This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: July 16, 2008 - Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar and graduate of Bradley University in Peoria, has been held since 2001. Currently he is in military custody in Charleston, S.C. He and his family had reentered the United States the day before 9/11. He said he was pursuing a master's degree at Bradley where he had gotten his bachelor's degree a decade earlier.
The basis of his detention is a statement by Jeffrey N. Rapp, director of the Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism. It states al-Marri trained at an al-Qaida training in the late 1990s and was introduced to Osama bin Laden. It goes on to allege he was a "sleeper agent" who had information about poisonous chemicals on his laptop.
A 5-4 majority of the appeals court concluded that the Congress gave the president authority to indefinitely hold an enemy combatant - whether the accused is a citizen or not - when it passed the war resolution after 9/11. Judge William B. Traxler, Jr., while upholding the president's authority, switched sides on the question of whether the government had presented enough proof that al-Marri was an enemy combatant. He said that the government's mere assertion of al-Marri's connection to al-Qaida did not give al-Marri a chance to prove the government was wrong.
The Scotusblog has a good summary of the case.
William Freivogel special to the Beacon