wikileaks: mentally ill canadian citizen held in bagram prison for 18 months, and counting

This morning CBC News reports that WikiLeaks has exposed that a Canadian is being held at the notorious Bagram prison, the US-run torture camp and holding tank for Afghans who were either trying to defend their country from foreign invaders or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The man, Khaled Samy Abdallah Ismail, is mentally ill. A citizen of both Canada and Egypt, he has been imprisoned in Bagram for 18 months. There is no evidence against him.

Omar Khadr, then, is not the only Canadian being held in deplorable indefinite detention. And the name Ismail gets added to the long and growing list of Canadian citizens that the Harper government has abandoned. As David Eaves says:

If you have the wrong colour skin, the wrong beliefs, if you do something that the Canadian government decides it doesn't approve of, or if you are simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time... you are on your own.

Read the CBC story on Ismail here.

See the Council of Canadians summary of how the Harper government has failed to protect Canadian citizens.