Archive for April, 2008

Sri Lanka Guardian: To introduce you, if anyone asks you, who is Andy Worthington, from which country is he, and what is his role and status, what would you say?

Andy Worthington: I’m a historian and journalist from the UK, living in London, and the author of three books. My latest, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, is the first book to look in detail at the stories of all the men held in Guantánamo. I’ve also just started work as the Communications Officer for Reprieve, the legal action charity founded by Clive Stafford Smith. Reprieve represents 31 Guantánamo prisoners, and also works on behalf of prisoners facing the death penalty.

Sri Lanka Guardian: What do you think of the current political and military developments in Sri Lanka as a senior journalist who is dealing with the international media?

Andy Worthington: I’m not qualified to report on the current situation in Sri Lanka, although I sincerely hope that peace will prevail for all the Sri Lankan people.

Sri Lanka Guardian: You have visited Sri Lanka a few years ago as a tourist. What do you think of the people in Sri Lanka and our customs, problems and the solutions we are pursuing?

Andy Worthington: Yes, I visited Sri Lanka about ten years ago. The island is beautiful, and the people charming and welcoming, although I was, of course, saddened by the violence that has torn a hole in the country’s heart.

Sri Lanka Guardian: Well, I would like to change our topic to discuss your current position. We know you are the best writer on some intelligence agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and their dirty tricks. How do you identify terrorism as a concept and the CIA’s perceptions of terrorism and effectiveness in countering it?

Andy Worthington: I’m sure I don’t deserve that first accolade, although I have certainly undertaken research into the workings of the US intelligence agencies. To keep my response succinct, I would say that terrorism — as it relates to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks — is the work of criminals, that it should not be confused with the precepts of Islam and the beliefs and actions of the overwhelming majority of Muslims worldwide, and that combating al-Qaeda by declaring a “war” on terrorism has been profoundly misguided.

Sri Lanka Guardian: How do you as a historian exhaustively trace terrorism and its historical development?

Andy Worthington: Essentially, with the help of some extraordinary researchers who have come before me. If we’re talking about Islamist terrorism, it’s important to understand its roots in terms of the radical ideologues who first promoted the idea of violent jihad — and in the modern era that includes pivotal figures like the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb. Also of crucial importance is the trajectory from colonization to independence in the Muslim world, the struggle of political Islamists and the manner in which that struggle has largely been superseded by notions of violent jihad, and the role in this development of Egyptian militants and, in some cases, their bloodthirsty radicalization by the Egyptian state (as in the case of Ayman al-Zawahiri, usually described as “number two in al-Qaeda”, but clearly an enormous influence on the radicalization of Osama bin Laden).

Another crucial trajectory concerns Afghanistan, from the Soviet invasion in 1979, through the funding of the mujahideen resistance by the United States (via Pakistan, an untrustworthy intermediary, to put it mildly) and Saudi Arabia, the ruinous civil war of the early 1990s and the rise of the Taliban. Two of many books that I would recommend, which have helped me along the way, are Ghost Wars by Steve Coll and Al-Qaeda by Jason Burke.

Sri Lanka Guardian: Could you tell us about current developments in global terrorism since 9/11 in the US and 7/7 in the UK?

Andy Worthington: Again, to keep my response manageable, I’d say that the US response to 9/11 has been misguided and counter-productive in three particular ways: the invasion of Afghanistan seems to have served primarily to push al-Qaeda into the border areas of Pakistan, where they remain; the invasion of Iraq created a whole new country-wide battlefield for al-Qaeda, and could have been dictated from a script prepared by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the processes — at Guantánamo and beyond — of imprisonment without charge or trial, “extraordinary rendition”, torture and secret prisons have been corrosively damaging for the moral standing of the United States.

In the UK, the government paranoia and tough posturing on terrorism has been equally misguided, in particular through the politicians’ unwillingness to equate their involvement in the carnage of Iraq with discontent amongst parts of the Muslim community, and their insistence that they have the right to hold terror suspects either without charge or trial or — when rebuffed by the courts — under control orders that amount to virtual house arrest. Speaking as a British citizen, it’s an absolute disgrace that these kinds of developments are taking place in the UK, and that they’re allowed to proceed virtually unchallenged. Where is the public’s outrage, and why are we almost solely dependant upon judges to combat an increasingly paranoid and authoritarian government?

Sri Lanka Guardian: Please comment on counter terrorism activities by the United States and the United Kingdom and their effectiveness. Would you do things differently?

Andy Worthington: I think I’ve largely answered this question above. The huge issues that are being ducked by both the US and the UK are that we should be seeking to decrease, rather then increase our violent involvement in the affairs of the Middle East, and that we should not confuse the actions of a small number of criminals with a supposed “Clash of Civilizations.”

