This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in the leading Italian daily La Stampa.
— Adel Ben Mabrouk has seen the inside of Italian prison cells from Milan in the north to Benevento in the south. He also spent eight years behind the barbed wire of a certain U.S. military prison on the island of Cuba.
Last February, a Milan Judge convicted this 40-year-old Tunisian of criminal association with terrorist intent, but then freed him from jail, citing the time he’d spent incarcerated at Guantanamo as “not democratic” and the conditions “inhumane”. Mabrouk is a survivor of Afghanistan, where he was arrested at the end of 2001 for his alleged associations with Al Qaeda.
I met him at his house in Tunisia. By chance, it was this past Monday, soon after Osama Bin Laden’s death had been announced. On the television screen in his living room, France 24’s Arabic channel was broadcasting the images of the collapsing Twin Towers, Bin Laden, and the stories of some of his many victims.
Looking at the screen, with a strange smile on his face, Mabrouk says: “The Americans…they are smart and bastards at the same time.” He then picks up the remote control, and starts looking for the Italian Rai TV channel, in vain. “I love watching Italian soccer. How did Inter of Milan do yesterday? What a team.”
