By Nidah Chatriwala

Both pictures:  People at the Helping Hand Fundraiser.

On May 2, Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD) organized a fundraiser dinner at the Arizona Cultural Academy to raise funds for programs that provide skill development of people, especially women in poverty stricken countries.

This was HHRD’s first official fundraiser in Arizona attended by almost 300 audience members who came with an open ear, heart and hand to donate to empower women globally.
“Knowing the giving nature of the Phoenix community; organizing the fundraiser in Phoenix is an added excitement. Helping Hand stands for helping those in need, to act as a bridge between those who give and those who need it the most,” enthused Regional Coordinator of HHRD West Region, Ishrat Rahman.

The main goal of the event was to facilitate sustainability through home-based income generating production and develop market linkages. The donations raised in Arizona will reach women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan and Mexico.

“I work, however I do work more passionately when I feel and understand the cause behind an organization. For me, Helping Hand is one such non-profit organization. They are doing good the world over,” shared HHRD’s Phoenix Liaison, Gul Siddiqi.

What made this fundraiser stand out was the method used to raise funds which was unique in itself. The organizers had pinned faceless women figures cut out of pink paper on a whiteboard next to each country’s name listing the skill program and the amount needed to complete the training to help women of that country to start earning their home-based income.
The event unfolded with Quran recitation followed by a few video clips to show the audience how previous donations helped women support their families with the training they received through HHRD.

The night came to a close with dinner and entertainment including stand up comedians, Azhar Usman and Mo Ammer, who left the audience smiling.
HHRD successfully raised their target amount of funds in Arizona almost clearing the whiteboard clean with only a few pink labels left hanging.

“Helping Hand will put in all our efforts to make sure that the donation reaches the right people,” assured Rahman.

To learn more about Helping Hand for Relief and Development, visit: www.hhrd.org

16-20

By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

Dinara Safina poses with a trophy in 2008.  AP Photo/The Canadian Press/Jacques Boissinot

Former women’s world number one tennis player Dinara Safina has announced her retirement from professional tennis after failing to recover from a serious back injury. The Tatar Russian has not competed on the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) Tour since May of 2011 and has spent the last three years trying to achieve the level of health and fitness needed to resume her playing career. However, she has had to concede defeat, calling it quits just nine days after her 28th birthday.

Safina announce, “I decided to withdraw from any official announcements until now as I was still hoping to overcome my back injury. But this moment has finally come. I played the last professional tournament of my career here in Madrid and that’s why I think it’s the best place for me to quit the game.” Safina will participate in the award ceremony of the WTA Madrid Open tournament, where she has won one of her titles in 2009. Safina’s farewell ceremony will also take place in Madrid.

Safina won a total of 12 WTA Tour titles. She also won an Olympic silver medal in Beijing in 2008. And she was a runner-up in three different Grand Slam finals, failing to break through with a Grand Slam victory during her career. She is the sister of men’s tennis star Marat Safin, who has also retired.

16-20

By Adil James, TMO

The audience pays close attention to Imam Mohammed Ishtiaq.

IONA hosted a long five hour program aimed at young people.  About 150 people were presenta at IONA for the program, which lasted from 5PM until about 10:15PM, introducing Imam Mohammed Ishtiaq, Ameer Abdul Malik, Omar Malik, and others.  The theme of the session could really be summed up by the catch phrase of the organization FIT–which stands for, first, its obvious meaning–but also as an acronym it stands for “fraternal, inspirational, transformational.” 

And this was in fact the theme of the evening–YOU is an organization which strives to thwart the “unmosqued” movement by bringing young people into the fold of Islam, reaching out to them through sports but then engaging them by making it a condition of their participation in sports to learn about Islam.

16-20

By Laura Fawaz, Contributing Reporter

Audience members at the My Orphans Fundraising Dinner

Young speakers at the My Orphans Fundraising Dinner

Dearborn, MI–“We are not asking you to stop enjoying what you have … we are asking you to enjoy what you have by sharing it with others in need.”

This is the slogan that concludes all of the documentaries and commercials in promoting the support of the orphans.  At their past two fundraising dinners, the My Orphans Dinner organizers decided to show a powerful documentary as oppose to having a key-note speaker.  And last Friday night was their 4th Annual Fundraising Dinner at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan.  The goal of their fundraising dinner is yes to raise money for the orphans, but to do what they call “bring a gleam a hope” to them too. 

And bringing a gleam of they have by hosting such fundraising projects as “Educate An Orphan” and “Eid For Orphans.”  The “Educate An Orphan” project was a monthly pledge of $10 for one year to build a school in Iraq.  This school was built last year.  The “Eid For Orphans” is a donation project of clothing gifts for these orphans so that they can have nice, new clothes for the Eid.

The best method of promoting such projects is the commercials and documentaries that the My Orphans Media Committee produces.  Hajj Mahmoud Hammoud, a local photographer and filmmaker, voluntarily runs this committee.  In the end of last year, he heard of an eight-year-old girl named Sukayna, who after finding out of the suffering of orphans overseas did extra chores around the house to earn extra money.  After her earnings totaled $136, she put each and every dollar of that directly into the My Orphans donation box.  Hammoud reenacted this into a commercial that was played at this fundraising dinner.  When the lights were still off and the commercial concluded a spotlight shinned on young Sukayna who gave a short thank-you speech to her family and to Hammoud. 

Hammoud also traveled to Lebanon and Iraq again this year to capture real footage from the orphanages.  He was so inspired from the fundraising dinner held in 2012, that he traveled to the Middle East to see these orphanages for himself. 

What the audience saw in last year’s documentary was a country that couldn’t even begin to repair itself from the decade long war, the massacre of it’s civilians, brutal dictatorship, and inhuman terrorism, and so many children without parents or a home.  But in this year’s documentary, the audience saw a country coming out of a war, an improved living situation of its people, and an improvement on project initiatives.  One such project seen was two new schools built, one for the young boys and another for the young girls.  As of last year, the school that was available to them was very small, run down, and with a half broken ceiling that couldn’t hold all of the children.  Though after the generous donated gathered by My Orphans, along with the “Educate An Orphan” project, there are now two schools. 

Each stands tall, and is painted pink for the girl’s school and green for the boy’s school.  Which was in dire need due to the fact that the majority of these young boys were not able to go to the public school.  After their fathers died they tried to find any work they could so that they could bring some kind of food home for their families.  Then when they tried to go back to school after missing so many years, they were no longer accepted since they were now years behind the rest of the students. 

My Orphans was established in 2007 as 501C3 non-profit organization, in response to the overwhelming statics such as in Iraq alone, with the war of 2002 resulted in over five million orphans, and over one million widows.  For anyone interested in doing so, please e-mail info@MyOrphans.us.  Donations and sponsorship information can be found on https://www.myorphans.us/donate.  99% of donations go directly towards supporting these orphans.  The photo gallery from the fundraising event can be found on www.muslimobserver.com.

16-20

This American Refused to Become an FBI Informant.
Then the Government Made His Family’s Life Hell.

By Nick Baumann

Naji Mansour;  Photograph by David Degner

It was after 10 p.m. on July 8, 2009, when Sandra Mansour answered her cellphone to the panicked voice of her daughter-in-law, Nasreen. A week earlier, Nasreen and her husband, Naji Mansour, had been detained in the southern Sudanese city of Juba by agents of the country’s internal security bureau. In the days since, Sandra had been desperately trying to find out where the couple was being held. Now Nasreen was calling to say that she’d been released—driven straight to the airport and booked on a flight to her native Kenya—but Naji remained in custody. He was being held in a dark, squalid basement cell, with a bucket for a bathroom and a dense swarm of mosquitoes that attacked his body as he slept. “You have to get him out of there,” Nasreen said. But she was unfamiliar with Juba and could only offer the barest details about where they’d been held. “He’s in a blue building. You’ve seen it. It’s not far from your hotel.”

Sandra remembered passing a blue warehouse ringed by tall, razor-wire-topped fences. She hung up and turned to her daughter, Tahani, who’d flown to Juba to assist in tracking down her brother: “We’ve gotta go look for Naji.” They packed food, water, and bug spray in case they found him. Then Sandra and Tahani laced up their sneakers, retrieved a flashlight, and slipped out onto a pitch-dark, deserted road.

Sudan’s long-running civil war had ended a few years earlier, and Juba, once a malarial backwater on the White Nile, was poised to become the capital of the world’s newest nation, South Sudan. The city had grown into a boomtown, its expansion fueled by newly discovered oil and an influx of foreign aid. Shacks and half-built concrete structures lined its maze of narrow, trash-strewn streets, and entrepreneurs rented out converted storage sheds for as much as $100 per night. Sandra, a US government contractor, lived in one of them.

The upstart city had a Wild West atmosphere. Rifle- and grenade-wielding bandits occasionally stormed poorly guarded compounds, and violent muggings and carjackings were commonplace. It was not safe to drive after dark, let alone walk, but Sandra and Tahani were desperate. “It was a very crazy thing to do,” Sandra later recalled. “But it was the first lead we had, and there was nothing that was gonna stop us.”

“He said, ‘We want you to work with us. You have what it takes. You’re the perfect candidate.’ This is the shit you see in movies.”

Sandra had grown up in Providence, Rhode Island; after leaving there on a backpacking trip in 1973, at age 21, she never stopped traveling. She later married a Sudanese economist, Ali Mansour, and together they lived and worked around the world, raising Naji and his three siblings to view their blue US passports as a ticket to a global life.

