It is anticipated that those turning out to protest Bush’s visit will dwarf the hundreds of protestors who turned up to campaign against a visit by former US Vice President Dick Cheney in Vancouver last month, where the “Vice President for Torture” was addressing diners who had paid $500 a head for the privilege. As CTV News noted, however, “The numbers at the Bush rally could dwarf those at the Cheney event because many protesters from the Occupy Vancouver movement camped out at the Vancouver Art Gallery are planning to head to Surrey to take part.”

Amnesty International got the ball rolling last week, calling for Bush’s arrest for war crimes and torture. In a press release, Susan Lee, Americas Director at Amnesty International, explained, “Canada is required by its international obligations to arrest and prosecute former President Bush given his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture. As the US authorities have, so far, failed to bring former President Bush to justice, the international community must step in.  A failure by Canada to take action during his visit would violate the UN Convention against Torture and demonstrate contempt for fundamental human rights.”

Amnesty International “submitted a memorandum to the Canadian authorities on 21 September 2011 that makes a substantial case for the former president’s legal responsibility for a series of human rights violations,” and a further submission has been made by Lawyers Against War (see here for the letter by Gail Davidson to the Crimes against Humanity & War Crimes Section of the government’s Citizenship and Immigration department). Furthermore, on September 29, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) submitted a 69-page page draft indictment to Attorney General Robert Nicholson, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, setting forth the case against Bush for torture.

All of these entreaties were ignored, but today, as George W. Bush arrives in Canada, the four Guantánamo prisoners — Hassan bin Attash, Sami el-Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz (all released, with the exception of bin Attash) — will lodge a private prosecution in Provincial Court in Surrey, British Columbia against George W. Bush. Further details of this submission, by CCR and CCIJ, are below, and I congratulate them for their tenacity.

In February this year, George W. Bush cancelled a planned visit to Switzerland, after CCR and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights announced that they would be submitting a torture indictment and asking the Swiss government to arrest him when he landed on Swiss soil. I cross-posted that complaint here, and, as CCR’s Executive Director, Vince Warren, explained, although Bush cancelled that particular visit, the Preliminary Bush Torture Indictment, prepared by CCR and ECCHR, “provides a strong factual and legal basis to hold Bush accountable — in any of the 147 countries which have ratified the [UN] Convention Against Torture (CAT) — for having authorized torture.”

It seems that the former President accepts that he is not welcome in Europe. What a shame that the Canadian government has not made it clear that he is also unwelcome in Canada.

Torture Victims to Initiate Private Prosecution against George W. Bush on His Arrival in Canada

Canadian Government Has Legal Obligation under UN Convention Against Torture to Prosecute Alleged Perpetrators of Torture, Rights Groups Say; Prominent Individuals and Organizations Sign on in Support.

October 19, 2011, Surrey, BC — Tomorrow, four individuals who allege they were tortured during George W. Bush’s tenure as president of the United States will lodge a private prosecution in Provincial Court in Surrey, British Columbia against the former president, who is due to visit Canada for a paid speaking engagement at the Surrey Regional Economic Summit on October 20. The four men will take this step after repeated calls to the Canadian Attorney General to open a torture investigation of George Bush went unanswered. Human rights groups and prominent individuals will sign on in support of the effort.

The four men — Hassan bin Attash, Sami el-Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz — each endured years of inhumane treatment including beatings, chaining to cell walls, being hung from walls or ceilings while handcuffed, lack of access to toilets, sleep, food and water-deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, sensory overload and deprivation, and other horrific and illegal treatment while in U.S. custody at military bases in Afghanistan and/or at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. While three of the plaintiffs have since been released without ever facing charges, Hassan bin Attash still remains in detention at Guantánamo Bay, though he too has not been formally charged with any wrongdoing.

“I lost my family, my father, my health, my education because of George Bush. Although I was completely innocent, I lost nearly 10 years of my life,” said former Guantánamo detainee and torture survivor Muhammed Khan Tumani. “I suffered greatly while detained at Guantánamo, and continue to suffer. I have restrictions on my travel and cannot travel to see my father who is ill. George Bush must face justice and be held accountable for his actions, which continue to cause me and so many harm.”

On September 29, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) submitted a 69-page page draft indictment to Attorney General Robert Nicholson, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, setting forth the case against Bush for torture. The indictment, incorporated into the criminal information lodged today, contends that by Bush’s own admission he sanctioned and authorized acts that constitute torture under the Canadian criminal code and the Convention Against Torture (CAT).

Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) who is assisting the plaintiffs, said, “George Bush’s brazen admission to authorizing torture techniques and unlawful detentions, including enforced disappearances, must not be met with indifference. His years of impunity must come to an end. Even if the United States has failed to meet its obligations to hold torturers accountable, Canada has an opportunity and a legal obligation to position itself on the right side of history and the law.”

Matt Eisenbrandt, legal director of the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ), who will submit the filing on men’s behalf, added, “Canadian law could not be clearer. If an alleged torturer is present in Canada, the government has the power to prosecute. As a signatory of the Convention Against Torture, Canada has an obligation to initiate an investigation when Mr. Bush sets foot in this country.”

