush, toilet paper, adequate bedding, and medical and psychological care. He has been confined in isolation in a dark 6-by-9-foot cell round the clock, his suit says, except for brief periods of outside recreation three times a week when he is deemed to be in compliance with jail rules.

Military jailers have also subjected him to extreme cold, used the roar of a loud fan nearby to "harass and torment him" and denied him access to any books, newspapers, radio, television or religious material except for the Koran, he says.

Marri also contends that jailers have treated the Koran disrespectfully and that he’s been denied access to his wife and children. He complains of abusive interrogation techniques, including threats to send him to a country where he “would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front of him.”