Gulet Mohamed is an 18-year-old Somali-American who appears to have been tortured by interrogators in Kuwait and barred from returning to the United States based on the suspicion that he may have come in contact with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen while traveling there last year. According to Glenn Greenwald, Mohamed says "he was repeatedly beaten with a stick on the bottom of his feet and his palms, hit in the face, and hung from the ceiling. He also says his captors threatened him with both the arrest of his mother and electric shock, and told him that he should forget his family."
In November, CIA Assistant General Counsel Daniel Pines -- not writing in his official capacity -- argued that "foreign-to-foreign rendition operations," did not violate the Convention Against Torture, even if they were done on the U.S. behalf, if the individual in question was not on U.S. territory at the time of the transfer. As I wrote at the time, it's Orwellian to suggest that "the authors of the Convention Against Torture actually meant to make knowingly sending someone to be tortured legal under a limited set of circumstances." Is the government relying on that interpretation here?
If that's the case, it's outrageous. The U.S. government is supposed to protect the rights of its citizens, here or abroad, not leave them at the mercy of foreign security forces prone to torturing individuals in their custody. Mohamed hasn't even been charged with a crime. If he's done something wrong, he deserves a day in court, not exile in a Kuwaiti detention facility.
