Kidd a witness or hapless detainee?
In March 2003, Abdullah al Kidd, an American, a former college football player and a convert to Islam, was arrested at Washington's Dulles International Airport where he was en route to Saudi Arabia to study for an advanced degree in Islamic studies. He was jailed and, he says, ferried about the country, finally coming before a judge in Idaho and finally released on the condition that he live with his in-laws and not travel outside a four-state area. In June, after 16 months in legal limbo, a judge lifted the conditions, but by then he had lost his wife and scholarship and, because employers assumed he was an ex-felon, unemployable. Kidd was never charged with a crime. He was held as a material witness. Civil-liberties groups accuse the Bush administration of misusing the material-witness statutes to arrest and hold people the Justice Department finds suspicious but can't prove anything. [more 
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