Sri Lanka Guardian: Osama bin Laden and his terror movement are said to have been created by the USA in the early 1980s. But now they are the enemies of the USA. First, is it true that the US created al-Qaeda? And can leaders in the United States and United Kingdom ever eliminate al-Qaeda?

Andy Worthington: It’s not strictly true to say that the US created al-Qaeda, although they did pour billions of dollars into Afghanistan in the 1980s to fund the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet Union. As a member of the Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan at this time, Osama bin Laden, and others who went on to form al-Qaeda, were therefore at least indirectly funded by the US, but the most significant side-effect of the US funding for the anti-Soviet fighters was that they — along with the Saudis, who matched US funding, or provided even more — literally swamped this poor country with weapons, to lingering and brutal effect.

The US also stepped back from Afghanistan when the Soviet regime fell and the mujahideen embarked on a brutal civil war, and were also sidelined — in particular by the Pakistanis — when the Taliban, supported by Pakistan, either directly or covertly, rose up to restore order in the mid-1990s. This combination of neglect and of manipulation by Pakistan meant that the military training camp system in Afghanistan, which had initially arisen during the US-funded resistance to the Soviet Union, and of which al-Qaeda was but a small part (from 1996 onwards, after Osama bin Laden returned from a four-year hiatus in the Sudan), was allowed to expand in a largely unchecked manner.

As for whether al-Qaeda can ever be eliminated, I have to return to my observations above about Western foreign policy and the need to regain the moral high ground.

Sri Lanka Guardian: What is the hidden agenda, if any, behind the US War on Terror?

Andy Worthington: Clearly, as Iraq demonstrates, the hidden agenda of the United States is geopolitical influence and the control of oil. Both factors also apply to Afghanistan, of course, but are somewhat muddied by the fact that the US was also involved in the pursuit of al-Qaeda. With Afghanistan in particular, it’s not enough to say simply that the “War on Terror” is a smokescreen for installing a pro-American regime that will cooperate with the construction of a pipeline from the Caucasus to Pakistan. Guantánamo, Bagram and the secret prisons are not just a front; they are, sadly, the fruits of an administration mired in a mix of vengeance, blinkered self-righteousness and the misguided pursuit of “actionable intelligence” through the use of torture.

Sri Lanka Guardian: You have launched an important book on Guantánamo Bay, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. The book reveals how American soldiers have held innocent people like slaves and how they are finishing them off. Please tell us why Americans are playing with human life like this.

Andy Worthington: Bluntly, because they believed their own hype that they were picking up “the worst of the worst” from the battlefield, even though at least 85% of those who ended up in US custody were handed over to US forces by their Afghan or Pakistani allies, at a time when substantial bounty payments for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects were widespread.

Specifically, as well, the administration, at the highest levels (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld), authorized the use of torture on these poor men, when they failed to produce “actionable intelligence” (for the most part, because they were either innocent men or simple foot soldiers, and had no knowledge to impart), and were also directly responsible for all the other lawless innovations of the last six years: holding prisoners without charge or trial, authorizing the kidnap and “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects anywhere in the world, and empowering the CIA to run secret prisons or to “render” those kidnapped to third countries, particularly in North Africa, where they could be interrogated by proxy torturers.

Sri Lanka Guardian: Have you visited Guantánamo Bay camp or Abu Ghraib in Iraq? What are the conditions prevailing there?

Andy Worthington: I haven’t. Abu Ghraib, like all the Iraqi prisons, is totally off-limits to all outsiders (except the Red Cross) and visitors to Guantánamo are only allowed to meet the prisoners if they are their legal representatives. For this, you need to be both a lawyer and an American, and I’m neither. As a journalist, I wouldn’t want to be given the military’s PR tour of the prison, although I admire journalists like Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, who has been a persistent and critical visitor to the prison since it opened, and I also appreciate that, as a journalist, the trials at Guantánamo — the Military Commissions, dreamt up in November 2001, and still struggling to establish their legitimacy — are important events to cover.

Sri Lanka Guardian: Pakistan, Afghanistan and some pro-USA countries have been giving their support to capturing al-Qaeda suspects. In Pakistan hundreds of youths have been disappeared. Some have been arrested and handed over to the CIA/FBI without proper investigations, according to some independent analysts. Could you let us know the contributory countries to the catastrophe in Guantánamo Bay? Asian countries?

Andy Worthington: As you correctly point out, both Pakistan and Afghanistan have been involved in these processes, although it should be noted that in Afghanistan this was down to the actions of individual warlords, whereas in Pakistan, as President Musharraf admitted in his autobiography in 2006, the government received millions of dollars for handing over hundreds of terror suspects.