More than 50 human rights organizations from around the world and prominent individuals signed on to support the call for George W. Bush’s prosecution, including former UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture, Theo van Boven and Manfred Nowak, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the Canadian-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group. A number of the human rights organizations which signed on are facing the on-going harms of the “counterterrorism” policies advanced under the Bush administration and then adopted or employed in their own countries.

Former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said: “The main aim of the UN Convention Against Torture was to eradicate safe havens for persons who commit, order, or participate in acts of torture worldwide. States parties to the Convention, including Canada, have a legal obligation to arrest all persons suspected of torture with the aim of bringing them to justice. There is plenty of evidence that President Bush authorized enhanced interrogation methods against suspected terrorists, some of which clearly amount to torture, such as waterboarding.”

Last February, the Center for Constitutional Rights, along with other human rights organizations, attempted to initiate criminal proceedings against Bush during a private speaking engagement in Geneva, but he canceled after news of the planned prosecution came to light. Following the cancellation, CCR and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights released the “Bush Torture Indictment,” which can serve as the basis for country-specific indictments against Bush in any of the 147 countries that have ratified the UN Convention Against Torture or have universal jurisdiction laws for torture.

Prior to the filing of this case, CCR and the CCIJ twice (on Sept. 29, 2011 and Oct. 14, 2011) petitioned Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Robert Nicholson by letter to launch a criminal investigation against Bush during his October 20 visit to Canada, but received no response. George Bush and former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney both recently made trips to Canada, without any legal consequence.

A copy of the filing can be viewed in full here. The Letter of Support is available in English and French.

*****

The Canadian Centre for International Justice works with survivors of genocide, torture and other atrocities to seek redress and bring perpetrators to justice. The CCIJ seeks to ensure that individuals present in Canada who are accused of responsibility for serious human rights violations are held accountable and their victims recognized, supported and compensated. For more information visit the website.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, in addition to filing the first cases representing men detained at Guantánamo, has filed universal jurisdiction cases seeking accountability for torture by Bush administration officials in Germany, France and submitted expert opinions and other documentation to ongoing cases in Spain in collaboration with ECCHR. The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. Further details regarding the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Bush Torture Indictment can be viewed here, and also visit the website.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As a follow-up, Jeff recently wrote another article for Truthout, providing further examples of the use of water as a torture technique, not only in Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to mark my return to work after two weeks away in Greece, I’m cross-posting his latest article as my own follow-up, because I cross-posted his earlier article just before my departure for Athens and Agistri, and I hope that making both articles available here will ensure that they reach new readers who have not yet come across Jeff’s work.

More Evidence of Water Torture “Depravity” in Rumsfeld’s Military
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, August 18, 2011

There have been a number of cases of detainees held by the Department of Defense (DoD) who have been subjected to water torture, including some that come very close to waterboarding, according to an investigation by Truthout. The prisoners have been held in a number of settings, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo Bay.

In a number of settings, DoD spokespeople in the past — most notably former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld — have denied the use of waterboarding by DoD personnel. But as examples of DoD water torture have multiplied, it appears government denials about “waterboarding” were overly legalistic, and that behind them, DoD personnel were hiding torture involving similar methods of choking, suffocation or near-drowning by water.

Reports of water-related torture by the military include having water forced into the nose or mouth by a hose, repeated dunking in water, pouring water over the head in such a way that it is difficult to breathe or over a piece of cloth or hood, dousing with high-pressure hoses, dousing or partial drowning in combination with the application of a chemical agent, and in a few instances, actually being thrown into a large body of water, such as a river.

An article in Truthout earlier this month [cross-posted here] documented a half-dozen cases of DoD prisoners subjected to waterboarding-style torture. The article also detailed discussions among high-ranking military and intelligence officials around the use of waterboarding, and the fact that interrupted or simulated drowning at a military site in Kandahar, called “water treatment” in this instance, was revealed at a Congressional hearing in May 2008.

Human rights and civil liberties groups have expressed concern over news of DoD water torture and have asked for further investigation.

Asked to respond on behalf of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the reports of such water torture, spokesperson Kathleen Long said the committee had “no comment.”

One web site, Lawfare, co-founded by former Department of Justice official Jack Goldsmith, who was involved in internal decisions surrounding torture inside the Bush administration, seemed confused by the Truthout report, complaining that “reports of waterboarding-like tortures at Guantánamo” lacked “any examples of the military’s using waterboarding, but refers to the repeated use of water in interrogations instead.”

Truthout continues to investigate further instances of DoD waterboarding-style torture at US military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

“Waterboarding-style” torture refers to the use of water to provoke choking or suffocation by water, and, in some cases, the triggering of the sensation of drowning, if not actual drowning itself, but without actually following the CIA’s description of the waterboard procedure. It is has also been called “water treatment,” “water torture” and “drown-proofing.”