But that was before Naji landed in the crosshairs of the FBI and the family’s comfortable expat existence started coming undone. For several months, Naji had been repeatedly interviewed by American authorities, detained and interrogated by Kenyan counterterrorism police, and ultimately forced into exile in Juba. Now he had vanished into a basement dungeon.

When Sandra and Tahani reached the blue warehouse, it appeared deserted. They circled it, then attempted to scale a back gate. When that failed, they shouted Naji’s name into the lightless building.
Naji couldn’t hear them. He was locked up about five miles away in another blue building, a Sudanese intelligence facility near a rocky outcropping called Witch Mountain. There, he was questioned repeatedly about whether he had ties to terrorism or Al Qaeda. The Sudanese interrogators threatened to kill him if he didn’t tell them what he knew, and he could hear the screams of other prisoners being beaten.

Two weeks into his detention, Naji’s jailers escorted him from his cell into a clean, bright room, where at last he saw a familiar face, a fellow American. It was an FBI agent he’d met with in the past. The agent told Naji that he could end his nightmare. “Help me help you,” he said.

Naji first contacted me in April 2012, after I wrote a story about Yonas Fikre [5], an Oregon man who alleges that he was tortured in the United Arab Emirates after he refused to become an FBI informant. “I went through a similar ordeal,” his email said.

Fikre’s story fit a familiar pattern in which US citizens suspected of (often tangential) ties to terrorism were detained and questioned abroad by foreign security services—with evidence suggesting that American authorities orchestrated the detentions. This wasn’t rendition, the controversial practice in which the CIA has shipped foreign nationals to allied countries where they were abused and tortured. Instead, American citizens were locked up abroad and interrogated by US agents in a manner that seemed designed to bypass their constitutional rights. Human rights advocates and civil libertarians have dubbed this practice “proxy detention.”

The FBI acknowledges [8] that foreign governments sometimes arrest Americans based on information the bureau provides. Here’s how one FBI source explained it to me: If a guy the Saudi government suspected of terrorism traveled to the United States, we’d want to know. So it’s only fair that we tip off the Saudis—or the Yemenis, Sudanese, or Egyptians—when an American suspected of terrorist ties enters their country.

What the bureau doesn’t say is that since counterterrorism forces in many countries are funded and trained by the United States, the FBI’s suggestions can sound a lot like orders—even when the suspects involved have never been charged with any crime.

“Often it has been US officials who do the real questioning, and sometimes the prisoners have been tortured and abused” by their foreign captors, says Hina Shamsi, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who works on the issue. “Unlawful detention and cruel treatment is wrong when the US government does it, and it’s just as wrong if the United States asks another government to do it.”
But as Naji discovered, the US government can do more than land you in prison overseas. It can reach deep into a family’s life, upending relationships, destroying livelihoods, and leaving citizens stranded far from home without recourse or explanation.

NAJI WAS BORN IN San Diego in 1976, the first of four children, and his upbringing was a whirlwind tour of far-flung locales. As his father worked his way around the globe as an economic consultant to governments and businesses, Naji attended grade school on an American compound in Saudi Arabia and part of high school in a Crusades-era castle (complete with a moat) in Malta. When he was 20, the family visited Nairobi on a vacation, and they moved there for good later that year. All four Mansour children attended American colleges (Naji went to the University of Rhode Island for a year), and two of them now live in the United States. One of Naji’s brothers joined the Marines and served two tours in Afghanistan.

Though he’s spent most of his life abroad, Naji is an American by birth, by law, and by culture. He’s a fan of the comedian Dave Chappelle, a rap aficionado—we had a lengthy conversation about the merits of Biggie Smalls versus Tupac Shakur—and a computer whiz.

Naji was raised Muslim, but he wasn’t particularly religious as a child and didn’t pray regularly until he was 18. He was more interested in pan-Africanism—in Naji’s words, the idea “that a united Africa could be independent from foreign intervention, and people’s lives would improve”—a popular school of thought among his professors at the United States International University in Nairobi. But in 1998, Naji dropped out of school and married a young Ugandan named Shamila. They moved to England and had a daughter, but without legal residency he couldn’t find work beyond odd jobs, and Shamila eventually returned to Uganda and gave birth to their son. Naji moved back to Nairobi in April 2000 in hopes that Sandra, then working as a housing and travel coordinator for USAID (she supervised luggage handling during then-first lady Laura Bush’s May 2007 visit), could set him up with a job at the US Embassy. In 2002, Naji and Shamila divorced. Soon after, he married Nasreen and they started a family together in Nairobi.

Sandra Mansour shops for sneakers with her graddaughters in Nairobi. Until December, she’d been blocked from entering Kenya for two years.

Naji spent 2008 working for a tech company in Dubai. During his stay, he occasionally invited friends from work and the mosque he attended to bunk at his mom’s house—which the family dubbed “Hotel Sandra”—if they ever visited Nairobi. A week after returning home from Dubai, he got a call from a guy named Muhammad whom he barely remembered. “I got a couple of friends. Could you put them up?” Muhammad asked. “They’re coming this week.” Naji agreed, expecting more details, but Muhammad abruptly hung up.

A few days later, Naji’s phone rang again. The men had arrived. “I was like, ‘Uh…okay.’” He hopped into the family’s old Mercedes—a memento of his father, who died in 2006—and drove to pick them up.

The two visitors [9], Bilal el-Berjawi and Mohamed Gamal Sakr, both 24, said they were grad students who had traveled to Kenya to study the farmers who grow miraa (also known as khat), a mild amphetamine that’s legal there. But they seemed to do little other than hang around. They watched the Mansours’ seven tortoises trudge around the backyard. They prayed. After a week, Naji gently inquired when Berjawi and Sakr would be moving on. They told him they were waiting for their families to wire some money to continue their travels and research.

Around 2 p.m. on February 23, 2009, a bit more than two weeks into the pair’s visit, dozens of armed men surrounded the house. Naji and Nasreen were out. The family’s maid, Violet Mugasiali, was home with their young daughters. “All of a sudden the bell started ringing nonstop,” Mugasiali remembered. The men said they were with Kenya’s counterterrorism police, a special American-funded unit. She called Naji and Nasreen as the police burst into the compound, arresting Berjawi and Sakr and confiscating computers belonging to Naji.

Nasreen rushed home while Naji contacted Al-Amin Kimathi, a prominent lawyer and the head of Kenya’s Muslim Human Rights Forum. Naji had volunteered for Kimathi’s organization, where he helped to investigate the detention and rendition of Muslims who had been arrested in Kenya as they fled Ethiopia’s US-backed invasion of neighboring Somalia. Some of the detainees were militants affiliated with the Islamic Courts Union, which spawned al-Shabaab, the terrorist group that pledged fealty to Al Qaeda in 2012. But many were simply refugees attempting to escape the violence.

Now Naji called on Kimathi for a favor. Since he didn’t have a Kenyan passport, he was worried he might be deported; Kimathi helped him obtain an official document saying he could stay. Then Naji turned himself in for interrogation. (Nasreen was also arrested; she was held for 30 hours before being released without charges.)

The Kenyan police told Naji that Berjawi and Sakr had been plotting a terrorist attack—perhaps targeting the Westgate, Nairobi’s fanciest mall. (The two men were deported to the United Kingdom, where they had grown up, but soon returned to Africa. In 2010, the UK revoked their citizenship for alleged ties to terrorism, and both were later killed by US drone strikes [10] in Somalia—where, the British government said, they had joined al-Shabaab.)

Naji was questioned about his ties to the would-be terrorists, whom he told his interrogators he barely knew. They also confronted him with terrorism-related files that were discovered on his computers. Some were mundane, such as research papers and think tank studies about Islamic extremism, but others were more suspicious, like martyrdom videos and al-Shabaab propaganda. Naji said that he was no terrorist, but was fascinated by the causes of terrorism and curious about how the religious doctrine of jihad was used to justify it; in his spare time, he spent hours doing online research.

“I’m telling you, you might get hit by a car. That is not a threat. That is a solid piece of advice. But you don’t want to take it.”

Following two days of questioning, the Kenyan authorities let Naji go. Sandra suggested that he reach out to the US Embassy, where she had many contacts, to report what had happened and clear up any suspicions about his ties to Berjawi and Sakr. She connected him with a diplomatic security officer named Michael Fogarty. When they later met at the embassy, Fogarty asked Naji if he would “consider speaking to some law enforcement.” Then he brought in a heavyset, blondish man he introduced as Jeffrey Roberts, the embassy’s deputy regional security officer. Roberts, in turn, ducked out and came back with two FBI agents. The shorter, dark-haired one introduced himself as Mike Jones. (This is a pseudonym. The FBI told Mother Jones that, because of the agent’s role in the “recruitment of sources” overseas for counterterrorism work, revealing his identity would put him at risk.)

Naji recounted the story of how Berjawi and Sakr had come to stay with him, but the agents asked few questions about them. Instead, Jones grilled Naji about Kimathi, his acquaintance from the Muslim Human Rights Forum, and inquired about one of Nasreen’s distant cousins, a man named Omar Awadh Omar. (Omar is currently beingprosecuted [11] in Uganda for helping orchestrate the 2010 bombings in Kampala that targeted soccer fans watching the World Cup finals.) Jones asked Naji whether he had ever brought “guns, money, or people for violence” to Somalia or other countries. Naji said no. After about an hour, the conversation wrapped up; Naji agreed to sit down with Roberts again later that week.