What we also need to remember is that, after 9/11, the US administration put pressure on almost every country on earth to provide assistance in the pursuit of terrorists. European countries complied, if not by assisting in the direct apprehension of suspects (as was sometimes the case), then in facilitating — or turning a blind eye — to the passage of “extraordinary rendition” planes through their airspace. Other countries were leaned on — or volunteered — for deeper involvement. Thailand and Indonesia were involved in kidnapping and rendition, for example, and for a while the Thais also allowed — or tolerated — the existence of a secret CIA prison in their country, as the Poles and Romanians apparently did later.

This is too big a topic to cover here in any depth, but your readers will probably be interested to know that the prisoners in Guantánamo were captured in 17 different countries, and that some, like those captured in the Gambia and Zambia, were some considerable distance from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Sri Lanka Guardian: It seems to us that Americans truly believe that they are fighting for freedom and democracy and cannot see what they end up doing. What is the mechanism behind this? Surely they are not brainwashed with books like yours freely available to them?

Andy Worthington: Well, that’s very kind of you to say so, but the simple truth is that millions of Americans believe what the President tells them, and that many of those involved in prosecuting the “War on Terror” — in the government, and in the military — also believe the hype that the illegal prisons are full of “the worst of the worst.” It’s still the after-effect of 9/11. The truth, which can only be perceived when you step back from these assertions, is that you can’t legitimately describe people as dangerous terrorists when they haven’t actually been through any valid screening process, and have been denied any legitimate manner in which they can question the basis of their detention. It’s as simple as that. You have to follow internationally acceptable methods of establishing guilt; you can’t just trust the President to say so, without having to provide any evidence, which is essentially the deplorable situation that still prevails.

Sri Lanka Guardian: How is flawed American public opinion on matters like this different from public opinion in closed countries like, say, China or North Korea?

Andy Worthington: Oh, I’d have to say that it’s very different. People complain that the right-wing controls too much of the media in the United States, and it’s certainly true that some media proprietors have a shockingly wide and baleful influence. People also complain that there are few good newspapers in the US either, but the truth is that some extraordinarily important stories about the conduct of the “War on Terror” have been broken by journalists at newspapers including the Washington Post and the New York Times, and it’s also apparent, of course, that there is a thriving alternative world of news that exists on the internet in the US, unlike, to use your example, China and North Korea.

Sri Lanka Guardian: Regarding Iran, it is now conceded that the US deposed the elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1952 and imposed the Shah. Many believe that it is this natural anger within Iran that led to the growth of extremism in Iran. It is also said that, however flawed, it is the most democratic of Islamic countries. And yet the US is allied with nearly all oppressive Islamic countries while always berating Iran. How does this happen with the American polity being democratic and the public having access to a wide variety of opinions?

Andy Worthington: Just because people have access, or potential access to information doesn’t mean that they exercise that choice. You’re right to point out the history of US-Iranian relations, but the default position, since 1979, has been that Iran and the United States are enemies. Similarly, citizens of all Western countries, not just the US, have to delve beyond the received positions on, for example, Israel and Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to begin to make sense of how the world really is.

Sri Lanka Guardian: According to your article Horror at Guantánamo, one of the terror suspects at Guantánamo is infected with the AIDS virus. Unfortunately, it is now evident that he was never involved with terrorism. That is, he is innocent. Why is America capturing innocent people outside America without proper investigations?

Andy Worthington: This is Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan who is married to an Afghan woman and ran a shop in Jalalabad at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001. The US administration denies that he has been infected with AIDS, and it may be that he was told this as an act of cruelty by one of the staff at Guantánamo, but what’s beyond doubt is that he has hepatitis B and tuberculosis, and that neither illness has been treated adequately, presumably because he has refused to cooperate with the interrogators by admitting that he was a terrorist.

His story is actually typical of many of the prisoners at Guantánamo, in that he was captured by bounty hunters and sold to the United States at the time when the system of bounty payments was prevalent, and that therefore it was presumed, from the moment that he was transferred to US custody, that he was a terrorist. Again, the problem is that there has been no adequate screening process to determine whether or not this is actually the case. All Arabs in US custody in Afghanistan were automatically sent to Guantánamo, and the screening in Guantánamo — involving military tribunals — was also inadequate, because the tribunals either relied on generic evidence that would not stand up in a court of law, or on secret evidence, which was often based on confessions made by the prisoners themselves, or by other prisoners, often under duress (or worse).