“The Interrogators Asked Me to Confess to Being a Part of 9/11″

In an affidavit filed on April 21, 2009, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Muhammad al-Ansi, a Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, described his torture in a tent at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan in the early weeks of 2001. According to al-Ansi, it began after a female interrogator became angry he would not “confess”:

Four American soldiers came and took me into another room. It was not a tent. They put me on a slab (the size and shape of a bed) made of bricks. I was made to lay on my stomach with my head hanging over the edge. They brought in a big water container and placed it under my head. They would [force] my head and shoulders [under] the water until I almost drowned and lift my head out at the last minute. They did this over and over. During this time, the interrogators asked me to confess to being a part of 9/11, confess I am part of al Qaeda, confess that I swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, confess I have explosive weapons training, and confess to knowing several names that I had never heard of. This continued for one to two hours. I said nothing other than: “Have mercy on me.”

In another instance of torture in Afghanistan, in June 2008, Tom Lasseter reported for McClatchy that Ghalib Hassan, “a district chief in Nangarhar province for the Afghan Interior Ministry,” was detained “in a basement at an airstrip in Jalalabad during March 2003″ by Special Forces troops.

According to Hassan, “At night they would strap me down on a cot, and put a bucket of water on the floor, in front of my head. And then they would tip the cot forward and dunk my head in the bucket … They would leave my head underwater and then jerk it out by my hair. I sometimes lost consciousness.”

Once again, the military personnel involved demanded that the prisoner confess, in this instance to supporting a former Taliban official. In fact, the Taliban had expelled Hassan in 1996, and he had fought with US-backed forces at Tora Bora against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Another case from Afghanistan concerned Saudi national Ahmed al-Darbi. Arrested by authorities in Azerbaijan in 2002 and later turned over to the Americans, he is the brother-in-law of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. Al-Mihdhar is also famous for being one of two al-Qaeda suspects who US intelligence knew was attending a meeting with other suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. As it turned out, this meeting likely involved the planning of the 9/11 and USS Cole terrorist attacks.

In a recently aired video interview with filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism “czar” who resigned during the Bush administration, charged former CIA director George Tenet and top CIA officials Cofer Black and Richard Blee with suppressing information about al-Mihdhar’s intent to enter the United States after the Malaysia meeting. The CIA deliberately had withheld cables to the FBI about al-Mihdhar entering the United States and failed to notify the State Department to put him and his traveling companion on the State Department watch list.

Al-Mihdhar’s brother-in-law, al-Darbi, was renditioned from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan in 2002 and was later sent to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. In a declaration dated July 1, 2009, al-Darbi cited a number of instances of abuse and torture at both the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantánamo.

At Bagram, al-Darbi stated, at times, “a sand bag or hood was placed over my head and tightened around my neck, and then they would grab my head and shake it violently while swearing at me and they would also pour water over my head while my head was covered.” The covering over the head while water is poured sounds very much like waterboarding. Al-Darbi also indicated that a powder, perhaps pepper spray, was applied to him and then water sprayed on him, so that the “water absorbed the powder and it burned my skin and made my nose run.”

More Water Torture at Guantánamo

In an August 2 Truthout article, six cases of water torture were described at the Cuban naval base prison. Two of these cases, including “near asphyxiation from water,” were described in an article published in an online medical journal earlier this year, but the identities of the detainees were kept anonymous.

Further investigation has found three more reports of such torture at Guantánamo and two cases of unique water torture, something between water dousing and waterboarding-style interrupted drowning.

One of the cases, of British citizen Tarek Dergoul, who was released from Guantánamo in 2004, involved treatment very similar to that reported by Omar Deghayes and Djamel Ameziane in the earlier Truthout article. According to an interview given to UK Guardian reporter David Rose, when Dergoul refused to have his cell searched for a third time on one day, an Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) squad was called.

“They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting,” Dergoul reported. “In all I must have brought up five cupfuls. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed.” They continued to beat him and finally shaved off his hair, beard and eyebrows.

In another interview, Guantánamo detainee Salim Mahmoud Adem, a Sudanese national released in 2007, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that he had witnessed another prisoner having his head shoved repeatedly into a toilet. Interestingly, the story came up after Goodman asked about waterboarding.

AG: Salim, did — Salim, did you witness anyone waterboarded?

SMA: I did not see waterboarding, but my neighbor, they insulted the Qu’ran, so we refused to listen to the guards. So they would come with the riot police and enter into the cells, one by one. So they went into the cell of a Yemeni brother, whose name is Othman [phonetic]. After they tied him, his hands to his back, they put his head to the toilet and turned on the flush many times. And all of us could see it. This was a horrible sight.

The torture of Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held at Guantánamo for seven years and finally released in 2008, presents a unique instance of torture involving forced application of water. Al-Haj was a hunger striker who, along with a number of other hunger strikers, was put on a forced feeding schedule. Civil rights attorney Candace Gorman, who has also represented some of the Guantánamo detainees, described the procedure in a May 2007 article for In These Times.

According to Gorman, al-Haj described his experience of forced feeding to his attorney. Al-Haj said he was strapped into a chair and had a tube painfully inserted through his nose twice each day. The attendants would blow air into the tube in order to ascertain its placement. Al-Haj would suffer in silence, “until tears stream down his cheeks.”

