THE QATAR CONNECTION

What prompted President Bush's decision this week to declare a Qatari computer student living in Peoria, Ill. an "enemy combatant" in the war on terrorism?

Administration officials insist it was new information showing that the Bradley University student, Ali Saleh Kahlah Al Marri, was an Al Qaeda "sleeper agent" who had been dispatched to the United States at the behest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks who was captured in Pakistan last March.

But administration officials took the step only after Marri began mounting an aggressive legal defense to criminal charges filed by the Justice Department--a legal defense effort that was engineered by a high powered New Jersey law firm that was being paid, NEWSWEEK has learned, by the Government of Qatar.

Marri's indictment appears to have been at least one factor in the administration's extraordinary decision to yank the Qatari citizen out of the criminal-justice system and dispatch him to a military brig in Charleston, S.C., where he will be held indefinitely--with no access to his lawyers or any opportunity to contest the government's charges against him in a trial.

At the time of Bush's decision Monday morning, Marri was facing a July 21 trial date in Peoria, Ill. on charges involving the use of bogus credit cards and lying to FBI agents about several phone calls he allegedly made to a phone number in the United Arab Emirates that had been used by Mustafa Ahmed Al Hawsawi--one of the suspected financiers of the September 11 attacks. (A calling card used by Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, had called the same number.)