The difference between the point of view you express — that the US is “capturing innocent people outside America without proper investigations” — and the point of view of the US administration is that, as far as the administration is concerned, every confession, however it is derived, is valid, whereas you — and myself, for that matter — are appalled that the entire process stems from the presumption of guilt, rather than the presumption of innocence. Again, if people like Mr. al-Ghizzawi had been captured on a battlefield, we might be having a different conversation, but the fact is that the majority of these men — including Mr. al-Ghizzawi — were not, and it is therefore imperative, as it has been for over six years now, that they be allowed to challenge the basis of their detention in a meaningful manner.

Sri Lanka Guardian: If that incident had happened in a poor country we would see lots of human rights organizations and the international media blaming the country. But now these same organizations are indefinitely silent. How do you explain their contradictory thinking and activism?

Andy Worthington: Basically, I don’t agree that human rights organizations or the media have been silent. My organization, Reprieve, is just one of many Western organizations involved in human rights and the law — including the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Human Rights First, The American Civil Liberties Union and scores of legal firms in the US — who have been challenging Guantánamo and the conduct of the “War on Terror” since the outset, and although some parts of the media — in the States, especially — were rather slow to pick up on the injustices that have been perpetrated over the last six years, they too — with the exceptions of the administration’s right-wing cheerleaders, of course — have been deeply committed to discovering the truth about what has been done in their name for many years now.

Sri Lanka Guardian: What are your future hopes as an author and journalist?

Andy Worthington: Basically to keep on exposing the truth about this most shameful of US administrations, and to stick with the story until the whole disgraceful edifice — from Guantánamo to the secret prisons — has been dismantled, and the United States returns to the rule of law. I hope that my book, my work as a journalist, and my work at Reprieve all contribute to the process.

This interview was originally published in the Sri Lanka Guardian.

Sami al-Haj is a journalist, but one unlike any other. For over six years, since December 15, 2001, when he was seized by Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border, while on assignment as a cameraman for the Qatar-based broadcaster al-Jazeera, he has been in a disturbing but unique position: a trained journalist held as an “enemy combatant” on the frontline of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” first in Afghanistan, and then in Guantánamo.

For the first four years of his imprisonment, Sami, like all the prisoners processed through the US-run prisons in Kandahar and Bagram and then transferred to Guantánamo, had no voice. Until October 2004, when the first lawyers arrived at the prison following a momentous Supreme Court decision, three months earlier, that the prisoners had the right to challenge the basis of their detention, the only voices that emerged from Guantánamo were those of the few released prisoners — of the 200 released between 2002 and 2004 — who dared to speak out about their treatment.

Mostly these were the Europeans: the British, French, Danish, Swedish and Spanish prisoners released in 2004. Others — like the handful of Saudis released during this period — were explicitly prevented from speaking out, and others were advised not to do so. When 17 Afghans were released in April 2005, Chief Justice Fazel Shinwari told them at a press conference, “Don’t tell these people the stories of your time in prison because the government is trying to secure the release of others, and it may harm the chances of winning the release of your friends.” Others had been terrified into acquiescence. Yuksel Celik Gogus, a Turk released in November 2003, said after being freed, “They will come and take me away if I say what happened in Guantánamo.”

Sami’s opportunity to speak out came in early 2005, when he met his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, the legal action charity that currently represents 31 Guantánamo prisoners. The stories that Sami told him were shocking, as were those of many other prisoners. Echoing each other, despite cultural and linguistic differences, the prisoners reported extraordinary violence in the US-run prisons in Afghanistan. In describing their experiences at Guantánamo, they complained about the psychological torment of indefinite detention without charge or trial, the indiscriminate brutality of the teams of guards unleashed on prisoners for the most minor infringement of the rules, and the regime of torture — influenced by CIA counter interrogation techniques, and including prolonged isolation, the use of extreme heat and cold, the prolonged use of agonizingly painful stress positions, and the exploitation of phobias — that was prevalent in Guantánamo in 2003 and 2004.

As Stafford Smith listened to Sami’s story, he was appalled to discover — beyond the tales of torture in Kandahar, Bagram and Guantánamo, and disturbingly unsubstantiated claims that he had “arranged for the transport of a Stinger anti-aircraft system from Afghanistan to Chechnya” — that every one of the hundred-plus interrogations to which he had been subjected in Guantánamo had focused solely on the administration’s attempts to turn him into an informant against al-Jazeera, to “prove” a connection between the broadcaster and Osama bin Laden that did not exist. As Stafford Smith noted bluntly and accurately in his book, The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay, “Sami was a prisoner in the Bush Administration’s assault on al-Jazeera.”

