Chicago civil rights attorney H. Candace Gorman writes about a current client, Abdul Al-Ghizzawi, in In These Times: 

“Al-Ghizzawi was a shopkeeper who sold bread, honey and other goods in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. When the American bombs started falling, he took his wife and daughter to the village where his in-laws lived. He then became one of those unlucky foreigners captured and turned in for a bounty. According to the Bush administration, all of the detainees were apprehended ‘on the battlefield’—in this case, the quiet home of Al-Ghizzawi’s in-laws.

“My ultimate aim is to release Al-Ghizzawi and reunite him with his family. However, my immediate goal is to keep him alive. The medical staff at Guantánamo have diagnosed Al-Ghizzawi with tuberculosis and hepatitis B but failed to inform or treat him for either condition. I have been fighting for access to Al-Ghizzawi’s medical records, but a D.C. district judge ruled that we had not demonstrated that he would suffer ‘irreparable harm’ in being denied his records.”

Never has catch-22 seemed less funny.

Apparently this will be an ongoing diary, one more reason to read or subscribe to ITT. Gorman has more at Huffington Post.

(My colleague Tori Marlan wrote about this all-American atrocity in the Reader October 22, 2004.)