U.S. teenager detained and tortured in Kuwait

Link.

Quote :

Gulet Mohamed is an 18-year-old American citizen whose family is Somalian. His parents moved with him to the U.S. when he was 2 or 3 years old, and he has lived in the U.S. ever since. In March, 2009, he went to study Arabic and Islam in Yemen (in Sana'a, the nation's capital), and, after several weeks, left (at his mother's urging) and went to visit his mother's family in Somalia, staying with his uncle there for several months. Roughly one year ago, he left Somalia and traveled to Kuwait to stay with other family members who live there. Like many teenagers who reach early adulthood, he was motivated in his travels by a desire to see the world, to study, and to get to know his family's ancestral homeland and his faraway relatives.

At all times, Mohamed traveled on an American passport and had valid visas for all the countries he visited. He has never been arrested nor -- until two weeks ago -- was he ever involved with law enforcement in any way, including the entire time he lived in the U.S.

Approximately two weeks ago (on December 20), Mohamed went to the airport in Kuwait to have his visa renewed, as he had done every three months without incident for the last year. This time, however, he was told by the visa officer that his name had been marked in the computer, and after waiting five hours, he was taken into a room and interrogated by officials who refused to identify themselves. They then handcuffed and blindfolded him and drove him to some other locale. That was the start of a two-week-long, still ongoing nightmare during which he was imprisoned for a week in an unknown location by unknown captors, relentlessly interrogated, and severely beaten and threatened with even worse forms of torture.

And the U.S. knows he's being detained, tortured, and threatened, doesn't seem to care, and in fact has barred him from returning to the country entirely. He is now on the U.S.'s "no-fly" list, because... well, no one seems to know.

Quote :

The questions Mohamed was repeatedly asked -- including two days ago by American embassy officials and FBI agents who visited him in the detention facility -- focused on whether he knew Anwar al-Awlaki, the American cleric in Yemen who has become an obsession of the Obama administration, as well as why he went to Yemen and Somalia. Kuwait is little more than a subservient American protectorate, and the idea that they would do this to an American citizen without the American government's knowledge, if not its assent and participation, is implausible in the extreme. That much of the information they sought from Mohamed is of particular interest to the U.S. Government only bolsters that likelihood.

.... Mohamed described to me how both embassy officials and the FBI expressed zero interest in the torture to which he had been subjected during his detention. The U.S. Government has said nothing about this matter, and refused to comment about Mohamed's treatment to The New York Times.

Well this is just fucking scary.

Change you can believe in.

Ah, he's from a Somali family. No wonder they don't give a hoot.