Later events and disclosures only served to reveal more of the administration’s dark machinations. A reporter was killed in a US bomb attack on al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Baghdad in April 2003, and in 2006 it was reported that President Bush had, as Stafford Smith again described it in his book, “mooted the idea of bombing the al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar.” As for Sami, it transpired that the US authorities had probably seized him because they had confused him with another man who had interviewed Osama bin Laden (although as Stafford Smith also noted, “name me a journalist who would turn down a bin Laden scoop”), and that, while Sami was on assignment in Afghanistan, his calls to his wife had been monitored by the CIA. “Extrapolating from the experience of a lowly cameraman like Sami,” Stafford Smith added, “it did not seem implausible that the phone of every al-Jazeera journalist was being tapped.”

The prisoners’ testimony was an enormous step forward in the wider understanding of the torture and abuse that was endemic in the administration’s “War on Terror” prisons, when their accounts, which were all subjected to a censorship process instigated by the Pentagon, often, and bewilderingly, emerged at the other end more or less intact.

In Sami’s case, his background in journalism added another dimension to these reports. In his book, Clive Stafford Smith recalled that when he asked Sami for information, he “would assemble important facts on almost any topic in the prison relying on the incredible prisoner bush telegraph.” He added, “Sami wrote reports about his treatment, the conditions at the prison and the pattern of his interminable interrogations. Perhaps two-thirds of these eventually made it through the censors, the others being held up for reasons that seemed little related to US security.”

These first-hand reports from behind the wire included reports on the religious abuse — primarily of the Qu’ran — that led to a series of hunger strikes and suicide attempts, and an assessment of the number of prisoners who were under 18 at the time of their capture (forty-five in total) which, as Stafford Smith wrote, sounded doubtful but was, in the end, probably something of an understatement. When the Pentagon finally released a prisoner list in 2006 — following a successful lawsuit pursued by the Associated Press — an analysis by Reprieve concluded that as many as sixty-four prisoners had been under 18 at the time of their capture (although it was difficult to state this with certainty, as many knew only the year of their birth, and not the day or the month).

As the years wore on, however, the irrepressible spirit recalled by all those who had met Sami before his imprisonment, and which also impressed Stafford Smith, was ground down by a particular despair that is perhaps unknowable to those who are not imprisoned without charge, without trial, with no contact with family or friends, and with no way of knowing when, if ever, this regime of almost total isolation will come to an end.

On January 7, 2007, the fifth anniversary of his detention without trial by the US, Sami embarked on a hunger strike, which continues to this day. In common with the small number of other persistent hunger strikers, he is strapped into a restraint chair twice a day and force-fed against his will. Clive Stafford Smith explained the brutality of the procedure, the reason the authorities are doing it, and also why it is illegal to do so, in an article last October.

“Medical ethics tell us that you cannot force-feed a mentally competent hunger striker, as he has the right to complain about his mistreatment, even unto death,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “But the Pentagon knows that a prisoner starving himself to death would be abysmal PR, so they force-feed Sami. As if that were not enough, when Gen. Bantz J. Craddock headed up the US Southern Command, he announced that soldiers had started making hunger strikes less ‘convenient.’ Rather than leave a feeding tube in place, they insert and remove it twice a day. Have you ever pushed a 43-inch tube up your nostril and down into your throat? Tonight, Sami will suffer that for the 479th time.”

Even as he endured this twice-daily ordeal, Sami found the strength to put together a report on all the other hunger strikers in the prison — another extraordinary piece of frontline reporting that was published last March by the human rights group Cageprisoners. As the months passed, however, Stafford Smith noted a decline in his physical and mental health. Although he made an appeal for the BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped and imprisoned in Gaza for four months, and noted, “While the United States has kidnapped me and held me for years on end, this is not a lesson that Muslims should copy,” Clive Stafford Smith also noted in October, “Sami looked very thin. His memory is disintegrating, and I worry that he won’t survive if he keeps this up. He already wrote a message for his seven-year-old son, Mohammed, in case he dies here.”

Although Alan Johnston wrote a public letter to Sami after his own ordeal came to an end, Sami’s story has failed to permeate the Western media the way that it has in the Muslim world where, with the help of al-Jazeera, he has become Guantánamo’s most celebrated prisoner. Unfortunately, in the world of 24-hour rolling news, Johnston’s appeal on behalf of his fellow journalist was soon forgotten in the West, even though his words were both apt and heartfelt.

“While I was kidnapped recently in the Gaza Strip,” Johnston wrote, “fellow journalists from around the world joined the campaign mounted to try to secure my release, and of course you were among them. I was particularly grateful for your contribution given your own very difficult circumstances. In the light of my own experience of incarceration I am aware of how hard it must be for you and your family to endure your detention, and I very much hope that your case might be resolved soon. I understand that after some five years in Guantánamo you are calling to be allowed to answer any allegations that are being made against you. And of course I would always support any prisoner’s right to a fair trial.”