Roberts showed up to their next meeting “in his shades, looking like Top Gun,” Naji recalled. And he had a proposition. “He said, ‘We want you to work with us. You have what it takes. You’re the perfect candidate.’ I asked him, ‘What exactly are you talking about?’ It was very surreal. This is the shit you see in movies. I was laughing.”

But Roberts wasn’t joking. “He said, ‘We can give you rewards for information, or we can put you on full time. But that would require a continuous flow of information.’” Naji understood that his houseguests had placed him under a “cloud of suspicion,” he later told me. But Roberts didn’t seem interested in that anymore. “Mostly, it was ‘We need your help,’” Naji said.

It’s not hard to see why the US government would view Naji as an ideal informant. He is religious, conservative, and speaks English and Arabic. He’s calm under pressure. He had crisscrossed the globe as a volunteer escort for refugees being resettled through the International Organization for Migration. When he traveled, he went to mosques and counted on the hospitality of strangers to find a bed for the night, and through this he had made connections with dozens of other religious Muslim men around the world.

This is precisely the kind of community that the FBI is trying to track and infiltrate. The bureau’s network of paid informants has expanded rapidly [12] since 9/11, and now includes more than 15,000 [13], rivaling the scale of the J. Edgar Hoover era. A guy like Naji—an expatriate working in countries where terrorists operate—would be a real catch.

But to someone not facing criminal charges, the FBI doesn’t have much to offer by way of enticement. “The problem for many American Muslims who have been approached by the FBI to become informants is that they aren’t involved in criminal conspiracies and don’t have relationships with criminals,” says Mike German, an ex-FBI agent who now works for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “Instead, they are being asked to spy broadly against their religious community. That creates a conundrum because the person may be perfectly willing to help the FBI fight terrorism but simply has no information to provide.”

Naji told Roberts he was planning to move to Juba, where his mother had taken a job with a company called Management Systems International that did work for USAID. He hoped to launch a business there selling rugged laptops. “We could use you there, too,” Roberts said.

“No, man,” Naji replied. Spying was “not something I want to play around with,” especially in a country like Sudan. “This is Africa. There’s no law for me here.”

Six weeks after the raid, the Mansour family headed to the Nairobi airport to fly to Uganda for a visit with Naji’s ex-wife and their children. When Naji handed his passport to a security officer, she glanced at her computer screen, stared at him, and asked, “What did you do?” Kenyan security officers detained the family for several hours, releasing them just before their flight took off.

When the family returned five days later, Kenyan airport police questioned Naji again. “The deputy immigration officer said, ‘We have nothing wrong with you, but we have a directive not to let you in,’” Naji recalled. Soon, Fogarty and Jones showed up at the airport. The FBI agent reiterated the US government’s desire that Naji become an informant. Naji once again declined.

He spent three nights at the airport, and when it became clear that he would not be allowed to enter Kenya, Nasreen brought him some clothes and his laptop samples and said goodbye. Then Naji boarded a plane to go stay with his mother in Juba. There, he buried himself in building his laptop business. “We kept thinking things were going to blow over,” Sandra said.

In late June 2009, Sandra took a business trip to Kenya, and stopped by the US Embassy to get more pages added to her passport, for all the visas needed for her international travels. She was told there was a “hit” on her passport that needed to be cleared in Washington. A few days later, she was informed her passport would be released if she’d meet with the FBI first. So on Monday, June 29, Sandra sat down with FBI agent Mike Jones. “He asked, ‘Where’s Naji now?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘He’s with me in Juba.’”

The next morning, June 30, Naji and Nasreen—who had come to visit her husband in Juba while Sandra was in Nairobi looking after their children—were about to go out for breakfast when they noticed a man peering through the window. Naji opened the door to find two men in suits, sweating in the heat, with guns on their hips. “One of them looked like African James Bond,” Naji told me. “And I say, ‘Yes, hello?’ And they’re like, ‘Naji Mansour?’ and I’m like, ‘Yes.’ And they just came in.” The agents of the South Sudan Security Bureau asked Naji to bring Nasreen out, and then they took the couple’s phones and laptops and hustled them into separate unmarked cars.

When I asked the FBI about why Naji and Nasreen were arrested a day after Sandra told Jones of Naji’s whereabouts, a spokeswoman told me in an email that the timing “is, in fact coincidence.” But there are indications that it may not have been. “Sandra, I’m not supposed to be telling you this, but this is coming from your people,” Sandra says a top Sudanese official told her. A former US diplomat who was stationed in Juba at the time told me that US officials there spoke openly of Naji’s detainment and said he would be freed if he cooperated with the FBI.

The agents took Naji and Nasreen to the National Intelligence building, where Naji was placed in a basement cell; later, he heard Nasreen sobbing. One of the guards was trying to remove her headscarf—most South Sudanese are not Muslim—but she prevailed. Then the lights went out. Nasreen was still whimpering in a cell down the hall.

In the days that followed, the couple was questioned about their intentions in the country, whether they had ties to terrorism, and the contents of Naji’s laptops. One of them contained materials similar to those that had raised eyebrows in Kenya. Nasreen was finally freed after eight days and put on a flight back to Nairobi. No charges were ever filed, nor was she given any reason for her detention.

The weekend after Nasreen’s release, guards escorted Naji into an interrogation room. Soon, a blond State Department official entered.

“Do you remember Mike Jones—you met him in Nairobi?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Naji replied.

“Would you be willing to see him?” the diplomat inquired. That was fine by him, Naji said, and to his surprise Jones and another FBI agent, Peter Smith (whose real name also has been withheld at the FBI’s request), strolled in moments later. Smith said he believed that Naji had done nothing wrong and wasn’t involved with terrorism, but told him that the FBI needed Naji to tell them something useful so they could advocate on his behalf with the Sudanese. “Quid pro quo, Naji. Quid pro quo,” Jones chimed in.

“Every time I try to cooperate with the FBI, I get deeper into shit. I’m a citizen. They’re supposed to have my back, and it’s the exact opposite.”

Naji racked his brain. Then he remembered that Muhammad, the guy who had arranged for Berjawi and Sakr to stay with him, had once called his office phone in Dubai—a number that very few people called. Perhaps the FBI could pull the phone records and locate Muhammad. But Jones was not interested in Muhammad. He wanted to know about Omar, Nasreen’s distant cousin—the one who’d later be charged in the Uganda World Cup bombings. Naji said he didn’t think Omar was the “type” to join Al Qaeda, but Jones didn’t seem to buy it. “All right, Naji, good luck,” the FBI agent said. “I hope everything works out for you, buddy.”

Then, 37 days after he’d been arrested and three weeks after his conversation with the FBI, Naji was brought upstairs again. A Sudanese officer told him he was free to go, so long as he stayed in the country for the next 30 days and didn’t talk to the media.

After his release, the director of South Sudan’s Security Bureau penned a memo [14] to the local minister of internal affairs briefing him on Naji’s case. “The accused has been very much willing to know in-depth about Terrorism and Islamic Jihad,” he wrote in the document, which was obtained by Mother Jones. “Thus, Mr. Naji is believed to have much interest in Terrorism activities, in fundamentalism and Islamic teachings. Whether that could lead to joining such activities or help in one way or another he will just remain a suspect that would require trailing.”

A month later, Naji moved to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where his late father’s family had lived. Nasreen and their children later joined him there. He began to think his problems were over. Then, in October 2009, Jones got in touch. “I am heading back to Africa in the near future,” he wrote in an email. “I’d be willing to stop by area, or Khartoum, and meet if you have the time.” Naji replied that he wanted to talk on the phone before committing. He planned to tape their conversation.

When Jones called a month later, Naji turned on his phone’s recording app and told the agent that he believed US officials had ordered his detention.

“We had 100 percent nothing to do with that,” Jones responded [16], according to a copy of the recording that Naji gave me. “It runs counter to everything that we do and that we stand for.”

“I just want normalcy for my family,” Naji said. “’Cause I think they deserve it. ‘Cause it’s been a screwed-up year, let me tell you.” Jones pressed for a meeting, and they agreed to talk again the next morning.

Naji recorded their subsequent conversation, too. This time Peter Smith was on the line with Jones, and the collegial tone of their previous interactions was gone. The agents again asked for a meeting, but Naji declined. Ever since he had first told his story to US officials, he said, his life had been thrown into chaos. “There’s scrutiny on your mom,” Jones finally said [17]. “…That’s not going to go away unless we sit down and get down to business.”

Smith jumped in, telling Naji that if he refused, “a series of events is going to be put into motion. And once you put it into motion, honestly I, I’m out of it. I honestly do not care. I’m going home, you know, I got a vacation to plan. My life goes on. Yours might change. And it’s not going to, it might not be necessarily to your liking.” He added [18]: “I’m telling you, you might get hit by a car—that is not a threat. That is a solid piece of advice. But you don’t want to take it.”

(The FBI refused to comment on the bureau’s attempt to recruit Naji as an informant, nor would it comment on his taped conversations with Jones and Smith or whether any misconduct on their part had occurred.)

Four days later, on November 17, a State Department security officer visited the offices of Management Systems International in Juba. Sandra was fired the same day—less than a week after the company had renewed her contract for another year. She was told her position had been eliminated, but MSI posted the same job a month later. Stefanie Frease, one of Sandra’s supervisors, told me the dismissal came at the behest of the US government.

