Ahmed Omar Abu Ali

There were several marks on Abu Ali’s back which the defense presented as physical evidence that Abu Ali had been tortured. The prosecution claimed that these marks were not the result of torture but merely “pigment discolorations.”

The defense expert was Dr. Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. Dr. Keller physically examined Abu Ali and said that he observed about seven to ten scars on Abu Ali’s back which evince scars from the whipping Mr. Abu Ali claims he suffered during interrogation in Medina.

The government expert was Dr. Robert Katz, a dermatologist. He did not physically examine Abu Ali but viewed photographs that the court had taken. Dr. Katz stated that, in his opinion, the marks depicted on Abu Ali’s back in the photograph were not scars, but “pigment discolorations.”

Mr. Ali is held under highly restrictive conditions in ADX Florence supermax prison. In August 2008, he requested permission to receive two books by Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Permission was denied by prison authorities on the grounds that the books contained material "potentially detrimental to national security".

The District Court in DC never got a chance to rule on the issue of jurisdiction. In February 2005, Abu Ali was transferred to US custody pursuant to a criminal indictment, returned by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on February 3, 2005. The indictment charged Abu Ali with two counts of providing material support to terrorists, two counts of providing material support to a terrorist organization (Al-Qaeda), one count of contributing goods and services to Al-Qaeda, and one count of receiving services from Al-Qaeda.

Abu Ali went to trial in the fall of 2005. The government's evidence was focused on a detailed confession Abu Ali had made while in Saudi custody. Abu Ali challenged the admissibility of the confession, claiming: (1) the confession was involuntary due to alleged torture he had suffered at the hands of the Saudis; and (2) he should have been given certain constitutional protections (including Miranda warnings), because the interrogations were a joint venture between the FBI and Saudi authorities, rather than a purely Saudi interrogation, which would not have been subject to the same scrutiny under the U.S. Constitution.

The jury trial took place in November 2005. On November 22, 2005, after deliberating for two and a half days, the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict on all counts. On March 29, 2006, Ali was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his crime. While prosecutors had pushed for a life sentence, Judge Gerald Bruce Lee explained that the (relatively) light sentence was handed down because Abu Ali's actions "did not result in one single actual victim. That fact must be taken into account."

Amnesty International has called Abu-Ali's trial unfair based on their observations in the period from November 7 to 10, 2005. They conclude that:

In June 2003, Abu Ali was arrested by Saudi authorities while taking exams at the Islamic University of Medina. He was held for approximately 20 months by the Saudi government without charges or access to an attorney, and given the paucity of information coming out of Saudi Arabia about the case, many human rights organizations speculated that Abu Ali's situation was actually a case of extraordinary rendition and that he might be subject to torture. In addition, comments allegedly made by Gordon Kromberg, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, heightened the concerns that Abu Ali had faced torture during his detention and interrogation in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, Kromberg was asked by a defense lawyer whether Abu Ali would be brought to the United States to face charges. Kromberg responded: "He's no good for us here. He has no fingernails left," according to an affidavit filed in court by the lawyer, Salim Ali.

Born in Houston, Texas, in March 1981 and raised in Falls Church, Virginia, Abu Ali was valedictorian of his class at the Islamic Saudi Academy high school in nearby Alexandria. Abu Ali entered the University of Maryland in the fall of 1999 as an electrical engineering major, prayed at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque near Falls Church, but withdrew in the middle of the 2000 spring semester to study Islamic theology at the Islamic University of Medina in Medina, Saudi Arabia.