Despite Sami’s suffering, he continues to seek ways to publicize the plight of his fellow prisoners. During the most recent visit from his lawyers in February — with Cori Crider of Reprieve — he produced a number of morbid, and almost hallucinatory sketches illustrating his take on conditions in Guantánamo, which he described as “Sketches of My Nightmare.”

Fearing that they would be banned by the military censors, Crider asked him to describe each sketch in detail and when, as anticipated, the pictures were duly banned but the notes cleared, Reprieve asked political cartoonist Lewis Peake to create original works based on Sami’s descriptions.

“The first sketch is just a skeleton in the torture chair,” Sami explained. “My picture reflects my nightmares of what I must look like, with my head double-strapped down, a tube in my nose, a black mask over my mouth, strapped into the torture chair with no eyes and only giant cheekbones, my teeth jutting out — my ribs showing in every detail, every rib, every joint. The tube goes up to a bag at the top of the drawing. On the right there is another skeleton sitting shackled to another chair. They are sitting like we do in interrogations, with hands shackled, feet shackled to the floor, just waiting. In between I draw the flag of Guantánamo — JTF-GTMO — but instead of the normal insignia, there is a skull and crossbones, the real symbol of what is happening here.”

In recently declassified testimony, Sami described more of his recent experiences of the force-feeding process:

On the Monday before last [February 11] a white male came to do the force-feeding. They gave him only ten minutes training, then he did three of the eight men being fed that day, including me. He screwed the tube into my nose, not slowly, and not using lotion. I had flu at the time and my nostril was closed. It made it much harder. I was in the chair. I could barely talk, and my mouth was covered with the mask they put on. I was waving my hands.

“That’s very painful!” I eventually said. There were tears streaming down my face. “I am meant to do this to you,” the man said, harshly. “If you don’t like it, don’t go on strike.” He would not look me in the eye. He did not look in the least bit ashamed. He never said sorry, or paused when I was in pain. I almost thought he seemed happy that he was doing it.

They used my feeding tube for another man last Monday [February 18]. This, even though they have marked the boxes for each tube. I have been getting a sore larynx, maybe from the infection of another person using my tube. I requested a spray but it was denied.

Sami’s second sketch is his take on the familiar JTF-GTMO sign outside the prison. “This time,” he explained, “the hooded skeleton is in a three-piece suit [the prisoners’ term for being shackled at the wrists, ankles and waist]. The head is totally blacked out. The wrists are shackled at the back, with chains running down the legs. There are very elaborate arm bones, leg bones and the spine. And again the flag, the Jolly Roger of JTF-GTMO with a diabolical smile on the skull.”

For his next sketch, Sami shifted his attention to the prison hospital. “There is a third sketch, which is about the Hospital,” he said. “Again it is a skeleton, but with a face this time. The top of the skull is dotted with tracks, tracks of pain. This is the hospital gurney prisoner. He sits completely still, his hands and feet shackled to the side of the bed.”

In his testimony, recently released, Sami has elaborated on his experiences of the hospital:

I am very concerned about having cancer. I have had blood in my urine for a long time. They refused to believe me until I showed them urine in a container that had red in it. Since then they have had seven positive tests for blood in my urine.

I have a pain all across my chest and stomach, and in both kidneys. To begin with they thought it might be a kidney stone, but I had a scan for that. They did not give me the results for two weeks, and I worried all that time. It was negative.

So then they did a second scan with a tracer in the blood. This time, they did not tell me the results for two months. Again, I was left to worry about what might be wrong with me. Again, eventually a doctor came to see me, a black male, about 40 years old, clean shaven, in a uniform without rank on it. He saw me for only give minutes. He began decently, but then got rather hostile. He told me the test was negative, meaning that there was no kidney stone. “From my experience,” the doctor said to me, “I think it’s cancer.”

They then said that the next time a doctor would be coming with the appropriate expertise would be in May. Nobody would be coming before that, and he might not come even then. “You will leave me worrying about this for months?” I asked. “I don’t have the necessary equipment,” said the doctor. He apparently thought the prisoners were not as important as the soldiers in his care. “I don’t mind if you suffer or not,” he said. “It’s not my problem. I’m not here for you.” He left.

I worried too much after this. For three days I got barely any sleep. I was worrying that maybe I was dying. Then the brothers around me said, perhaps they are just telling you this, just trying to break your strike. I took some heart from this. But I still worry, as Abdul Razzaq died of cancer here, and it was a very painful death [Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, an Afghan who died on Dec.30].

I have all the other medical problems too. Really, I have pain almost everywhere –- all over. I have pain everywhere. It’s hard to identify one thing as it’s all over. My back, kidneys, chest, stomach, knee, I even have hemorrhoids. When I do get released, I am going to need to be taken to hospital right away.