“We all thought she was blackballed,” said Inez Andrews, a former foreign-service officer working in the US compound in Juba at the time. “It’s awful she hasn’t been able to clear this up, that she’s being held hostage to a system that was trying to extract information.”

In a statement, USAID maintained that “decisions regarding the termination of employees…are ultimately made and executed by contractors themselves.” And an FBI spokeswoman said the bureau “made no recommendations in regards to Sandra Mansour’s employment status.”

But Sandra’s ordeal wasn’t over. When she tried to return to her home in Nairobi in 2011, she was blocked from entering the country, just as Naji had been. An immigration official told her, she recalled, “If the Americans don’t want you here, you ain’t coming in.” She was finally allowed entry to Kenya last December, when American nationals were evacuated there after South Sudan descended into violence.

Other members of Naji’s family have been targeted, too. In 2011, Naji’s sister, Tahani, was detained at the Nairobi airport for three days. “I’ve heard, ‘It’s your people’”—that the US is behind her family’s troubles with customs officials—”more times than I can count,” she told me. “I go to airports now and there’s this constant sense of trepidation. Am I gonna make it? Am I gonna get locked up again?”

“As a family we have always been mobile and traveling our whole lives, and as a result completely took it for granted,” she told me. “The removal of the liberty to travel was crippling.”

One of Naji’s brothers says he is frequently questioned about Naji when he crosses an international border. The other, a Marine veteran based in Virginia, was visited by members of the Navy’s criminal investigative service, who grilled him about Naji. The FBI even interviewed Naji’s uncle and aging grandmother in Rhode Island in 2009.

“They didn’t get to me, so they had to target my family,” says Naji.

On September 21, 2013, members of al-Shabaab, armed with assault rifles and grenades, stormed the Westgate [19], the upscale mall that Bilal el-Berjawi and Mohamed Gamal Sakr had allegedly plotted to bomb four years earlier. Over the next three days, at least 72 people (including the attackers) were killed and the mall was almost entirely destroyed.

I had just left Nairobi—where I had visited Tahani at the Mansour family’s home, just a few miles from the mall—the day before. As the news broke, I was sipping white tea with Naji in the lobby of the Acropole Hotel, a Khartoum landmark with a Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe and a cartoonishly large safe in its office. The hotel’s prime clientele are foreign archaeologists (Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt); it’s also a popular haunt for journalists, as the bumper stickers—CNN, BBC, CBC—on the lobby window attest.

Naji was skinny and 5-foot-7. He had close-cropped black hair with a sprinkling of gray, stylish glasses, and a mustacheless beard that he absentmindedly stroked when he grew sad or worried. He spoke quietly and slowly, telling me about his passion for organic food and his interest in “open-source ecology,” in which people build their own tractors and plows from plans available on the internet.

Sudan, Naji told me, had become his prison. He felt trapped and helpless. He was no longer welcome in Kenya, and he feared what might happen if he set foot outside Sudan, believing he might be detained—and possibly tortured—at the behest of the US government. The experience “made me scared of traveling,” Naji said. “What happens if I go to a US-friendly country or pass through a US-friendly country?”

The older two of his and Nasreen’s four children now live with his mother-in-law in Nairobi (it has better schools than Khartoum), where he cannot visit them. He hasn’t seen his son and daughter from his first marriage in three years. And Naji’s lifelong ambition—to travel the world with his kids, “doing all the stuff with my children that my father did with me”—is blocked by fear.

Over and over during my time in Khartoum, Naji assured me that he had no ties to terrorism. I asked him about the terrorism-related files that had been found on his computer and what had kept him from following his interest in jihad down a path toward violence, as has been the case with some other conservative Muslims who have immersed themselves in extremist dogma online. “Knowledge” of Islam, he replied, explaining that he has had a long-standing “intellectual” interest in jihad and political Islam. I pressed Naji on whether he thought killing civilians was justified in certain situations. “What happened at Westgate is forbidden,” he told me. “Am I a sleeper cell? I like to sleep a lot!”

In fact, it was a notorious act of terrorism that first prompted Naji’s curiosity about jihad—Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi. Among the 213 people killed in the blast was his sister’s best friend, Jay Bartley, who liked to shoot hoops with Naji and his brothers. Bartley’s father, Julian, the consul general, was also killed in the attack.

“The following days were a haze,” Tahani told me. “I don’t think I ate anything other than coffee for three days. I burned a huge chunk of my hair off with the hair dryer just in a daze.” Naji, then 22, saw his sister’s despair. Yet when he went to the mosque, some of the men there spoke of the attack as a legitimate act of jihad, Naji remembered. “I honestly had no idea what to think,” he said. “I became very curious about how something like that could be justified under Islam.”

When Naji moved to London in 1999, he fell in with a group of conservative Pakistani men. Once drawn to secular pan-Africanism, he became more devout and enthusiastic about Islam as a political solution to the world’s problems. “I started learning that Islamic systems were behind some of the greatest empires,” he said. He educated himself about the structure of an Islamic state—how banking and finance would be conducted, how the poor would be cared for. “’Oh wow,’ I thought, ‘something other than democratic socialism and capitalism’—it was very appealing to me, liberating.”
Tahani didn’t view her brother’s increasing interest in political Islam and jihad as unusual, even in light of what had happened to the Bartleys. “He was totally open about it,” she told me. Jihad “was just the next topic” for Naji. “He really takes it upon himself to properly look into things through multiple sources.” She told me her brother had once been fascinated by Sufism, Islam’s more mystical branch. “Naji’s approach to the whole jihad thing was similar to that. There was an enigma about it and he wanted to be informed. That’s what he does—he teaches himself.”

As we watched Kenyan police and military units respond to the mall attack, Naji called his mother-in-law, who works in a hair salon near the Westgate. She told him that her building had been evacuated and she had fallen running away, but she and the kids were fine. Then he rolled his prayer mat out on the hotel balcony and prayed. Later we took an ancient minibus to Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city across the Nile, and sat on the sagging couches in Naji’s apartment and talked until the muezzin sang the sunrise call to prayer from the minaret across the street.

“Even if I was guilty, there’s a process,” he told me.

Though he spent much of his life abroad, Naji had never doubted his rights as an American citizen. But the experience with the FBI had made him deeply distrustful of his government. “Every time I try to cooperate with the FBI, I get deeper into shit. I’m a citizen. They’re supposed to have my back, and it’s the exact opposite. You shouldn’t expect this from the beacon of democracy.”

On my last day in Khartoum, Naji and Sandra picked me up at the Acropole. We drove for 30 minutes to the outskirts of the city, where the US Embassy complex sits on a desolate road near a turn in the Blue Nile. Naji needed to renew his passport. He was nervous—he had told Nasreen that if he didn’t return within two hours, she should notify the press and local authorities. A security officer took our phones, and then we followed a covered walkway that cut across the bright green lawn.

We stepped into a scene that would not have been out of place in a municipal building in Dayton, Ohio. It was just before 8:15 a.m. and a television mounted on the wall was tuned to the Armed Forces Network, which was showing The Doctors. Five numbered windows lined the wall. A table was covered with old magazines, and official portraits of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and John Kerry peered down from the wall. Soon, a disembodied voice asked Naji to report to window one. He handed in his form and his passport. As we waited, 10 or 12 other people renewing passports came and went. Finally, after about an hour, a voice announced over a loudspeaker, “Excuse me, Mr. Mansour? Can you go to window number six?” There was no window, only a soundproof door, marked “INTERVIEW ROOM.”

Inside, a window looked through to another room, but its shades were drawn. After a few minutes, the shades rose and two State Department officials were on the other side: Chris McVay, an assistant regional security officer at the embassy, and a woman who introduced herself as Amelia Sanders, the second secretary for regional, political, and economic affairs. They didn’t mention any of Naji’s previous troubles, although they brought up his time in Juba and travels throughout Africa. The diplomats said they were interested in hearing Naji’s thoughts about the countries he had visited. Before they let him go to collect his passport, Sanders asked if perhaps they could meet again sometime soon.

This story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

16-20

A scholar’s beliefs took her from Canada to Guantanamo and, she says, closer to the spirit of a liberal education.

By Ian Wilhelm

Arlette Zinck, an associate professor of English at King’s U. College, in Alberta, heard a pessimistic talk about Omar Khadr’s detention in 2008. “We don’t do hopeless,” she remembers thinking at the time.  Jason Franson

Edmonton, Alberta–One afternoon in September 2008, students at King’s University College here filled every available seat in a lecture hall, occupied the aisles, and fanned out against the wall. A guest speaker had them spellbound with the story of Omar A. Khadr.

The speaker, a human-rights lawyer from Scotland named Dennis Edney, told the students at this small Christian college how the Toronto-born Mr. Khadr had been captured at the age of 15 in Afghanistan by the U.S. military and was being held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Years of living in Edmonton hadn’t scrubbed away the lawyer’s Scottish brogue, nor had he adopted Canadians’ preference for polite talk. The young man stood no chance of receiving justice, he said bluntly. It was hopeless.

From near the front of the hall, that cold assessment hit Arlette Zinck in the gut. “We don’t do hopeless,” thought Ms. Zinck, an associate professor of English.

A short time later, although she was not scheduled to speak, she felt moved to stand up before the entire college. Ms. Zinck, slim with straight, auburn hair that frames her face, wasn’t exactly sure what she would say. It turned out to be a simple message.

