Thank you for the supportive comments — which are always gratefully received, but no, they’re not why I’m pursuing this mission. Somewhere along the line, while researching these men’s stories, I became determined to do all I could to expose Dick Cheney, David Addington and their close associates for their brutal, stupid, and counter-productive dictatorial tendencies, and to insist that, in future, prisoners must be either PoWs, protected by the Geneva Conventions, or criminal suspects who will face a trial in a federal court.

Thanks also for the many insights in your message — about racism, imperialism, and the US prison system. I wish I had time to tackle that one! Maybe next!

Andy
Greetings,

I want to thank you for remembering Muhammad Salih and for keeping that portion of the world’s people who want to know what is happening at Gitmo up to date. Your dedication to this project is both profound and outstanding — and I know you can not be doing this based on praise like what you have just read.

Last month marked the 21st year that I left Afghanistan for the first time. I had been in-country for 18 months, was in Herat province and affiliated to the men supporting Ismail Khan, went on my own dime and regretted that I had not gone sooner because somehow I knew the Afghanistan situation would continue to ripple and by the time of my departure, it was already understood that the Soviet military adventure was already over.

While there, I was already the subject of an Interpol warrant and wanted in the US for what they call an act of terror and had made up my mind that if the remote possibility arose, and I came across anybody who knew me from home (the US) and he looked official or military then there would be an immediate shooting match and may the best man win. That never happened. What did happen was that I was hunted unsuccessfully by KHAD.

The reason I tell you this is that while in the states I had spent two years as a so-called Muslim ‘chaplain’ in the D.C. and federal prison system. I had a card that could get me into any facility in the US and though I only went to five, that was enough. In the prison system too, I was a volunteer — no pay involved and when I visited places I paid.

Of course, you can not grow up black in America and not know something about prisons or not be acquainted with those who have done time. And I grew up in the 60s well before prison conditions became Hollywood fare. Actually going into those places in the late 70s and interacting with the inmates was a no-holds barred education. And later when things popped up like Abu Ghraib, what shocked me was that the world was so dumb as to what takes place in those hell holes right there in American communities.

What has always been particularly disturbing to me about Guantánamo is the notion that these men have no idea when they will ever see a trial much less release. I am no legal historian but I can not think of any thing that comes close to such an act of evil save the incarceration of the Japanese-Americans in WWII and they did less than half the time. For me American justice concerning poor and minorities was always a misnomer even in the US.

Perhaps the good Guantánamo will do for the world is to make it understand that the notion of a morally good and just America is simply bullshit. And I think the way things work out there and also in Afghanistan will bring about the realization that good looks, elocution and intelligence aside, Barack Obama is just another American imperialist.

I have not been to Gitmo but like I said earlier, I am not unfamiliar with how prisons work and what kinds of people work in them. What is happening down there in all its horror, represents for me one sign out of many of the diminishing of America in very significant ways and that ultimately can only be good for the rest of the world.

Again, thank you for keeping people up to date on what happens there and the fate of simple, ordinary men like Muhammad Salih. And I am sitting here thinking that if he has been force-fed for two years, perhaps it was not suicide at all.

Dawud Salahuddin

Jim McPherson
Roswell, Georgia

Thanks also for the update on Salih’s status as one of the few prisoners who didn’t even have legal representation. I read today that he was one of only eight prisoners who hadn’t had contact with lawyers. That was reassuring on one sense, as I thought the figure was much higher, but it remains a bitter indictment of the ad hoc nature of Guantanamo that, five years on from Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruling that first allowed lawyers to meet the prisoners to prepare habeas corpus cases, someone like Muhammad Salih died as the Bush administration initially planned for all the prisoners: outside the law, imprisoned without charge or trial, and deemed guilty by Presidential whim.