For his final sketches, Sami focused on the doctors’ role in the force-feeding process. “All they care about is the prisoner’s weight,” he explained. “’Are you sick? Are you in pain?’ Who cares? It is all about the number on the scale. At the top of the drawing there is a skeleton again, but this time without hands or feet. The top of the head, the cranium, even the eyes are gone. Our lives depend on the doctors, but we get nothing from them. So we’re going mad. A man who is mad has no mind, but he still has a heart. We’re all going mad here. The skeleton is strapped to a gurney, there’s a tube and a pump, and the gurney is on a scale. It reads 98 lbs. But that’s with the weight of the gurney, and maybe the soldier’s pushing down on the skeleton a bit also.”

He added, “As they prepare the feeding they don’t use gloves. When they take the tube out, things come out of the nose, but the people are strapped to the chair, and cannot do anything to clean the revolting tube. There are psychological teams all around, all keen to work out what the impact of this is on the prisoner.”

In the fifth sketch, Sami explained the meaning of the bloated body, noting that, even if the prisoner’s weight were to rise due to force-feeding, he would still be losing his mind. “In the second half of this drawing the prisoner is inflated,” he said. “The man is strapped to the gurney, and the weight on the scale reads 250 lbs. He has filled out, there are rolls of fat on his belly, but he is still mad. The pumps are all hooked up, forcing food into him. But the top half of his head is still vacant.”

The last of his declassified notes add a disturbing conclusion to the story of the doctors’ involvement in the force-feeding process, and the horrendous isolation and deprivation that still prevail in Guantánamo:

We met recently with a senior female doctor from the hospital. “Only if you break your strike can we give you medical care,” she told those of us on hunger strike. “Otherwise we cannot help you.” Some have now broken their strike. Four men are very sick, and were suffering too badly. But the truth is that they have given no help even to those who stop.

I am having bone problems. The cold is bad. I am on disciplinary for being on strike, so I get a plastic blanket at 10 pm, at least three hours after our last prayer time. Every other day I hardly get to sleep anyway, as rec [recreation time] is in the middle of the night.

For eight days I had the same clothes. I have not been given proper toothpaste for two years and seven months now. I am allowed a fingerbrush for just five minutes each day, and it doesn’t reach the back of my mouth. I am not allowed a prayer rug. I am not allowed a prayer cap. I am not allowed my prayer beads. I am not allowed any holy book except for the Qur’an. I have no books to read. The last book I was allowed was in December 2006, before I began my strike.

All I have are orange clothes, flip flops, an isomat, a Qur’an, and a bottle of water. I suppose I should think myself lucky. Another of the men here has been disciplined by having even his isomat take away –- for a whole year. Another man has lost his right to a water bottle for a whole year. All this made another man so upset that he tried to hang himself.

Andy is the Communications Officer for Reprieve, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

A version of this article was published on AlterNet, as The Torture Drawings the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to See.

See here for further articles about Sami, dealing with his release in May 2008 and his subsequent activities.

In the first of an occasional series looking at prisoners in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release after multiple military reviews, but are still held in the notorious offshore prison, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, and Communications Officer for Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity that represents prisoners in Guantánamo, looks at the case of Said al-Boujaadia, a Moroccan prisoner who was cleared for release in 2006.

There are, at conservative estimates, at least 50 prisoners in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release by military review boards from 2005 to the present day, but who are still held in appalling isolation. The majority are held in Camp VI, a maximum-security cell block, completed in December 2006, where they remain for 22 to 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, in metal cells without windows. They have no opportunity to socialize with other cleared prisoners, have extremely limited opportunities for education or entertainment (no TV, no radio, and limited access to books), and their ability to communicate with their families by letter is subject to the whims of the authorities, who frequently delay the delivery of letters or misplace them altogether.

In the cases of dozens of these prisoners — from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan — they continue to be held because the Bush administration (which is usually more than willing to shred its international obligations) has, for the most part, agreed to be bound by international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture, although there are notable exceptions.

Last year, in an attempt to bypass its obligations, the US administration signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the government of Tunisia, which purported to guarantee the humane treatment of cleared prisoners released from Guantánamo, even though Tunisia is regularly condemned for endemic human rights abuses by the US State Department. When two men — Lotfi Lagha and Abdullah bin Omar (aka Abdullah al-Hajji) — were returned to Tunisia from Guantánamo, they were reportedly subjected to ill-treatment in Tunisian custody, and were then convicted and imprisoned in trials that were regarded by observers as woefully inadequate. A US District judge then intervened to prevent the return of a third cleared Tunisian, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, and another court recently intervened to prevent the return of another cleared prisoner, Ahmed Belbacha, to Algeria, another country with which the administration has been pursuing dubious “diplomatic assurances” of humane treatment.

