Abou Elkassim Britel can’t sleep, or he sleeps too much; it varies. He backs out of commitments. The Islamic website he wants to publish from his Italian home remains unfinished.
“I would add,” he said through translation, “that I cannot think of the future.”
The doctors tell Britel that he has post-traumatic stress disorder, after a decade-long ordeal of imprisonment without charge or transfer and abuse. It began in 2002, when the United States packed him onto a contractor’s Gulfstream V in Pakistan and flew him to Morocco.
Britel survived what the US calls rendition, an extrajudicial process of transferring a detainee for “interrogation” in a foreign country. Allies of the US beat Britel with a cricket bat, shoved a bottle into his anus, denied him access to lawyers and Italian diplomats and unceremoniously released him in 2011, as if nothing ever happened.
“Rendition is a series of shocking events, one worse than the other,” he said.
Palestinian goalkeeper Saleem al-Ashqar was killed earlier this week by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip,...
The destruction of villages in southern Lebanon was inevitable from the beginning of Israel’s invasion, an...
Under the expansive Montana sky, hundreds of members and descendants of 19 tribal nations gather at...