But sometimes things went even worse:

Three times they have inserted the tube the wrong way, so it went into his lungs. When they think that has happened they check by putting water into the tube, which makes him choke. Al-Haj says that never once have the hospital personnel apologized when the tube entered his lung.

Extreme “Water Dousing”

In a few reports, detainees have described a form of “water dousing” that went far beyond the description of the procedure given by the CIA. According to the 2004 CIA Inspector General (IG) report on “counterterrorism detention and interrogation activities,” which looked at the implementation of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques of the Bush administration, “water dousing” involved “laying a detainee down on a plastic sheet and pouring water over him for 10 to 15 minutes.” The room was to be maintained at room temperature.

In a 2008 Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and its Impact,” PHR quoted testimony by a detainee, Haydar (not his real name), who recalled having been sprayed with pepper spray and then hosed with high-pressure water. “This one female soldier subjected me to pepper gas and then sprayed me with water with extreme force — and I was writhing on the ground in pain,” Haydar said.

Another Guantánamo detainee, British citizen Jamal al-Harith, noted in a 2004 statement to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly that he knew of “three or four occasions guards using an industrial strength hose to shoot strong jets of water at detainees. This was done to me on one occasion. A guard walked along the gangway by the cages sending the hose into each alternate cage. When it happened to me I was hosed down continuously for about one minute. The pressure of the water was so strong it forced me to the back of the cage. It soaked the cage including my bedding and my Koran.”

Such cases of “water dousing” by Guantánamo guards, including the use of high-pressure hoses, went far beyond what was even contemplated by such a technique even under CIA torture procedures.

Drownings in Iraq

A review of news reports from Iraq reveal two separate instances of actual drowning of Iraqi detainees by US and British forces. In one case, soldiers were court-martialed and received light sentences. In the other case, the men were acquitted.

In January 2005, Army Sgt. First Class Tracy Perkins was convicted for ordering men under his command one year earlier to throw Iraqi detainees into the Tigris River. One of the Iraqis, 19-year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, drowned. Perkins was sentenced to six months in military prison and his rank was reduced to staff sergeant.

Perkins claimed he was ordered to throw the men in the river by his platoon leader, Army First Lt. Jack Saville. According to an account by the UK Guardian, Saville “pleaded guilty to assault and dereliction of duty,” and was sentenced to 45 days in military prison and ordered to pay a $12,000 fine. The light sentence was reportedly because “Lt. Saville agreed to testify against his captain, who had given him a hit list of five Iraqis who were to be executed on the spot if they were captured in a raid.”

But there was more. According to a July 2004 Associated Press article, the actions by Saville, Perkins, and two other soldiers, Sgt. Reggie Martinez and Spec. Terry Bowman, were initially covered up by their commanding officers. At an Article 32 hearing, and under grants of immunity, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, Maj. Robert Gwinner and battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman said they told Saville and his men to “to clam up because they feared higher-ups in the chain of command would use the incident against them.”

In another case, British soldiers, operating as part of the US-led alliance that invaded Iraq, arrested and beat an Iraqi teenager, who was then ordered to swim across the Shatt al-Basra canal. According to an account in the Guardian, 17-year-old (some reports say 15-year-old) Ahmed Jabbar Kareem was too weakened by his injuries and drowned. All four soldiers involved were acquitted of manslaughter in the case. One of the soldiers, Irish guardsman Joseph McCleary, told the press, “We were told to put the looters in the canal. I was the lowest rank, and we were always told we weren’t paid to think. We just followed orders.”

The acquittal of the British soldiers and the light sentences for US soldiers involved in the drowning of captives represent an attitude towards prisoners in general — including the use of water torture and drowning — that carried minimal consequences in the Iraq war theater.

Indeed, in a US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigatory report dated May 27, 2004 (pg. 70), the special agent in charge reported that a team leader for 5th Special Forces group (Airborne), based in Al Asad, Iraq, gave “special instructions for the guarding and handling of EPWs” [enemy prisoners of war], including “maintaining a sandbag over their heads, playing loud music and pouring water over their heads.”

The torture of the Iraqi EPWs is very similar to the description Ahmed al-Darbi gave of his treatment at Bagram.

Reactions to New Revelations

The examples of water torture described in this and the earlier Truthout article are certainly not the only occurrences of water torture. For instance, one further example exists of a Guantánamo detainee who suffered water being poured over his head while it was covered, but further details could not be given due to legal restrictions covering his case.

It is also assumed that some instances of such torture have not yet been revealed. The press and human rights groups have not interviewed most prisoners released from US custody. Furthermore, detainees released from Guantánamo must sign an agreement that twice notes they can be “immediately” re-imprisoned if the United States finds any condition of the agreement, which includes prohibitions against conspiracy or vague “preparation of” “combatant activities,” violated. Fear of re-imprisonment and psychological traumatization from their experience have led many former detainees to maintain a silence about their experiences.

Not all observers or participants in DoD activities have indicated they witnessed or heard of water torture at DoD sites.

Morris Davis, who was chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, told Truthout that his office “focused on about 75 of the detainees we were assessing for potential prosecution.” He added he “did not have the time or the manpower to examine the many others that were not likely candidates for prosecution.”

