In the early hours of 2 October 2001, Pakistani security officers stopped a bus travelling between Quetta and Karachi and took off three passengers. One of them was Mamdouh Habib. My Story begins as a conventional biography of a Middle Eastern immigrant, but becomes an unrelentingly stomachchurning account of maltreatment, torture, and persecution. Habib was born in Egypt and moved to Australia in 1982. He married, became nationalised, had children, and started his own business. But things started to go wrong. Habib’s business failed, and his involvement with Middle Eastern refugees attracted the attention of ASIO. Disillusioned, he left Australia in July 2001 and travelled around the Middle East looking for a new homeland, until his detention in Pakistan. From Pakistan, he was ‘rendered’-a weasel word for kidnapped-first to Egypt where he endured five months of torture, then to Afghanistan, and finally to Guantanamo Bay, where the nightmare continued until his release in January 2005. Was he simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? Whatever the truth, Australian politicians and officials were complicit in his detention, and ignored his inhumane treatment. Although he was released without charge, Habib still remains ‘a person of interest’ to ASIO. Scary.

Graeme Moore is an online bookseller and freelance writer

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