While these cases account for the majority of the cleared prisoners who are still held in Guantánamo, others have been overlooked for other reasons, and one of these men is Moroccan national Said al-Boujaadia.

A father of three, al-Boujaadia, who is 39 years old, is from Casablanca. In 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan with his Afghan wife, whom he had met and married on a previous visit, and their three children. In the chaos that followed the US-led invasion in October 2001, he managed to secure the safe escape of his family, but was himself captured, as he attempted to help another family cross the Pakistani border to safety.

Hundreds of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay were seized at this time in a similar manner, and it has since become apparent that many were then sold by their Afghan captors to US forces, who were offering bounty rewards, averaging $5,000 a head, for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects. When offered these rewards, many of the Americans’ allies seized stray foreigners, in the knowledge that they could be packaged as “terror suspects” and sold.

Al-Boujaadia was cleared for release from Guantánamo in late 2006, when a military review board decided that he did not pose a threat to the United States or its allies — including Morocco. He was reportedly scheduled to leave Guantánamo in April 2007, with another cleared prisoner, Ahmed Errachidi. At the last minute, however, while Errachidi was flown to Morocco to be reunited with his family, the US military decided to keep al-Boujaadia at the prison, not because of anything he had done, but because he had been requested as a witness at the trial by military commission of another prisoner, Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had been a driver for Osama bin Laden.

Hamdan’s defense counsel offered alternatives that would have allowed al-Boujaadia to be released. These included videotaping a statement from him, or allowing him to testify from Morocco, but these options were all refused. The authorities continued to hold al-Boujaadia and failed even to explain to his lawyers, or to al-Boujaadia himself, that he was being held because he was required as a witness.

On December 6, 2007, al-Boujaadia finally testified on Hamdan’s behalf. Despite an eight-month wait, it was clear that he had little to offer, and that Hamdan’s defense counsel had acted correctly in trying to find ways to allow him to make a statement without having to remain in Guantánamo. Although he was seized on the same day as Hamdan, al-Boujaadia recalled only that the first time he saw Hamdan was when he was taken to a makeshift Afghan prison and found Hamdan lying face down on the floor. In response to further questioning, he explained that he had no idea whether Hamdan was an al-Qaeda member, and that he had not seen his car, which allegedly contained a number of rockets.

Since he has already given his testimony, there has been no reason for the US authorities to continue holding Said al-Boujaadia, but four months later he remains in Guantánamo, still separated from his family, and with no indication of when, if ever, he will finally be released.

In an attempt to address this oversight, lawyers from Reprieve (including the charity’s director, Clive Stafford Smith) recently traveled to Morocco to raise his plight with the Moroccan government. In meetings with government representatives, and at a well-attended press conference in Rabat, Stafford Smith urged the government and the media to take action on Said al-Boujaadia’s behalf. He noted that ten Moroccan prisoners had already returned home from Guantánamo Bay, and that each had been dealt with in a just and appropriate manner.

The lawyers also asked the government to assist the US authorities in their stated aim of closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay by making representations on behalf of two other Moroccan prisoners, Younis Chekkouri and Abdullatif Nasser, who have not yet been cleared for release.

Younis Chekkouri, who is 39 years old, traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, with his Algerian wife, after many years in Pakistan, where he had first traveled in search of work and education. The couple lived on the outskirts of Kabul, working for a charity that ran a guest house and helped young Moroccan immigrants, and had no involvement whatsoever in the country’s conflicts. Chekkouri has repeatedly explained that he was profoundly disillusioned by the fighting amongst Muslims that has plagued Afghanistan’s recent history, and has also expressed his implacable opposition to the havoc wreaked on the country by Osama bin Laden. In his military tribunal in Guantánamo, he described bin Laden as “a crazy person,” adding that “what he does is bad for Islam.”

Abdullatif Nasser, who is 43 years old, had worked as a small-scale businessman in Libya and Sudan, and had also spent time in Yemen and Pakistan. He was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, and has explained that he was attracted to the country because of its Islamic scholars and its piety. In Guantánamo, he has experienced particularly harsh treatment, because he stands up for the rights of his fellow prisoners, and refuses to keep silent in the face of injustice.

All three men are represented by Reprieve, and Clive Stafford Smith made it clear, both in public, and in representations to the King and the government, that they are all happy to submit to any investigations that the Moroccan government thinks appropriate. “The men are perfectly willing to stand trial to face any charges your government feels are warranted,” he explained to Moroccan officials. “They have been asking for a trial, after all, for six years. These men merely seek justice — justice denied them for far too long by the American government.”

As published on the Huffington Post and CounterPunch.

Note: Said al-Boujaadia was released from Guantánamo and transferred to Moroccan custody in May 2007.