“You’ve heard a passionate advocate. You’ve heard one story. You never leave it at one story. Go out and learn everything you can,” Ms. Zinck 51, recalls telling the students. “If at the end of that you’re still wanting to do something, then know that we’re not going to leave that with you; we’re going to walk beside you.”

It was a pledge. Perhaps similar to one professors make every day when they see passion in their students’ eyes. But the commitment Ms. Zinck made that afternoon would eventually give her an unlikely new student: Omar Khadr himself. It would take her far from Canada and, some would argue, far from the proper role of an academic.

Mr. Khadr, a Toronto-born teenager, was held at Guantánamo prison for his role in the killing of an American medic near Khost, Afghanistan. Above, an image from surveillance video during his questioning in 2003.

Child soldier. Murderer. Torture victim. Terrorist.

Omar Ahmed Khadr has been called many things since his capture by U.S. Special Operations forces on July 27, 2002.

After a firefight and an airstrike on a compound seven miles from Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, Mr. Khadr was found in the dirt and rubble, seriously wounded. During the skirmish, Army Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, a Delta Force medic, had been killed by a grenade, purportedly thrown by Mr. Khadr.

A few months after his capture, the U.S. military moved him to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. During Mr. Khadr’s time in custody, his military defense lawyers said he had been beaten by interrogators and made to endure other abuses—accusations that a judge rejected.

Allegations of his mistreatment provoked outrage, but the key controversy in the Khadr case was his age; at 15 he was one of the youngest captives held at the prison in Guantánamo.

Reuters

Dennis Edney, shown here with Omar Khadr’s mother, is a human-rights lawyer working pro bono on the young man’s case. His talk at Kings U. College inspired Ms. Zinck’s correspondence with Mr. Khadr.

Although military prosecutors call Mr. Khadr a hardened terrorist, Mr. Edney, who works pro bono for Mr. Khadr’s family, says the detainee was but a boy sent into battle by a father who had indoctrinated him in radical Islam.

During Mr. Khadr’s youth, his family moved back and forth between Canada and Pakistan, where his father ran various charitable projects for Afghan refugees. The Khadrs eventually settled in Afghanistan, where the father formed ties with Osama bin Laden. In the summer following the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. military response in Afghanistan, Omar Khadr joined a group of militants who wanted him to work as an interpreter. The U.S. military said he received “basic training” at that time, learning how to use grenades, rifles, and other weapons. Not long after leaving his family, he found himself in the deadly firefight in Khost.

In Canada, Mr. Khadr’s case sharply divided the country. Many considered his imprisonment a necessary part of America’s war on terrorism. Critics of the Canadian government said it should have done more to repatriate him and to speak out against the United States’ detainment of terrorism suspects in Guantánamo.

The government’s silence, wrote Michelle Shephard, a Canadian reporter, in her 2008 book, Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr,meant “a Canadian teenager has been interrogated, abused, and jailed in conditions worse than those afforded convicted rapists and murderers. Canada has lost the moral high ground we once enjoyed.”

In the weeks following Mr. Edney’s visit to King’s University College, Arlette Zinck noticed an energy building on the campus of 600 students.

A senior stopped her in the hall one day, breathlessly telling her he had been reading documents about the Khadr case.

Another day, she discovered students in the atrium ironing an image of Mr. Khadr’s young face onto white T-shirts for a silent protest of his treatment.

Then a handful of students sought out Ms. Zinck and made an appeal: “We want to send him a letter.”

A commitment to social activism runs strong through the private Christian college, but Ms. Zinck was surprised by how passionate the students were. She liked the idea of a letter, remembering Matthew 25:36, which urges the faithful to “visit” the imprisoned.

After an attempt to send postcards to Mr. Khadr via the U.S. Judge Advocate General’s Corps failed, Mr. Edney offered to help. On his next trip to Guantánamo, he would take letters directly to Mr. Khadr.

Ms. Zinck’s first letter was short. She introduced herself and her family. She invited Mr. Khadr to come and visit one day, and included pictures of her two children—her daughter Arielle on a horse and her son Colin playing ice hockey.

The goal was simply to let Mr. Khadr know that people back in his home country were concerned about his welfare.

She handed the letters to Mr. Edney. And she waited.

Before Mr. Edney’s talk on campus, Ms. Zinck had read only the occasional newspaper article about the Khadr case. Her passions are not political but literary.

In the classroom she has a maternal quality as she gently prods her students to think deeply about a text. She speaks with a thoughtful, quiet confidence, has a self-deprecating sense of humor, and as her colleagues at King’s note, is fiercely determined when she sets her mind to a task.

Her scholarship centers on the writing of John Bunyan, the 17th-century preacher who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress. It tells of a lost soul who must overcome suffering and trials to make his way to the “Celestial City.”

Ms. Zinck dislikes drawing connections between her scholarly focus and her interest in helping Omar Khadr. But Bunyan is widely believed to have started writing Pilgrim’s Progress while in prison. Ms. Zinck would seem to draw on that fact one day to give Mr. Khadr hope. “Some of the world’s most important stories have been written by men in prison,” she would tell him.

His handwriting was shaky; words were misspelled, and the grammar at times incorrect.

But the short letter, dated October 23, 2008, spoke volumes.

Dear Arlette:

I got you letter and picture and was very serprised by them. So thank you very much for them i’m in your debt and what you showed me is more than what i expected and that you are true friend and as they say: The true friend is not in the time of ease but in the time of hard ship. So again thank you and i’m honored to visit you when i come back.

Stay will with best wishes

Your truly

Omar A Khadr

From that initial exchange, a correspondence blossomed. As Mr. Edney prepared for his trips south, which he took several times a year, Ms. Zinck would hand him a packet of letters, including hers. When he returned, it was often with a letter from his client.

Mr. Khadr’s responses were usually short, expressing deep thanks for the attention from the outside world. And while his formal education had stopped at eighth grade, his words revealed an articulate, even poetic, young man.

“Your letters are like candles very bright in my hardship and darkness,” he wrote to Ms. Zinck on January 22, 2009. “We hold on the hope in our hearts and the love from others to us, and that keeps us going till we all reach our happiness.”

That summer, Mr. Khadr wrote that her words were worth more than gold because words “keep you going in such hardship.”

In a letter dated that fall, Ms. Zinck responded. “Omar, don’t feel discouraged about the time you are spending in Guantanamo right now. Live it fully. Be kind to those around you. Know there are many of us here at home who are thinking about you. Right now you have time to read slowly and think deeply. Believe it or not this is a blessing if you will see it as such.”

“Be a good student of the lessons that life is presenting to you right at this moment,” she wrote near the end of the letter. “They are precious, uniquely yours and irreplaceable.”

Respectful of Mr. Khadr’s Muslim beliefs, Ms. Zinck, a practicing Episcopalian, never tried to teach him about Christianity, let alone convert him. But she did not refrain from expressing her own faith. “Whenever you are lonesome, remember you have many friends who keep you in their prayers,” she wrote. “Each morning at 9 o’clock, I include you in mine.”

More frequently, she expressed her faith in the power of education.

“I know you are likely busy and preoccupied these days, but I hope you have had time to do some reading,” she wrote on February 5, 2010. “Reading provides an education that no school can provide.”
In that same letter, encouraged by Mr. Edney, she asked Mr. Khadr to write a one-page book report.

Mr. Khadr responded, telling her what books he was reading: Great Expectations, the Twilight series, Three Cups of Tea, a John Grisham novel, and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. He chose to write about that last one, the nonfiction account of a Sierra Leone teenager’s experience fighting in his country’s civil war and his rehabilitation from the horrors he witnessed and committed.
His report was a methodical summary of the book, each of his points numbered, one through seven. But his conclusion hinted at the demons in his life:

“Children’s heart are like sponges that will abserb what is around it, like wet cement soft until it’s sculptured in a certain way,” he wrote, “a child soul is a sacred dough that must be shaped in a holy way, for there is no good fruit in a bad earth or tree.”

In a letter he included with the essay, for the first time, he signed off as “Your … future student.”

Really, though, Ms. Zinck had already become his teacher.

During the exchange of letters, Mr. Khadr wrote nothing about the legal roller coaster he was on. After several years of uncertainty over how to prosecute detainees, in 2007 the U.S. government charged Mr. Khadr with murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism, and spying.

Military-court proceedings were finally coming to a close by the fall of 2010, eight years after his imprisonment, and a military jury would decide his fate. At Mr. Edney’s suggestion, the Army lawyer who served as Mr. Khadr’s counsel asked Ms. Zinck to testify at his trial, to tell the jurors about his educational potential. She agreed.

For Ms. Zinck, the relationship had been its own roller coaster. She had not expected to develop the bond she had with Mr. Khadr, and as word spread about her work with him and her plans to testify, the news media put an uncomfortable spotlight on King’s University College.

In August, in a filing to the military commission, Mr. Khadr’s defense team said Ms. Zinck would testify that the college was willing to admit Mr. Khadr “immediately.” Ms. Zinck, who learned of the filing from a reporter withThe Globe and Mail, denied that the promise had been made. Other erroneous reports said King’s had offered Mr. Khadr a scholarship or a tuition waiver.

J. Harry Fernhout, the university’s president at the time, began to hear a steady drumbeat of questions that grew louder as Ms. Zinck’s court date neared. The university said it took no official position on the Khadr case and emphasized that Ms. Zinck was doing Christian charity on a purely volunteer basis, not as an official project of King’s.