Even so, Davis told Truthout, “I never saw any evidence that any detainee was waterboarded or subjected to any similar technique at Gitmo,” though “others things [were] done to some of them that I believe constitute torture.”

In addition, some guards, even if critical of abuses at Guantánamo, have said they did not witness waterboarding or water torture at the Cuban prison camp. In an interview with The Talking Dog blog in March 2009, former guard Terry Holdbrooks Jr. said, “In my time in Camp Delta, I didn’t see or hear of any waterboarding.”

But testimony and evidence offered in this investigation strongly suggest that water torture similar to waterboarding or of other extreme nature was inflicted on some prisoners under US military control, and also by allied forces.

Some sources have been adamant that waterboarding did in fact occur, for instance, at Guantánamo.

In an April 2007 statement to the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, Guantánamo detainee attorney Brent Mickum said that a guard who had worked at the prison camp told him “prisoners at Guantánamo were routinely waterboarded.” Mickum reiterated this point in an interview with the blog The Talking Dog later that year.

Mickum said the guard “confirmed that waterboarding, which he called ‘drown-proofing’ took place. This individual knew extensive details of the camp layout and the names of military personnel. Eventually, the full story will be released and people will be shocked at the extent of the depravity.”

Mickum has also said he heard from a civilian contractor that he heard interrogators talking about waterboarding at Guantánamo in 2003.

In a telephone interview, Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, responding to the accumulated evidence compiled on DoD water torture, told Truthout, “The suggestion that the use of water to torture is more widespread than previously thought is extremely troubling, and reaffirms the need for greater transparency and a broader investigation into the abuse committed under the Bush administration.”

In an emailed statement, Vince Warren, executive director for Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have represented a number of Guantánamo detainees, said, “It’s clear even from the accounts of men who were released from Guantánamo that many more people were subjected to different forms of water torture or simulated drowning than the three victims of waterboarding the government has admitted to. Our attorneys can’t talk about what happened to our all of clients because they are under a protective order, but public documents show the widespread extent of this barbarity. It’s simply shameful.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

• To help coordinate assistance to prisoners who remain beyond the rule of law, who are often subjected to torture and abuse;

• To assist former prisoners to reintegrate into society in a positive and peaceable manner, many of them in countries with limited available resources, and with governments hostile to human rights;

• To assist the family members of those being held.

The launch was trailed on Wednesday, when Sami al-Haj, the al-Jazeera cameraman released in May 2008, who now heads the Human Rights Desk at al-Jazeera in Qatar, told the Associated Press that the Centre “aims to help over 500 men who have been released from the prison get medical and psychological treatment and find jobs.” Al-Haj explained that “only one in 20 former inmates has a job, and many have received no psychological or medical assistance,” and stated, “If you lock someone up in a normal prison for six months they need help. These people have been in jail for more than six years in an institution that’s much worse than a normal jail.”

He added that released prisoners “have received no explanation or apology, despite having never been charged with a crime,” and also explained that the organization will “lobby for the release or court trial of the 229 remaining inmates,” and, in the longer term, will “explore ways” of suing Bush administration officials for ordering the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo.

At the launch itself, which was extremely well-attended, Moazzam Begg began by explaining that returning British ex-prisoners had support from families, activists, community members and individuals, but that those returning to developing countries had little help. “Whether they are in Bermuda, Morocco, Mauritania or Yemen, the story is pretty much the same,” he said, as Reuters described it. “Where is the welfare for the people who have been tortured? Where is the support system for people who have endured cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment? The fact of the matter is — rarely does it exist.”

Adding that former prisoners face the stigma of having been held at Guantánamo every single day, Begg said, “How do you remove that from your head? How do you tell people that I am not a criminal, but I endured criminality? How do you explain that to anybody? When Guantánamo, by its definition, means that you must have been guilty of something because the world’s most powerful democracy could not have got it wrong. Even though we know it has got it wrong, we still carry that stigma with us, every single one of us.”

Describing the extent of the stigma, Sami al-Haj added, “My son does not deal with me as a normal father and even my wife and our close family like brothers and sisters and even our friends are keeping away from me because they do not want to put themselves in trouble.”

Binyam Mohamed, speaking for the first time in public since his release from Guantánamo in February, explained that he was not involved with the GJC “to win compensation,” and asked, “How much money can you give me that would make me forget the seven years I have gone through?” He also explained to reporters that, during an interrogation in Karachi shortly after he was seized at the airport in April 2002, his US captors explained how the US approach to the law had changed after 9/11. They told me, “You are guilty until you are proven innocent,” he said.

Describing his difficulties in readjusting to life after Guantánamo, and “at times struggling to control his emotions,” as the BBC described it, he said that he would “automatically” treat ordinary questions as an “interrogation,” and explained, “You have to live it to explain it. It’s very hard. If I enter a room and the light turns off for some reason I wonder if I’m back in the ‘Dark Prison.’” Mohamed was referring to the secret CIA prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was held for several months in 2004 after being tortured in Morocco for 18 months on behalf of the US authorities.

