Back in June I asked Who And What is Matthew Craig Barrett? Barrett, a young American globetrotter with a Pakistani wife and two children, had then been arrested in Islamabad and was accused as being a spy.

That was after the Raymond Davis case in which a CIA contractor had killed to people in Peshawar and after the Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. U.S.-Pakistani relations at that time where in a deep hole.

There was nothing at all in the "western" media about Barrett's arrest. For a case that made quite some press in Pakistan this seemed unusual to me. As I wrote:

From his age, agility and "having visited 60 countries" Barrett could well be a military or CIA spook. Marriage to a Pakistani woman would be a nice background for a long-term agent. But Barrett could of course also be just a normal innocent man. But why then would the U.S. media be quiet about him?

Now, three month later, the British Guardian picks the story up: 'Now Pakistan and America have some problems. So they're taking it out on me'

Tensions between Pakistan and the US often made life tricky for Matthew Barrett, a young man from Alabama living in Islamabad, but when he was arrested in May, things went from bad to worse, as he has revealed in a letter smuggled from his jail cell.

There is not much factual new in it about the arrest but there is a a bit on his private background gained in interviews with his family and friends.

Matthew Craig Barrett is still in jail and the U.S. embassy seems to have no interest to get him out. Like me the Guardian's Declan Walsh leaves it open if he is a spy or just an adventures and impatient young man.

Given that so far the U.S. has shown absolutely no interest at all to get Barrett released I now assume that he is indeed a private citizen with no unofficial official role in one of the many U.S. agencies.

BTW – the last comment, quite angry, in the older thread is now confirmed to have come from Barrett's father in law, Abdur Rahman Khan, who the Guardian describes as:

a fiery human rights lawyer who has embraced his son-in-law. Having survived the 2005 earthquake when a house collapsed on his head, he is not a man to mince his words. Over an iftar dinner to mark the breaking of the Ramadan fast, he rails against Pakistan's military establishment, which he calls a "fascist, feudal, Nazi network". If his son-in-law comes to harm in prison, he warns, he will take tribal-style revenge. "I am a Pakhtun. I cannot be afraid," he declares.

Matthew Barrett's wife Binoche – the Guardian piece has a picture of her and the children – contacted me today by email and pointed to the Guardian story. She wrote:

Without any real proof your website did a lot of propaganda in endangering the life of an innocent person in a fascist and lawless state like Pakistan. Its 3 months me his wife and two minor kids are denied to see him. He was tortured in Judicial custody by criminal minded police. his own embassy remained silence to all the atrocities done to a poor US citizen.

I don't think my piece was propaganda. It was solely assembled from accounts in the Pakistani English language media and I was clearly ambiguous about Barrett's role. I picked up on the case because I was curious that no one else in the "west" showed any interest in it.

Anyway. I hope that Matthew Barrett will soon be freed and can live a happy life with his wife and his children. He might even learn from this drama. "Kicking one man in the behind and mocking his captors," as the Guardian describes him doing, is, even when well deserved, not a helpful behavior when interacting with any authority anywhere in this world.