Most but not all faculty members and students were supportive of her. Some donors complained. In phone calls, emails, and the occasional home visit, Mr. Fernhout tried to explain the situation to them. A few balked and eventually stopped supporting the institution. (He declined to say how much the controversy cost King’s in financial support.)

Ms. Zinck even received a pair of anonymous letters containing threats. She declines to discuss the details, but the letters were worrisome enough that Mr. Fernhout turned them over to the police.

He says the Khadr case was the most divisive issue he ever had to deal with as a university president. Yet he supported Ms. Zinck. It was only after a long talk with the president that she agreed to appear at Mr. Khadr’s trial.

Their discussion had been reassuring. But on October 26, 2010, as Ms. Zinck traveled from Edmonton to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, and from there on a charter plane to Guantánamo, she still had her doubts.

She had never met Mr. Khadr in person. Her plan was to tell the jury about the young man she had found in the five letters he sent her over two years: the thoughtful student, the eloquent soul. And just maybe, prod the jurors to question the narrative they had heard about him.

It was as if Mr. Khadr was a character in a novel, she thought, and the jury a class of students meant to interpret his actions and motivations. “And I’m a lit scholar,” she thought. “I teach people how to ask intelligent questions about a figure that you meet in a text.”

Yet the doubts lingered. What was an English professor from Canada doing in a trial like this? What chance did she have of changing a single juror’s mind?

As she said later, “I knew I was going to go down to be comic relief in a very dark bit of political theater.”

Two days after arriving in Cuba and only hours before she was to testify, Ms. Zinck was taken to an old, squat, two-story airport building with a traffic-control tower jutting from its top. It was here, in an area known as Camp Justice, where the military commissions were held. Inside the building, a member of Mr. Khadr’s defense team handed her a stack of papers; it didn’t take her long to figure out what it was: the confession of prisoner 0766, Omar Ahmed Khadr.

As part of a deal signed before her arrival, Mr. Khadr had pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him, making him the youngest war criminal in modern history. At the end of the documents was Mr. Khadr’s signature, in the same uneven writing as he signed his letters to her.

Ms. Zinck says she didn’t feel disappointment or outrage at Mr. Khadr. She says she wasn’t even surprised. To her, it was just the latest sign that the system had failed him.

She still wanted to testify. The jury was unaware of all aspects of the deal and would in part determine his sentence. And though it might have little impact on the outcome, she wanted to show Mr. Khadr that the outside world had not abandoned him.

Arlette Zinck, an English professor, testified about the Omar Khadr she had come to know as her student, through his assignments and his letters. “I knew I was going to go down to be comic relief in a very dark bit of political theater,” she says.

At about a quarter to three, in a canary-yellow jacket, she took the stand. She was scared but “on,” reminded of the moments before she defended her Ph.D. dissertation. About 50 people, mostly military personnel, occupied the windowless room. And there, a few feet away, sat her student. Mr. Khadr wore a dark suit, and a trim beard covered his face. At 24 years old, he was no longer the slight boy who had been captured in Afghanistan.

They exchanged a short nod of hello and a smile.

Ms. Zinck settled into the witness chair. Hours earlier Tabitha Speer, widow of the Army medic whom Mr. Khadr had now admitted killing, sat in the same chair, talking about the life of her late husband. At one point, she had spoken directly to Mr. Khadr, saying he had stolen a father from her two children.

Now, the jury heard a different story.

Prompted by questions from Lt. Col. Jon S. Jackson, Mr. Khadr’s Army defense lawyer, Ms. Zinck told the court about her background, how her relationship with Mr. Khadr developed, and the person she had grown to know.

“What’s your analysis of Omar’s writing of what you’ve seen?” asked Lt. Col. Jackson.

Ms. Zinck emphasized his good character, calling him courteous, with a generous spirit: “He is remarkably outward focused,” she said. “He will always ask what’s happening to the people that he’s writing to.”

“And, of course, I mean I see an intelligent young man,” she added. “A man who’s thoughtful and has a good vocabulary and capacity to express himself.” If he ever wanted to apply to King’s, she said she would write his recommendation.

The prosecution lawyer, a captain whose name has been redacted from the court transcript, seized on that statement.

Would admissions officers “consider the whole Omar, which would be the fact that he admitted that he murdered someone?” he asked.

Yes, said Ms. Zinck.

“They’ll consider the fact that he admitted that he attempted to murder as many Americans as he possibly could?”

Yes, she repeated.

“That he wanted to murder for money?”

Yes.

He hammered on the fact that Ms. Zinck was not speaking on behalf of King’s or everyone at King’s. Again and again, he made the point that the prisoner might not get accepted if he applied.

“If I’m a betting woman,” she answered at one point, “odds are good.”

The prosecutor brought up foul language and crass names Mr. Khadr had called guards and military officers, asking: Is that thoughtful? Is that courteous?

No, Ms. Zinck said. But she had two teenagers at home and heard that language under much less “difficult circumstances.”

When the prosecutor had finished, Lt. Col. Jackson asked whether, if Omar Khadr applied to King’s as a convicted war criminal, it would be taken into account that he was 15 at the time of the crimes. Yes, replied Ms. Zinck, it would. And then she gave voice to what many had long argued was the crux of the case:

“We treat our children differently before the law, because we understand that human beings are mutable and that it is our responsibility to protect them, and particularly our responsibility to give them opportunity to reform, right, to start again.”

Three days later, the jury sentenced Mr. Khadr to 40 years in prison. Ms. Zinck’s words had apparently fallen on deaf ears. Perhaps her testimony meant something to Mr. Khadr; it’s hard to know. Mr. Edney declined to make him available for an interview.

But also sitting in the courtroom during her testimony was Katherine Porterfield, a child psychologist who works with child soldiers and victims of torture. In her mind, the professor’s contribution was immeasurable.

“To me,” Ms. Porterfield says, “the greatest truth that was spoken at that entire hearing came out of Arlette Zinck’s mouth.”

As part of his plea deal, Mr. Khadr’s sentence was reduced to eight years. And after one more year in Guantánamo, Canada would consider allowing him to be repatriated to serve the remainder of his time.

Exhausted and mentally drained, Ms. Zinck cried on the plane ride home, but she felt hopeful that Mr. Khadr’s life was entering a new phase.

Lt. Col. Jackson had made her an offer: While Mr. Khadr remains in Guantánamo, can you develop a correspondence course for him?

Ms. Zinck relished the idea—and made it a team effort.

She brought together a multidisciplinary group of about 15 professors from in and outside of King’s: a mathematician, a biologist, a historian, a geographer, a religion scholar, and others.

They designed a curriculum based on books by Canadian authors set in different parts of the country or exploring different cultures there, providing Mr. Khadr with a virtual tour of a home he barely knew. He readWho Has Seen the Wind, a novel about life on the Canadian prairie, andObasan, a story told through the eyes of a child about the internment of the Japanese in Canada during World War II.

They wove in lessons about math, history, and geography with the reading. For example, when he read a book that featured the Canadian Rockies, a physicist at King’s designed a math lesson to teach Mr. Khadr how to measure the height of a mountain using triangulation.

The lessons were intended to help sustain him during his final year in Guantánamo, but he remained in limbo. In November 2011, when he was first eligible to return to Canada, government leaders gave mixed messages as to whether he would be moved.

As the months dragged on, his military lawyers sought to bolster the correspondence lessons. So, for the second time in her life, Ms. Zinck was asked to go to Guantánamo. In April and May 2012, she held what she called the “spring session”—two visits lasting a few days each.

At Guantánamo, Ms. Zinck insisted on wearing a business suit, hose, and heels despite the 90-degree heat—a wardrobe that sometimes drew quizzical looks on the base. She wanted to dress as she would for classes at King’s.

In a small room at the base’s Camp Echo, with Mr. Khadr at a small, plastic table, his ankles shackled to the floor, she taught practical lessons on essay writing and reading critically. But it was also a freewheeling affair, with Ms. Zinck recruiting others on the base to contribute brief seminars. A civilian lawyer taught Mr. Khadr about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With Ms. Porterfield, the psychologist, Mr. Khadr read journal articles and connected concepts in the psychology of trauma and resilience to his own life.

Ms. Porterfield says it felt a like graduate-level class.

For Ms. Zinck, the lessons for Mr. Khadr were a curriculum of “human flourishing,” approaching a Platonic ideal of what education should be. Without the pressure to transmit job skills or meet academic requirements, she and her colleagues were free to teach to the whole person. And contrary to the criticisms that she had no business giving lessons to a suspected terrorist, Ms. Zinck believes she was acting in the true spirit of liberal education, with its power to change lives.

“That’s ultimately what liberal arts and science education is all about,” she says. “It builds people.”

Arlette Zinck takes a white binder from the bottom shelf of a bookcase in her low-lit office at King’s. She places it on a table and opens the cover.

Inside, preserved in plastic sleeves, are Mr. Khadr’s lesson plans and completed tests. The professor turns the pages as if reminiscing over a family photo album.

Someday she would like to give the assignments back to Mr. Khadr. Once he’s free. Perhaps to serve as a reminder of how far he has come.

In September 2012, 10 years after he was captured—and almost four years to the day from Mr. Edney’s talk at King’s University College—Mr. Khadr returned to Canada.

The departure from Guantánamo was a long-sought victory, but it was not an easy homecoming. For Ms. Zinck, the sad irony was that though Mr. Khadr was closer than ever—held at a maximum-security prison in Ontario—she was cut off from him. As a new prisoner, Mr. Khadr had been placed under evaluation, with restricted communications privileges.

