An update to an earlier story we ran. Seems it gets even more interesting.
When Barbara Jennings made her first trip to the Middle East in 1991, she was a soldier, deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Storm. A native of Georgia, she served in the Army for two decades and completed several more overseas tours before retiring in 2003. Then, like many veterans, she kept deploying as a defense contractor.
Four years ago, she took a job on Camp Arifjan, a U.S. military base in Kuwait. She had never intended to stay this long, but in March 2016 something happened that may very well keep her there for the rest of her life.
Her son, Gabriel Walker, also a contractor, was sentenced to 20 years in Kuwaiti prison for the crime of marijuana possession. Jennings says she won’t go home without him.
Jennings, 62, has few if any allies in her fight for Walker’s repatriation. Numerous appeals to U.S. government officials and politicians have yielded only moral support. Walker’s employer, the Kuwait-based company KGL Logistics, fired him as soon as he was behind bars. There are also language barriers, and absent lawyers, and secretive trial proceedings, and countless emails from the United States Embassy explaining that there’s very little it can do.
It is a battle that Jennings appears all but certain to lose, but the alternative is not an option. She keeps a letter from her son as a reminder of why she can’t give up. He wrote it several months after he got arrested, before his father died — “of grief and heartbreak,” Jennings said. The letter begins, “Today, I was tortured and beaten by guards dressed in all black with their faces covered and a white skull on the right side of their chest.” It is nearly 3,000 words long.
At the very least, Jennings being in Kuwait gives Walker hope — and, no less important, a connection to home. He is one of just a handful of Americans being kept in a prison stuffed with approximately 3,500 more inmates than it is designed to hold. In his letter, he recalled being asked by one of the guards how he had managed to survive behind bars for as long as he had without speaking Arabic. “I told him that I survive like a dog,” Walker wrote.
On March 6, Arab Times reported that the Kuwaiti Interior Minister Sheikh Khalid Al Jarrah Al-Sabah announced plans to build a new prison and “deport foreign inmates whose countries are ready to accept them.” The transfers are part of a bigger initiative launched in late January to address severe overcrowding in Kuwait’s prisons — specifically, Central Prison, where Walker and at least seven other Americans, all defense contractors, are being held.
This is the third article about Americans imprisoned in Kuwait that Task & Purpose has published since Feb. 20. Over the course of our reporting, we have contacted or attempted to contact numerous government agencies and officials, including the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the American Embassy in Kuwait, the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington, and multiple U.S. senators. Few have even been willing to comment.
Only the State Department has been receptive to our queries, but it declined to comment on whether the department has taken measures to ensure that U.S. citizens are on the list of foreign detainees deported from Kuwait. However, a U.S. Army veteran serving a life sentence in Central Prison told Task & Purpose via WhatsApp that from his vantage point it appears as if the American inmates will be among the few who don’t make the cut.
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Jennings moved to Kuwait to be closer to her son, whom she had helped secure a job in contracting after a three-year stint at the University of West Georgia. The two shared an apartment in the town of Mahboula, about a 40 minute drive down the Persian Gulf coastline from Kuwait City. For a time, they worked together on Arifjan, which houses the bulk of the 15,000 American troops stationed in the country. Jennings checked vehicles entering the base for bombs. Walker was her supervisor — a position that required a secret security clearance, Jennings is quick to point out. He has no criminal record in the United States.
Eventually, Walker got a job with KGL escorting trucks delivering mail to Arifjan and other U.S. military installations. By that point, he’d been working in Kuwait for about six years. It was home.
Walker was staying at a friend’s apartment when he was arrested in the early hours of March 22, 2016. According to court documents, he was awakened around 3 a.m. by the sound of the doorbell. The police entered the apartment with their guns drawn.
The lead detective, a lieutenant named Abdullah Salem Aloutian, later testified that Walker immediately led the agents to the room where he had…