@@ American gulag: Torture, force-feeding and darkness at noon @@

Los Angeles Times
February 26, 2006

Opinion

American gulag

Torture, force-feeding and darkness at noon -- this is Guantanamo, a lawyer for
prisoners says.

By Thomas Wilner

The American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeast corner of Cuba, a
sliver of land the United States has occupied since 1903. Long ago, it was irrigated
from lakes on the other side of the island, but Cuban President Fidel Castro cut off
the water supply years ago. So today, Guantanamo produces its own water from a
30-year-old desalination plant. The water has a distinct yellow tint. All Americans
drink bottled water imported by the planeload. Until recently, prisoners drank the
yellow water.

The prison overlooks the sea, but the ocean cannot be seen by prisoners. Guard towers
and stadium lights loom along the perimeter. On my last visit, we were escorted by
young, solemn military guards whose nameplates on their shirts were taped over so
that prisoners could not identify them.

Very few outsiders are allowed to see the prisoners. The government has orchestrated
some carefully controlled tours for the media and members of Congress, but has
repeatedly refused to allow these visitors, representatives of the United Nations,
human rights groups or nonmilitary doctors and psychiatrists to meet or speak with
prisoners. So far, the only outsiders who have done so are representatives of the
International Committee of the Red Cross ? who are prohibited by their own rules from
disclosing what they find ? and lawyers for the prisoners.

I am one of those lawyers. I represent six Kuwaiti prisoners, each of whom has now
spent nearly four years at Guantanamo. It took me 2 1/2 years to gain access to my
clients, but now I have visited the prison camp 11 times in the last 14 months. What
I have witnessed is a cruel and eerie netherworld of concrete and barbed wire that
has become a daily nightmare for the nearly 500 people swept up after 9/11 who have
been imprisoned without charges or trial for more than four years. It is truly our
American gulag.

On my most recent trip three weeks ago, after signing a log *** and submitting our
bags to a search, my colleagues and I were taken through two tall, steel-mesh gates
into the interior of the prison camp.

We interviewed our clients in Camp Echo, one of several camps where prisoners are
interrogated. We entered a room about 13 feet square (4 meters square) and divided in
half by a wall of thick steel mesh. On one side was a table where the prisoner would
sit for our interviews, his feet shackled to a steel eyelet cemented to the floor. On
the other side were a shower and a cell just like the ones in which prisoners are
ordinarily confined. In their cells, prisoners sleep on a metal shelf against the
wall, which is flanked by a toilet and sink. They are allowed a thin foam mattress
and a gray cotton blanket.

The Pentagon's files on the six Kuwaiti prisoners we represent reveal that none was
captured on a battlefield or accused of engaging in hostilities against the U.S. The
prisoners claim that they were taken into custody by Pakistani and Afghan warlords
and turned over to the U.S. for bounties ranging from $5000 to $25,000 ? a claim
confirmed by American news reports. We have obtained copies of bounty leaflets
distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. forces promising rewards ? "enough to
feed your family for life" ? for any "Arab terrorist" handed over.

The files include only the flimsiest accusations or hearsay that would never stand up
in court. The file on one prisoner indicated that he had been seen talking to two
suspected al-CIA-duh (al-Qaeda) members on the same day ? at places thousands of
miles apart. The primary "evidence" against another was that he was captured wearing
a particular Casio watch, "which many terrorists wear". Oddly, the same watch was
being worn by the U.S. military chaplain, a Muslim, at Guantanamo.

When I first met my clients, they had not seen or spoken with their families for more
than three years, and they had been questioned hundreds of times. Several were
suspicious of us; they told me that they had been interrogated by people who claimed
to be their lawyers but who turned out not to be. So we had DVDs made, on which
members of their families told them who we were and that we could be trusted. Several
cried on seeing their families for the first time in years. One had become a father
since he was detained and had never before seen his child. One noticed his father was
not on the DVD, and we had to tell him that his father had died.

Most prisoners are kept apart, although some can communicate through the steel mesh
or concrete walls that separate their cells. They exercise alone, some only at night.
They had not seen sunlight for months ? an especially cruel tactic in a tropical
climate. One prisoner told me, "I have spent almost every moment of the last three
years, and eaten every meal, here in this small cell which is my bathroom". Other
than the Koran, prisoners had nothing to read. As a result of our protests, some have
been given books.

Every prisoner I've interviewed claims to have been badly beaten and subjected to
treatment that only could be called torture, by Americans, from the first day of U.S.
captivity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by their wrists and
beaten, hung by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and paraded before female
guards, and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten again
upon arrival in Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27, said his
ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt the indentation in his
ribs. "Beat me all you want, just give me a hearing", he said he told his
interrogators.

Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25, is a teacher who left Kuwait City in 2001 to
work in Afghan, then Pakistani, schools. After 9/11, he and four other Kuwaitis were
invited to dinner by a Pakistani tribal leader and then sold by him into captivity,
according to their accounts, later confirmed by Newsweek and ABC News.

On August 8, 2005, Fawzi, in desperation, went on a hunger strike to assert his
innocence and to protest being imprisoned for four years without charges. He said he
wanted to defend himself against any accusations, or die. He told me that he had
heard U.S. congressmen had returned from tours of Guantanamo saying that it was a
Caribbean resort with great food. "If I eat, I condone these lies", Fawzi said.

At the end of August, after Fawzi fainted in his cell, guards began to force-feed him
through tubes pushed up his nose into his stomach. At first, the tubes were inserted
for each feeding and then removed afterward. Fawzi told me that this was very
painful. When he tried to pull out the tubes, he was strapped onto a stretcher with
his head held by many guards, which was even more painful.

By mid-September, the force-feeding had been made more humane. Feeding tubes were
left in and the formula pumped in. Still, when I saw Fawzi, a tube was protruding
from his nose. Drops of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it with a napkin.

We asked for Fawzi's medical records so we could monitor his weight and his health.
Denied. The only way we could learn how Fawzi was doing was to visit him each month,
which we did. When we visited him in November, his weight had dropped from 140 pounds
(64 kilograms) to 98 pounds (44 kilograms). Specialists in enteral feeding advised us
that the continued drop in his weight and other signs indicated that the feeding was
being conducted incompetently. We asked that Fawzi be transferred to a hospital.
Again, the government refused.

When we saw Fawzi in December, his weight had stabilized at about 110 pounds (50
kilograms). The formulas had been changed, and he was being force-fed by medical
personnel rather than by guards.

When I met with Fawzi three weeks ago, the tubes were out of his nose. I told him I
was thankful that after five months he had ended his hunger strike. He looked at me
sadly and said, "They tortured us to make us stop". At first, he said, they punished
him by taking away his "comfort items" one by one: his blanket, his towel, his long
pants, his shoes. They then put him in isolation. When this failed to persuade him to
end the hunger strike, he said, an officer came to him January 9 to announce that any
detainee who refused to eat would be forced onto "the chair". The officer warned that
recalcitrant prisoners would be strapped into a steel device that pulled their heads
back, and that the tubes would be forced in and wrenched out for each feeding. "We're
going to break this hunger strike", the officer told him.

Fawzi said he heard the prisoner next door screaming and warning him to give up the
strike. He decided that he wasn't "on strike to be tortured". He said those who
continued on the hunger strike not only were strapped in "the chair" but were left
there for hours; he believes that guards fed them not only nutrients but also
diuretics and laxatives to force them to defecate and urinate on themselves in the
chair.

After less than two weeks of this treatment, the strike was over. Of the more than 80
strikers at the end of December, Fawzi said only three or four were holding out. As a
result of the strike, however, prisoners are now getting a meager ration of bottled
water.

Fawzi said eating was the only aspect of life at Guantanamo he could control; forcing
him to end the hunger strike stripped him of his last means of protesting his unjust
imprisonment. Now, he said, he feels "hopeless".

The government continues to deny that there is any injustice at Guantanamo. But I
know the truth.


* Thomas Wilner is a partner at Shearman & Sterling, which has been representing
Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantanamo since early 2002.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-wilner26feb26,0,1383538.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions


.

Quantcast