Adam Serwer on what happens when detainees are sent back to their home countries:
After seven years of being locked in the Guantánamo Bay detention center, Mohammed Jawad was headed back to prison.
That was what one of Jawad’s former attorneys, Maj. Eric Montalvo, realized soon after arriving in Afghanistan last month. In 2002, the United States detained Jawad because it believed he tossed a grenade at a U.S. convoy — he was between 12 and 14 years old at the time. Because most of the evidence against him was gleaned through torture suffered at the hands of Afghan and U.S. authorities, Judge Ellen Huvelle granted Jawad’s habeas corpus petition in July and ordered him sent back home. His legal team requested that one of them be allowed to accompany Jawad on his trip back to Afghanistan. Montalvo says that after all Jawad had been through, “We’re pretty much the only adults he’s been able to rely upon.”