He also said, “What the world doesn’t understand is that most people love to hear about torture stories — somebody hanged here, beaten there, blood over here, blood over there, but that’s physical torture. What remains [on release] is, each time you see a rope, you always go back to the time you were hung. That doesn’t go away.”

Adding, “I cannot fit into society,” he described the opening of the Guantánamo Justice Centre as “an important event” for the former prisoners, saying, “We are here and we are living in torture — a world of torture,” and, insisting that it was not a political organization, stated bluntly, “From my point of view, there’s a mess that has been done and someone has to fix it.”

Like all the other ex-prisoners, Mohamed was concerned not primarily with relating his own difficulties adjusting to freedom, and the ghosts of torture that still haunt him, but with the plight of others. He explained that he had recently spoken on the phone to Mohammed El-Gharani, the Chadian national — just 14 years old when he was seized in Pakistan — who was released from Guantánamo in June, and that El-Gharani was now “sleeping on the streets, rejected by his family, branded as a terrorist although he was released by the US and cleared of any wrong-doing.” “I realized that he can not talk to others, like his lawyers, as he can to me,” Mohamed said. “So I have to speak out for him here.”

Returning briefly to his own ordeal, he explained, “No one knows that what stays after torture is the memories. Lawyers speak about my rights in court, but I can only think about Military Commissions and about having no rights. After four years I can only think of things in terms of Guantánamo. No institution or medical foundation in the world can change how I feel.” He then added, poignantly, “And how about in Chad, where there is nothing to help El-Gharani?”

This was a theme reiterated by Jamil El-Banna, released in December 2007, who also spoke for the first time in public since his release. El-Banna explained, “The only people who can help are those who went through this,” and, as Victoria Brittain described it in the Guardian, “told the story of Ahmed Hassan, a Jordanian who lost most of both sight and hearing from torture in Guantánamo. He spoke of the moment when Hassan trusted him as they spoke on the phone and he was able to tell him he had found a doctor here who will help him. Hassan had previously found no material or medical support in Jordan, but only promises, which disappeared into thin air. El-Banna emphasized that Hassan’s was just one of many, many stories of deep disappointment on release.”

Moazzam Begg also spoke on this theme, explaining that the Yemenis, who make up the largest single group of remaining prisoners in Guantánamo (about a hundred of the remaining 229), were of particular concern to the new organization because Yemen lacked the facilities necessary to care for people traumatized by their long and brutal imprisonment.

He explained that former prisoners from Western countries were suffering too, and described how two men now living in London “were unable even to communicate with other people due to psychological and physical damage.” “One of them lives in a room that is so tiny it is close to the size of his cell where he spent five years. That is the difficulty in the UK,” he said, but he added, “Our own situation is much better than the vast majority of people who were held there.”

The former prisoners also read out messages of support from other ex-prisoners. Ahmed Errachidi, a Moroccan who had lived for nearly 20 years in the UK, and was repatriated from Guantánamo in March 2007, wrote that “the life of ex-detainees is simply a life on pause,” and from Qatar Jarallah al-Marri (released in July 2008) explained, “Freedom is more than walking away from a world of cells, shackles and beatings. It is a state of mind, a state of being that takes time to develop.”

As the meeting wound up, Moazzam Begg added further details about the Centre’s aims, explaining that it would partner with NGOs in the Middle East and in African countries who were well placed to deliver care on the ground, and that it was looking for funds from sources in the Gulf, Europe and elsewhere, and Ramzi Kassem, a US lawyer who represents prisoners in Guantánamo and in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, described the prisoners of George Bush’s “War on Terror” as the “victims of an ill-conceived policy” and criticized the Obama administration for retaining the system of Military Commissions introduced by its predecessor. “They only exist for one reason and that’s to whitewash torture,” he said, adding — in a sign that the GJC’s work will not be solely concerned with Guantánamo — that the estimated 600 prisoners in Bagram, unlike those in Guantánamo, are still being denied the right to challenge their detention in court.

For a short interview with Binyam Mohamed, see this BBC video, and see below for two reports on the GJC’s launch, from Al-Jazeera and Press TV (via YouTube):

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

Standing straight and tall, an impressive and deeply introspective man, Sami al-Haj walks with a limp and the help of a walking stick. Neither laughter nor smiles light up the refined face of this man, old before his time. A deep sadness pervades him. He was 32 years old when, in December 2001, his life, like that of tens of thousands of other Muslims, became a horrific nightmare.

He endured horrendous suffering. Weakened by a hunger strike which lasted 438 days, set free on the 1st May 2008, he greets you attentively and with a gentle manner. He calmly tells you of a world whose paralysing, suffocating horror is beyond your comprehension.

“I came to Geneva, the city of the United Nations and freedom, to ask for the law to be respected, to demand the closure of the Guantánamo camp and secret prisons, and to demand that this illegal situation be brought to an end,” he says calmly. The word has been uttered. Everything is “illegal”; everything is false, manipulated, absurd and Kafkaesque in this war waged essentially against those of the Muslim faith.

In Guantánamo, spurred on by his passion for justice and his conviction that every journalist’s mission is to bear witness to what he sees, Sami al-Haj had the psychological strength to carry on, resisting the worse abuses and putting his own suffering to one side. His experiences were extremely painful but he was able, even in the worst moments, to cling to the hope that he would get out alive. And knowing that he had to observe everything in order to be able to tell the world helped him to bear the unbearable.

