Qatari Lawyer Builds Case for Detainees At Guantánamo Bay

Attorney's Clients Include U.S.-Born Prisoner

The former justice minister of Qatar has assembled a legal team from a half-dozen countries to represent the families of 70 al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners held at a U.S. Navy base in Cuba and is preparing to ask the U.S. government to release them or hold hearings to determine their fates.

Najeeb Nuaimi, now an attorney in private practice in Qatar, also represents Yaser Esam Hamdi, 22, the detainee who was transferred from Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to a jail in Virginia last month after U.S. officials discovered he had been born in this country and may be a U.S. citizen.

The effort by Nuaimi and his colleagues may be the most potent legal undertaking so far to challenge the government's detention of the 384 captives in Cuba and Hamdi, who is held in the brig at the Norfolk Naval Station.

Although other lawsuits filed on behalf of Guantanamo detainees have been hamstrung by the fact that no federal court has jurisdiction over the Cuban base, Nuaimi may be able to apply political pressure through the governments of the growing coalition of detainee families he is assembling.

Specifically, the attorneys are asking that the United States apply provisions of international law that could cast doubt on the legality of the captives' detentions.

"I'm trying to get the U.S. government to understand that these captured people have a right to defend themselves," said Nuaimi, whois arranging to meet Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II later this month and to visit Hamdi in Norfolk.

"My plan is to be patient, and if I'm rejected totally [by the Pentagon], then I'll have the right to file against the government," he said.

Nuaimi said he and his associates have secured power-of-attorney documents from the relatives of 70 detainees and are trying to line up more. It is possible, he said, that they could eventually represent most of the captives at Guantanamo Bay.

A spokesman for the Pentagon said military officials had no comment.

Nuaimi did not describe his possible lines of legal attack. But like other complaints filed on behalf of the detainees, his would confront a 1950 Supreme Court decision that denied captured foreign combatants overseas the right to have their cases heard in U.S. federal court.

Earlier this month, another group of attorneys filed suit in federal court in Washington requesting hearings on the fairness of the captivity of 11 Kuwaitis held at Guantanamo Bay. Attorneys for two Britons and one Australian held there also have filed a similar petition in the same court.

Those cases, which are still pending, have at least a chance of being heard because, like Nuaimi, the attorneys had obtained written requests from the captives' families that they wanted representation, legal experts said.

In February a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed a lawsuit seeking hearings on the propriety of the detentions. The judge said the attorneys had no standing to bring the case because they had no client in Cuba, and because U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over the naval base there.

Among his clients in Cuba, Nuaimi said, are dozens of Saudi and Jordanian families, plus a number of Kuwaitis and Yemenis, and one Syrian.

"Maybe these [detainees] cannot explain their legal status, but I can," he said. "The majority of these people were caught in between forces in the Afghanistan civil war."

He cited the case of a Saudi detainee who had traveled to Pakistan to get married and was pulled off the street by a gang tied to Pakistani security forces that had been offered rewards to locate al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. A similar fate befell a Jordanian man seeking medical attention in Pakistan for a skin disease, who was arrested and turned over to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he said.

But Nuaimi said he was most hopeful that he will win Hamdi's freedom. Nuaimi has secured the help of the federal public defender's service in Norfolk to initially serve as his co-counsel on that case.

"It will be impossible for the government to reject" arguments for Hamdi's freedom, Nuaimi said. "He's not sitting in prison in Iraq or Libya."

Hamdi was captured by U.S. forces during a prison rebellion in the Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, in which a CIA officer was killed. He told U.S. interrogators early on that he had been born in Louisiana, but they began to take him seriously only a few weeks ago, when federal agents located his birth certificate in Baton Rouge.

Hamdi's father, Esam Hamdi, a petrochemical engineer in the Saudi city of Jubail, said in an interview that he and his family had lost touch with his son and believed he was still on a humanitarian trip to Afghanistan.

But on April 6, the father saw a television report that his son had been held for months at Guantanamo Bay and was being moved to Virginia because of the possibility that he is a U.S. citizen.

"We want to talk to him as soon as possible," Esam Hamdi said. "We don't know how to contact him, at least to say 'hello,' and to say we're working on his case."

The elder Hamdi was living in Baton Rouge in 1980, working on a petrochemical project, when his son was born. The family also lived in California and Texas during that assignment, before returning to Saudi Arabia when Yaser Hamdi was 3, his father said.

Last year, Yaser Hamdi was a sophomore studying marketing at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. In July he disappeared, his father said. The young man later called his uncle from Pakistan to say that he planned to do humanitarian work among refugees in Afghanistan, and that he was too intimidated to talk about it with his disapproving parents, the father said.

"He went off for the summer the way young people do," Esam Hamdi said. A week before Sept. 11, the young man called his mother, saying that he planned to come home.

"We think he then got trapped by September 11 and the war," the father said.

In hindsight, the family spotted no sign of religious radicalism in him.

"He's a very joyful character, and he's always been close to his relatives," the elder Hamdi said. "In school he had good relations with Americans, British, Indian kids. . . . I'm convinced he was not involved in any illegal activity."

U.S. officials say they lack enough specific information about Hamdi's activities in Afghanistan to justify charging him criminally. But military officials say they consider him a "captured enemy combatant" and plan to hold him until they decide what to do with him.

Some international lawyers say the government lacks the authority to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely, and should quickly decide Yaser Hamdi's fate.

But other lawyers more sympathetic to the Bush administration say the government has the power to detain Hamdi even if he is an American citizen. They cite, among other things, the Union's lengthy detention of thousands of captured Confederate troops during the Civil War.

One potential complication is the possibility Yaser Hamdi may not be a U.S. citizen, despite his birthplace. Saudi Embassy officials have said that the kingdom does not allow dual citizenship, and that on his return to Saudi Arabia as a child Yaser Hamdi likely was stripped of his U.S. citizenship. The Saudi Embassy did not return telephone requests for information on the case.

In any case, Esam Hamdi said he is eager to speak to his son but is waiting for his lawyers to arrange it.

"If you talk to him," the father said, "ask him to call us."