He was also a target for other inmates. Given his high profile, Ms. Zinck feared he would be hurt, or worse.

The uncertainty took a toll, and the professor drew heavily on her Christian beliefs. “Without my own vibrant, personal faith, the pain of caring in a context where so, so, so many are ambivalent or opposed might be more than I can bear,” she says.

Indeed, many were against Mr. Khadr’s return.

One of them was Ezra Levant, a Canadian newspaper columnist, who wrote about the case in his 2011 book, The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. In it, he lambasted Ms. Zinck as a key member of Mr. Khadr’s “fan club,” saying she had “led the charge in turning her campus into a factory for Khadr groupies.” He argued that sympathetic Canadians like Ms. Zinck had been duped by the savvy Mr. Khadr.

Others have questioned whether she overlooked the hurt caused to Tabitha Speer and her family. Ms. Zinck said she prays regularly for them.

“People are going to eventually meet this young man,” she says, “and they’re going to come to their own decisions about who he is.”

Ultimately, her work did not hinge on whether Mr. Khadr did or did not do what he was charged with. It was about restoring an individual to the larger community.

“For us, it’s never been about guilt or innocence; we’re not lawyers,” she says of the team of educators she assembled. “It’s been about the simple understanding that punishment plays some role in justice, but if that’s all you’ve got, you haven’t got justice.”

While the criticism has persisted, others have rallied to support her, with some saying her involvement in a very public issue is all too rare these days for academics.

David J. Goa, director of the University of Alberta’s Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life, has contributed lessons on Christianity, Islam, and secularism to Mr. Khadr. He says Ms. Zinck and King’s, with its liberal-arts focus and Christian orientation, had entered an area where most administrators and professors at larger, public universities would be reluctant to go.

To Mr. Goa, Ms. Zinck is fulfilling one of a professor’s fundamental roles. “One of the gifts of tenure,” he says, “is precisely to give you liberty to speak in the public square about things that are important and to enhance the conversation about it.”

“Integrity.” Ms. Zinck says. “Who has it? What does it look like?”

It is 9:30 a.m. on a sunny winter day at King’s, and the professor is starting to rally her sleepy students into a conversation about A Man for All Seasons and the virtues—and drawbacks—of living a conscientious life.

She moves around the room, a small gold cross hanging from her neck, and tries to get the 22 students to use the text and the decision of its main character, Sir Thomas More, to reflect on their own lives. “What does living with integrity look like?” she asks them.

The discussion continues, but one topic Ms. Zinck won’t bring up in the classroom is Mr. Khadr. If a student asks about their relationship, she is happy to discuss it, but outside of class.

In general, few ask. While some students at King’s remain engaged in the Khadr case, those who were provoked by Mr. Edney’s remarks have all graduated.

Mr. Khadr’s case continues to receive attention from the news media, but since his release from Guantánamo, it is not the same hot-button issue it once was.

Omar Khadr (left) in an undated family photograph, before his capture in Afghanistan in July 2002. Mr. Khadr (right) as he appeared in a courtroom in Edmonton, Alberta, in 2013.

Today Mr. Khadr is imprisoned in a medium-security facility not far from Edmonton and fighting his conviction, saying he signed the plea deal because it was his only way out of Guantánamo.

Ms. Zinck was able to re-establish communication with him several months after his return and now speaks with him often. Members of the team of professors she organized visit Mr. Khadr regularly to tutor him, and other prisoners have expressed interest in joining the classes.

He is about halfway to the credits needed to receive his high-school diploma. He hopes to become a doctor. Enrollment at King’s someday remains a possibility.

Looking back on it all, Ms. Zinck says, she never intended to become so involved. “Look, I got up that morning in September 2008, and I went to work. I sat in the audience and I listened because that was my job, and I watched our students because that, too, was my job, and everything else has fallen out from this.”

And for all that Mr. Khadr has received from Ms. Zinck—the letters, the lessons, the hope—she says the gifts have been returned in kind. 

“In getting to know this young man, I have been privileged to have observed embodied hope in a way that I have not been exposed to it before,” she says. “I have learned how to cope with fear, my own and other people’s. I’ve learned the value of story and how engaging with narrative can open windows and doors in the most isolating prison cells.”

Letters from Omar Khadr quoted in this article were made public at his trial. Arlette Zinck’s letters to Mr. Khadr first appeared in the Edmonton Journal.

________________________________________
Timeline of a Guantánamo Education

September 2008: Dennis Edney, an Edmonton lawyer, speaks at King’s U. College about the case of Omar A. Khadr, a Canadian citizen held at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
October 2008: Arlette Zinck, an associate professor at King’s, sends a letter to Mr. Khadr. He responds, starting a correspondence.
January 2009: The relationship deepens. Mr. Khadr says the letters from Ms. Zinck “are like candles, very bright in my hardship and darkness.”
February 2010: Ms. Zinck encourages Mr. Khadr to focus on his education, urging him to read often and to apply to college someday.
April 2010: At the professor’s request, Mr. Khadr writes a book report on A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.
August 2010: King’s struggles with growing attention from the news media and concerns from donors about the relationship.
October 2010: Ms. Zinck testifies at Mr. Khadr’s trial at Guantánamo.
November 2010: A team of professors organized by Ms. Zinck starts to develop a formal correspondence course for Mr. Khadr.
April and May 2012: Ms. Zinck visits Guantánamo to tutor Mr. Khadr.

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The Americans and the Israelis hold the largest keys to quashing the Palestinian unity deal.  Will the hope triumph over cynicism finally?

By Ramzy Baroud

Palestinians celebrate the national reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza City in this file photo.

For years, Palestinian factions have strived for unity and for years unity has evaded them. But is it possible that following several failed attempts, Fatah and Hamas have finally found that elusive middle ground? And if they have done so, why, to what end and at what cost?

On April 23, top Fatah and Hamas officials hammered out the final details of the Beach Refugee Camp agreement without any Arab mediation. All major grievances have purportedly been smoothed over, differences have been abridged, and other sensitive issues have been referred to a specialized committee. One of these committees will be entrusted to incorporate Hamas and the Islamic Jihad into the fold of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

A rift lasting seven years has been healed, rejoiced some headlines in Arabic media. Israelis and their media were divided. Some, close to right-wing parties, decried the betrayal of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas of the “peace process.” Others, mostly on the left, pointed the finger at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pushing Abbas over the edge — “into Hamas arms” per the assessment of Zehava Galon, leader of the left-wing party Meretz.

It is untrue that the rift between Fatah and Hamas goes back to the January 2006 elections, when Hamas won the majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and formed a government. The feud is as old as Hamas itself. The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, was founded in Gaza with two main objectives, one direct and the other inferred: To resist the Israeli military occupation at the start of the First Palestinian Intifada in 1987 and to counterbalance the influence of the PLO.

Hamas founders were not the only Palestinians to have a problem with the PLO. The latter group, which represented and spoke on behalf of all Palestinians everywhere, was designated by an Arab League summit in 1974 as the sole and only representative of the Palestinian people. The target of such specific language was not Hamas, for at the time, it didn’t exist. The reference was aimed at other Arab governments who posed as Palestine’s representatives regionally and internationally.

The “sole representation” bit, however, endured even after surpassing its usefulness. Following the Israeli war on Lebanon in 1982 that mainly targeted PLO factions, the leading Palestinian institution, now operating from Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other Arab entities, began to flounder. Its message grew more exclusivist and was dominated by a small clique within Fatah, one that was closest to former leader Yasser Arafat.

When Arafat signed the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993, the once unifying character of the “sole representative” of Palestinians began to quickly change.
The PLO shrunk into the Palestinian Authority, which governed parts of the West Bank and Gaza under the watchful eye of Israel; and the Parliament in exile became the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), a much more restricted Parliament at home that was still under occupation. The blurred lines grew between the PLO, the PA and Fatah. It was clear that the liberation project, mounted by the PLO and Fatah in the early 1960s, became anything but that.

In fact, the whole paradigm was fluctuating at all fronts. “Donor countries” became the true friends of Palestine, and geography suddenly became a maze of confusing classifications of areas A, B and C. The status of Jerusalem was a deferred topic for later discussions; the refugees’ Right of Return was a mere problem that needed to be cleverly and creatively resolved with possible symbolic gestures.
The befuddling peace process has remained in motion, and is likely to continue even after the unity deal. On April 18, former Israel lobbyist and current US peace envoy Martin Indyk returned to the region in a last desperate effort to push both parties to an agreement, any agreement, even one that would simply postpone the US-imposed deadline for a “framework agreement.” But little could be done. Netanyahu had no reasons to move forward with the talks, especially being under little or no pressure to do so. Abbas’ only hope that Israel would release a few Palestinian prisoners, from the thousands of prisoners it currently holds, was dashed. He had nothing to show his people by way of an “achievement.”

With the imminent collapse of the peace process, this time engineered by US Secretary of State John Kerry, Abbas needed an exit, thus the Beach Refugee Camp agreement with Hamas.

The timing for Hamas was devastatingly right. The group, which once represented Palestinian resistance, not just for Islamists, but for others as well, was running out of options. “Hamas is cornered, unpopular at home and boxed in as tightly as ever by both Egypt and Israel,” wrote the Economist on April 26.