Moreover, it was through viewing this horrific place (which could have been his tomb) with the objective eye of the journalist that Sami al-Haj was able to survive and remain sane. Others, who were not as lucky as he was, died [see here and here] or became insane, and so were unable to recount their experiences.

With neither pencil nor paper, Sami al-Haj forced himself to memorise everything in order, even in a cage, to carry on his work as “an al-Jazeera journalist covering a story,” as he put it.

Today he is driven by the idea of bringing to the world’s attention these tens of thousands of prisoners who are still suffering inhuman treatment in the prisons of Guantánamo, Bagram and Kandahar [and Iraq]. He replies tirelessly and with good humour to all the journalists who interview him, hoping that his words will allow those who no longer have a voice to be heard.

Silvia Cattori: How do you feel, just a few short weeks after your liberation?

Sami al-Haj: I feel fine, thank you. When I see people committing themselves to saving human beings and fighting to defend their rights, it gives me great comfort. Of course, when I left Guantánamo, two months ago, I was in a very bad way. But now I feel better, discovering that people outside are fighting and not losing sight of the main goal — achieving peace and freedom for everyone.

Silvia Cattori: After those painful years spent in the camps, what are your strongest feelings and greatest hopes?

Sami al-Haj: Of course, I am happy to be free again. I have been reunited with my family, my wife and my son. For six and a half years he did not see me, and had to go to school without me. He waited for me and said, “Dad, I have missed you for so long! I was so unhappy, especially when I saw my school friends, with their fathers, and they asked me where my father was. I had no answer to give them. That’s why I asked my mum to take me to school in the car, because I didn’t want them to keep asking me that question.”

I said to my son, “Now, I could take you to school, but you must understand that I have a message to give, a just cause to defend. I want to fight for the cause of human rights, for those who have been deprived of their freedom. I do not want to fight alone. There are thousands of people who are standing up and fighting wherever human dignity is attacked. Do not forget that we are fighting for peace, to defend rights whenever they are denied, for a better future for you. Perhaps one day we will achieve this, and then I will be able to stay with you and take you to school.”

I do not know if he understood, because he is still very young, but he smiled at me. My wife did not want me to leave again either. But when I reminded her of the horrific situation those imprisoned in Guantánamo find themselves in, and that they also have a family, sons, daughters, a wife whom they miss terribly, and that if I do not fight these people will remain imprisoned even longer, she understood that I must carry on travelling, adding my voice to all the other voices, so that the detainees can return home as soon as possible. She gave me her full support. On the way to the airport she said to me, “I will pray for you.”

Silvia Cattori: So, by going to Afghanistan to film the massacres of civilians, victims of President Bush’s war, you yourself became one of his victims? Are you not afraid of what could happen to you again?

Sami al-Haj: For me, there is no question — I will continue my work as a journalist. I must continue carrying a message of peace, no matter what. For my part, I have spent six years and six months in prison, far from my family, but for others it was so much worse. I lost a very dear friend, a journalist with al-Jazeera: he died in Baghdad, killed when the hotel where he was staying was bombed. I also lost a colleague who was working with me at al-Jazeera, whom I consider a sister: she too died in Baghdad.

Many people have lost their lives because of this war. You must know that the Bush administration wanted to prevent coverage by the free media, like al- Jazeera, in the Middle East. The al-Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed.

In 2001, when I left my son and my wife to film the war initiated by the USA against Afghanistan, I had to expect finding death during a bombing raid. I went there fully aware of the risks. Every journalist knows that he is carrying out a mission and must be ready to sacrifice himself in order to bear witness to what is happening, through his films and writing. And to help people understand that war brings nothing but the death of the innocent, destruction and suffering. It is on the basis of this conviction that my colleagues and I went to countries at war.

Now, after all these years in captivity, I can once again do something to help bring about peace. I am going to commit myself to this goal, until it is achieved. I am sure that one day, even if I do not personally reap the fruits, we will succeed in achieving peace and the respect of human rights, as well as the protection of journalists throughout the world. I am sure that we will see the day when journalists are no longer tortured or injured doing their job, defending people’s rights to information and highlighting human rights abuses.

Silvia Cattori: You said at the beginning that you are feeling fine. But after such a terrible experience, and given that you were released with no apology whatsoever from your torturers, how are you able to talk about all this without resentment or bitterness?

Sami al-Haj: Of course, what happened to me was very hard and my personal situation is difficult. But when I think of those who are still in Guantánamo, and their families that they miss very much and who have no news at all of them, I tell myself that my situation, as difficult as it is, is better than theirs.

I cannot forget that in Guantánamo I have left behind brothers who have been crushed, who have gone mad. I am thinking in particular of a Yemeni doctor who now lives naked in his cell because he has lost his mind.

Silvia Cattori: What kind of torture did they subject you to?

