Al-Hussayen languishing in county jail
BOISE – Two days after he was supposed to be back home in Saudi Arabia, former University of Idaho graduate student Sami Al-Hussayen was still sitting in a tiny jail cell Friday in Caldwell, Idaho.
The computer science student, cleared of charges of aiding terrorists by operating Web sites, agreed two weeks ago to drop his appeals of a deportation order in exchange for federal prosecutors dropping several remaining immigration charges against him. The same jury that acquitted Al-Hussayen on three terrorism charges and three other, similar immigration charges had deadlocked on the remaining eight immigration charges. The agreement called for Al-Hussayen to be sent home within two weeks – but those two weeks were up Wednesday.
“I struck an agreement with the United States government, and it frustrates me that it’s not being followed through on,” said David Nevin, Al-Hussayen’s defense attorney. “I just think it’s perplexing to him to still be sitting in jail after all this time, and it is. It’s just astonishing.”
Federal prosecutors couldn’t be reached for comment Friday. Jean McNeil, spokeswoman for the Idaho U.S. Attorney’s office, said she, too, thought the agreement was for 14 days, but didn’t know what was happening. The jury reached its verdict June 10, which means Al-Hussayen has remained in jail more than a month since being acquitted.
Rita Nixon, acting deputy field office director for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Missoula, said, “It takes time to set this up, it takes time to get the approvals, to make the arrangements. It’s all in the process of being handled. He will be moved very shortly.”
Nixon said she thought the agreement was to work on the deportation within 14 days, not necessarily to complete it. “It is in the works, and it will be happening as soon as we can get all the necessary concurrences,” she said.
Nevin said, “They can say they have to go through procedures and everything else, but I think we all know that if they want to send him home they could do that. They could do it tomorrow, they could’ve done it yesterday. The Saudi Embassy has been very clear that they will do anything to speed the process. It’s just very dismaying.”
Al-Hussayen, 34, has been jailed since February 2003, when he was arrested in a pre-dawn raid at his Moscow, Idaho, apartment. Federal agents seized computers and records, and accused the student of aiding international terrorists in Chechnya and the Middle East by operating various Web sites for an Islamic group, the Islamic Assembly of North America, and funneling donations to the group.
The group never was charged with any wrongdoing. A defense witness at Al-Hussayen’s eight-week trial in federal court said the group’s Web sites were religious and analytical, and not terrorist tools, though they included some extremist articles and lectures.
Al-Hussayen’s wife and three young sons returned to Saudi Arabia months ago rather than face deportation themselves. Though Al-Hussayen has maintained his innocence throughout the case, he told his lawyers that rather than continue his immigration appeal, he’d rather go home and be reunited with his family.
While he is awaiting deportation, Al-Hussayen has been turned over from the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service to immigration officials, which meant a transfer from the Ada County Jail to the Canyon County Jail in Caldwell. There, he is being held in a small, disciplinary segregation cell, which authorities say is the only place they can hold Al-Hussayen separately from other jail inmates. He is locked down 23 hours a day.
Five days a week, he is allowed into another room for one hour. “It’s an empty room about the size of my living room,” Nevin said. “There’s a telephone in there and he’s allowed to make phone calls.”
Though outside light filters into his cell through a frosted window, Al-Hussayen can’t see outside, day or night, Nevin said.
“It’s an isolation environment,” he said. “It just seems terribly unfair to me.”
A stack of nearly a dozen books Al-Hussayen had planned to read in jail wasn’t transferred with him from one jail to the other, and Nevin scrambled this week to get new books sent to him. Books only can arrive at jail in a sealed container direct from the bookseller, for security reasons.
“With Sami, that’s like taking away food and water – that’s what allows him to survive,” Nevin said of the books. “They gave him the New York Times to read today, and he’s happy about that. He had a smile on his face.”
Al-Hussayen, son of a retired Saudi government education minister, is the former president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of Idaho. He was studying in the United States on a scholarship from the Saudi government, and was a prominent spokesman for the Muslim community in Moscow before his arrest, which came just months before he was to have earned his doctorate in computer science.