Barry Clarke is sponsoring Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian presently detained in Guantánamo Bay:

Bishop Barry Clarke of the Anglican diocese of Montreal, has been speaking out about why the diocese decided to sponsor Mr. Ameziane as a part of an ecumenical partnership with the Presbyterian Church in Montreal called Action Refugee Montreal. “There’s an injustice here,” he said, noting that one the Five Marks of Mission in the Anglican Communion is changing unjust structures in society.

Mr. Ameziane has been imprisoned in Guantánamo since 2002, but has never been charged with a crime. According to information from the Center for Constitutional rights in New York where lawyers have taken on his case, he is an ethnic Berber who fled Algeria 17 years ago. He came to Canada but was denied refugee status and then traveled to Afghanistan. “As a foreigner in a land soon torn apart by conflict, he was an easy target for corrupt local police who captured him while he was trying to cross the border into Pakistan. Mr. Ameziane was then sold to U.S. military forces for a bounty,” his lawyers say.

I doubt that Barry particularly cares whether Ameziane is a terrorist or not as long as he meets the criterion of suffering an apparent “injustice”, and I’m sure that bishop Barry regards imprisoning someone without trial an injustice even if he is a terrorist.

Whether Ameziane is a terrorist or not is, at the very least, an open question:

A Summary of Evidence memo was prepared for the tribunal, listing the alleged facts that led to his detainment. His memo accused him of the following:

a. The detainee is associated with al Qaida:

1.       In late 2000, the detainee, who claims Algerian citizenship, ^[9] traveled to Afghanistan from Canada on a fraudulent passport.

2.       Prior to his departure from Canada, the detainee received 1,200 to 1,500 Canadian dollars from a Tunisian man who had encouraged the detainee to travel to Afghanistan.

3.       The detainee was instructed to go to a guesthouse in Kabul upon his arrival in Afghanistan, which direction the detainee ultimately followed.

4.       The detainee noted that a number of the other residents of the guesthouse were Taliban fighters.

5.       The guesthouse in Kabul was run by an al Qaida communications specialist.

6.       The detainee then stayed in a guesthouse in Jalalabad, Afghanistan with a number of Arab men.

7.       The detainee traveled with Taliban fighters through the Tora Bora mountains during the U.S. bombing campaign.

8.       The detainee traveled illegally to Pakistan without any documentation and was captured by the Pakistani military at a mosque.

9.       The detainee escaped from a bus that was forcibly overtaken by other prisoners with the detainee, but he was captured again a short time later by Pakistani authorities.

Look out Montreal.

Considering the number of Christians who suffer persecution world wide,  one wonders why Bishop Barry doesn’t sponsor one of them: not trendy enough and they could be fundamentalists who oppose same-sex blessings.