Guantanamo Justice?

Abdullah Kamel, 28, is an engineer who worked with Kuwait's public electricity company. Family photos show him as a teenager in 1991, hospitalized after a piece of leftover gulf war ordnance exploded in his hand. They show him six years later in a T shirt flexing his muscles, joking with friends. Yet after Kamel got married, he cultivated a more serious image. Recent photos show that he's grown a full beard and adopted the garb of a religious conservative.

Like many Kuwaitis, Kamel had a job that let him take paid leaves to do charity work. In 2001, just as his vacation began, the World Trade Center was attacked and the United States quickly prepared to wage war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Arabic press was full of horror stories about the impending Afghan refugee crisis. "He said, 'That's a good place to help people right now'," Abdullah's brother, Mansour, recalls. "He gathered money from everybody in the family. I was in the States at the time. I said, 'Don't go close to the danger zone.' He said, 'No, no, I'll be near the border'." In October, he called his family to say that he was stuck in Afghanistan. The border was closed and he couldn't get out. Now his four children, the oldest a 5-year-old boy named Suleiman, have been waiting nine months for their father to come home.

Kamel made a desperate effort to get there in December. Broken and sick after the journey across White Mountain, he and his four compatriots found shelter with a local tribal leader, Malak Munir Hussain, in the Pakistani village of Mandorai. At first, one of Malak's relatives says, the Kuwaitis and their companions (including a handful of Saudis and Yemenis) were given water, food, cigarettes, blankets and a place to sleep. But the hospitality didn't last long. Malak was looking to make a profit.

His chance came within days, when a Pakistani posse showed up in the village, hunting armed Qaeda who had escaped from a prisoner convoy. For a large but undisclosed sum of money, according to the relative, Malak sold the five Kuwaitis and their companions to the local "political agent" of the Pakistani government. Both Malak and the agent, locals say, knew these men were not those who escaped. But no matter. The agent could say he had rearrested 10 of the 15 fugitives. The Kuwaitis were thrown into the nearby Alizai jail, where 140 men were crammed in a space built for 20. Tainted food had given everyone diarrhea. According to Liquat Ali, one of the guards, the stench was overpowering.

Three days later the prisoners were hooded, shackled and thrown into the backs of two trucks for transfer to a larger prison in the town of Kohat. But just before the Kuwaitis were dragged out of jail they managed to write a two-page note in blue ink addressed to "His Excellency the Ambassador of Kuwait in Pakistan." They passed the note to the sympathetic guard, Ali. Unfortunately for the Kuwaitis, however, neither Ali nor a local journalist with whom he shared the note had the courage to show it to their superiors.

In the note, a photocopy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, the Kuwaitis swore that they went to Afghanistan only for "charity work." They said they had tried but failed to contact the Kuwait Embassy in Pakistan while they were in Afghanistan. "We could not enter Pakistan because of the intense patrols and checkpoints on the Pakistan-Afghan border," they wrote. "So we were compelled to go to Tora Bora because there was no other safe place." The message ended with these words: "It is our third day in jail and [we] are living in subhuman conditions. We hope for sympathy from you and an inquiry about us."