Indeed, the regional scene was getting too complicated, even for resourceful Hamas, a group that was born into a crisis and is used to navigating its way out of tough political terrains. Despite putting up stiff resistance to Israeli wars and incursions, the group has in recent years been obliged to facilitate cease-fires with Israel, doing its utmost in keeping Gaza’s border with Israel rocket-free. Moreover, the destruction of the Rafah tunnels since July of last year had cost the Hamas government nearly $230 million. To manage an economy in a poor region like Gaza is one thing, to sustain it under the harshest of sieges is proving nearly impossible.

As is the case for Abbas’ PA, for Hamas the agreement was necessitated by circumstances other than finding true ground for national unity to combat the Israeli occupation. In fact, the Beach Camp deal would allow Abbas to continue with his part of the peace process, as he will also remain at the helm of the prospected unity government, to be formed within a few weeks from the signing of the agreement. Although Arab governments were not directly involved in bringing both parties together — as was the case in previous agreements in Sana, Makkah, Cairo and Doha — some still hold a sway.

The Americans and the Israelis have the largest keys to quashing the unity deal. Netanyahu immediately suspended the peace process, as the Hamas-Fatah agreement was a last minute escape route for his government to disown the futile talks, whose collapse is now being blamed on the Palestinians. The Americans are in agreement with Israel, as has always been the case.

Scenes in Gaza tell of much hope and rejoicing, but it is a repeated scene of past agreements that have failed. Sometimes despair and hope go hand in hand. The impoverished place has served as a battlefield for several wars and a continued siege. It is aching for a glimmer of hope.

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Gulf state urged to take action after official figures show migrant workers dying at rate of more than one a day

By Owen Gibson

Migrant workers leave a construction site in Doha, Qatar, where 1.4 million labourers are helping prepare for the 2022 World Cup. Photograph: EPA

Migrant workers are still dying in Qatar at a rate of more than one a day, intensifying pressure on the Gulf state to improve conditions for the 1.4 million labourers helping it prepare for 2022 World Cup.

On the day that the Qatari authorities confirmed they had received a pivotal independent report into workers’ rights triggered by Guardian revelations of workplace abuses in the country, they on Thursday faced mounting calls to rapidly reform labour laws.

According to official figures, a total of 53 Nepalese workers died between January 2014 and mid-April this year, taking the toll on that country since January 2012 to more than 430. New figures from the Indian embassy show that 89 migrants died in the first four months of the year, bringing the total of Indian deaths to 567 since January 2012.

Analysis of previous death figures has shown that a high proportion were involved in workplace accidents or suffered sudden heart failure, though some may have died of natural causes and will not have been on building sites.

Qatari officials have stepped up inspections of working conditions and recently gave strong indications that they are prepared to reform labour laws, but it remains unclear whether they will go as far as scrapping an exit-visa system which prevents workers leaving Qatar without the permission of their employer. There are many examples of migrant workers being effectively held to ransom because their employer refuses to allow them to leave, with French footballer Zahir Belounis being a high-profile example.

The exit-visa system has become an important issue as rights bodies await the publication of an independent report by law firm DLA Piper that was commissioned in the wake of a global outcry prompted by a series of reports in the Guardian in September 2013.

The Qatari government confirmed they had received the “comprehensive” DLA Piper report into the health and safety migrant workers and its national labour laws. It said it was studying the conclusions and proposals for action, promising to publish it in full at a later date together with its response.

At a conference in Doha on Thursday attended by senior Qatari government representatives, Amnesty International’s head of global issues, Audrey Gaughran, told them the exit-visa system was a “blatant human rights violation”.

Human rights organisations believe Qatar has reached a crunch point at which it must make a decisive move to demonstrate its commitment to reform by scrapping exit visas.
“It would be evidence of good intentions and good faith. It’s very much the low-hanging fruit in this debate. [The system] can be abolished without any impact on the profitability of commercial enterprises,” said Nicholas McGeehan, the Human Rights Watch researcher for Bahrain, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates.

“We recognise that labour reform will be incremental. We see it as in Qatar’s best interests to get rid of this system. It would demonstrate to the business community that labour reform and the ability to run commercial enterprises are not mutually exclusive. We hope someone invests some political capital in this and abolishes it.”

The minister of labour and social affairs, Abdullah Saleh Mubarak Al Khulaifi, told the Peninsula newspaper his ministry was making “every effort” to tackle all laws that relate to workers’ issues. He reportedly announced a new system whereby workers would have to be paid by bank transfers, which can be monitored, instead of by cash, which is open to abuse.

“Our [Islamic] religion has ordered us to treat workers in a humane way, and not to task them with unbearable jobs … most importantly, to pay them,” Khulaifi said. “We hope that the wage protection system will achieve its aims.”

James Lynch, Amnesty’s lead researcher for the Middle East, said after speaking at Thursday’s conference that the Qataris were engaging with the complex issue but Amnesty now wanted to see concrete signs of progress.

“It is encouraging that the government turned out in force and the officials with relevant authority engaged in the debate,” said Lynch.

“But we don’t have any new information about what the plans are. There was some acknowledgement that there were issues to be addressed, but we didn’t hear any positions particularly shifting.”

Workers from Nepal make up around a sixth of the 1.4 million migrant workers in Qatar fuelling a £123bn investment in infrastructure over the next four years, while just over a fifth come from India.

The oil and gas-rich Gulf state is embarking on an unprecedented “nation-building programme” of which the 2022 World Cup is an integral part. The International Trade Union Confederation has warned that 4,000 migrant workers could die before a ball is kicked if nothing is done to reform labour laws.

Pressure for better working conditions has increased since a Guardian investigation last year discovered that Nepali workers alone died at a rate of almost one a day last summer. The new figures from the Nepalese Foreign Employment Promotion Board are likely to be a conservative estimate, because they only record those families that approach it for compensation on behalf of the deceased.

Qatar has its UN universal periodic review session on 7 May – a process that takes place every four years in which a country’s human rights record is reviewed by other states – and is expected to want to unveil some progress towards labour law reform before then.

Visiting MEPs and other inspectors have also been told to expect significant changes to the labour law, which could include a commitment to extend a new workers’ charter applying to World Cup-related projects to all work commissioned by the government.

Jim Murphy, the shadow secretary for international development, said: “The release of the DLA Piper report will be a step in the right direction, but the real test is the reform that comes with it. Fifa must insist on substantial change that dramatically improves the lot of migrant workers currently suffering in Qatar.”

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The muscular system is an organ system consisting of skeletal, smooth and cardiac muscles. It permits movement of the body, maintains posture, and circulates blood throughout the body. The muscular system in vertebrates is controlled through the nervous system, although some muscles (such as the cardiac muscle) can be completely autonomous. Together with the skeletal system it forms the musculoskeletal system, which is responsible for movement of the human body

There are three distinct types of muscles: skeletal muscles, cardiac or heart muscles, and smooth (non-striated) muscles. Muscles provide strength, balance, posture, movement and heat for the body to keep warm.

Upon stimulation by an action potential, skeletal muscles perform a coordinated contraction by shortening each sarcomere. The best proposed model for understanding contraction is the sliding filament model of muscle contraction. Actin and myosin fibers overlap in a contractile motion towards each other. Myosin filaments have club-shaped heads that project toward the actin filaments.

Larger structures along the myosin filament called myosin heads are used to provide attachment points on binding sites for the actin filaments. The myosin heads move in a coordinated style, they swivel toward the center of the sarcomere, detach and then reattach to the nearest active site of the actin filament. This is called a rachet type drive system. This process consumes large amounts of adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

Energy for this comes from ATP, the energy source of the cell. ATP binds to the cross bridges between myosin heads and actin filaments. The release of energy powers the swiveling of the myosin head. Muscles store little ATP and so must continuously recycle the discharged adenosine diphosphate molecule (ADP) into ATP rapidly. Muscle tissue also contains a stored supply of a fast acting recharge chemical, creatine phosphate which can assist initially producing the rapid regeneration of ADP into ATP.

Calcium ions are required for each cycle of the sarcomere. Calcium is released from the sarcoplasmic reticulum into the sarcomere when a muscle is stimulated to contract. This calcium uncovers the actin binding sites. When the muscle no longer needs to contract, the calcium ions are pumped from the sarcomere and back into storage in the sarcoplasmic reticulum.

Neuromuscular junctions are the focal point where a motor neuron attaches to a muscle. Acetylcholine, (a neurotransmitter used in skeletal muscle contraction) is released from the axon terminal of the nerve cell when an action potential reaches the microscopic junction, called a synapse. A group of chemical messengers cross the synapse and stimulate the formation of electrical changes, which are produced in the muscle cell when the acetylcholine binds to receptors on its surface. Calcium is released from its storage area in the cell’s sarcoplasmic reticulum. An impulse from a nerve cell causes calcium release and brings about a single, short muscle contraction called a muscle twitch. If there is a problem at the neuromuscular junction, a very prolonged contraction may occur, tetanus. Also, a loss of function at the junction can produce paralysis.

Skeletal muscles are organized into hundreds of motor units, each of which involves a motor neuron, attached by a series of thin finger-like structures called axon terminals. These attach to and control discrete bundles of muscle fibers. A coordinated and fine tuned response to a specific circumstance will involve controlling the precise number of motor units used. While individual muscle units contract as a unit, the entire muscle can contract on a predetermined basis due to the structure of the motor unit. Motor unit coordination, balance, and control frequently come under the direction of the cerebellum of the brain. This allows for complex muscular coordination with little conscious effort, such as when one drives a car without thinking about the process.

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