Sami al-Haj: All kinds of physical and psychological torture. As all the detainees were Muslim, the camp administration subjected them to many forms of harassment and humiliation linked to religion. With my own eyes I saw soldiers tearing up the Qur’an and throwing it in the toilet. I saw them, during interrogation sessions, sitting on the Qur’an until their questions were answered. They insulted our families and our religion. They made fun of us by pretending to ring our God, asking him to come and save us. The only Imam at the camp was accused of complicity with the detainees and was sent away, in 2005, for refusing to tell visitors that the camp respected religious freedom.

They beat us up. They taunted us with racist insults. They locked us in cold rooms, below zero, with one cold meal a day. They hung us up by our hands. They deprived us of sleep, and when we started to fall asleep, they beat us on the head. They showed us films of the most horrendous torture sessions. They showed us photographs of torture victims — dead, swollen, covered in blood. They kept us under constant threat of being moved elsewhere to be tortured even more. They doused us with cold water. They forced us to do the military salute to the American national anthem. They forced us to wear women’s clothes. They forced us to look at pornographic images. They threatened us with rape. They would strip us naked and make us walk like donkeys, ordering us around. They made us sit down and stand up five hundred times in a row. They humiliated the detainees by wrapping them up in the Israeli and American flags, which was their way of telling us that we were imprisoned because of a religious war.

When a detainee, filthy and riddled with fleas, is taken out of his cell to be submitted to more torture sessions in an attempt to make him collaborate, he ends up not knowing what he is saying or even who he is any more.

I was interrogated and tortured more than two hundred times. Ninety-five percent of the questions were about al-Jazeera. They wanted me to work as a spy within al-Jazeera. In exchange, they offered American citizenship for myself and my family, and payment based on results. I refused. I told them repeatedly that my job is a journalist, not a spy, and that it was my duty to make the truth known and to work for the respect of human rights.

Silvia Cattori: Today, can you find it within yourself to pardon your torturers?

Sami al-Haj: Of course I will pardon them if they close Guantánamo. But if they continue to cause suffering, I will go to the courts and take action against them.

Although I know that the Bush administration has done so much harm, I still think that it’s not too late for these people to make up for their mistakes.

A distinction must be made between the administration and the people. The Guantánamo detainees know that they have friends in America, like the lawyer who came to Guantánamo and fought for my case [Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the British-based legal charity Reprieve].

Silvia Cattori: Am I right in thinking that they were not able to break you?

Sami al-Haj: Because I am not alone, and there are people supporting me, this feeling gives me strength. In prison, I drew my strength from the belief that no free man can accept being in this position of inferiority and dehumanisation. You feel pain and sorrow but you are determined to keep alive the hope that there will be an end to it; and the idea that even in prison, it is possible to carry on your work as journalist, makes suffering easier to bear.

Silvia Cattori: When you were in Guantánamo, did you know that outside there where people who were fighting for you to be released?

Sami al-Haj: In fact I didn’t know about them, because in prison it is very difficult to receive news, even if you have a lawyer, because he is not allowed to tell you anything. Now I do know those who work for human rights, and those who do not agree with the Bush administration. I think that every day their voice becomes stronger.

Silvia Cattori: Your brother, when he saw you again, said that you looked like an old man. Is that how you feel?

Sami al-Haj: Personally, it is my heart that counts, and not my face or my body. I feel that my heart is as young as ever, and stronger than before.

Silvia Cattori: So it was a very painful experience, but in fact you have emerged from it with unforeseen benefits?

Sami al-Haj: That’s right. I have been able to reap some benefits from my time spent in Guantánamo. Before going there, I only had a small family. Now I have a large family as I have gained hundreds of friends from around the world. This is very positive: I may have lost six and a half years but now, I have more friends.

Silvia Cattori: Are you still considered an “enemy combatant”?

Sami al-Haj: I don’t know, but when they released me, they said, ”Now you are no longer a danger to America.”

Silvia Cattori: And your name is not on the “terrorist list” anymore?

Sami al-Haj: I don’t know. I think that for them, all the people they labelled as “terrorists” will remain so. And that now they are afraid of us because they made us suffer for no reason.

Silvia Cattori: Do you think CIA agents will still spy on you?

Sami al-Haj: Yes. The truth is that I have nothing against the country and its people. If the Bush administration makes amends for its errors, I will have nothing to complain about.

Silvia Cattori: Were you surprised when, as you were leaving, an officer from the Pentagon who saw you with a walking stick accused you of being manipulative?

Sami al-Haj: The Pentagon officials claim that the Guantánamo detainees were criminals, but in fact 500 of them have now returned home. How could they have been allowed to leave if they really were criminals? They are still lying.

Silvia Cattori: Two other Sudanese men were released at the same time as you — Amir Yacoub al-Amir and Walid Mohamed Ali. How are they now?

Sami al-Haj: The Sudanese government has treated them very well. They greeted all three of us personally at the airport. Despite the fact that the Americans had taken my passport, I was given a new one within two hours, and they did not prevent me from travelling outside Sudan.

Silvia Cattori: In Guantánamo, did the soldiers call you by your name or by your detainee number, “number 345”?

Sami al-Haj: They never called me by my name, just “three, four, five”, my prison number. Towards the end they called me “al-Jazeera”. