[NYTr] Guantanamo: American Gulag
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Radio Havana Cuba - Mar 8, 2006
http://www.radiohc.cu
Guantanamo: American Gulag
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 hav4 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 sheet and
submitting our bags to a search, my colleagu4s 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 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 $5,000 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 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 befor4
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 hav4 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 befor4 female
guards, and given el4ctric shocks. At least three claimed to hav4 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 Aug. 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. H4 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 to 98 pounds.
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. 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
Jan 9 to announce that any detainee who refused to eat would be forced
onto "th4 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 "th4 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.]
*
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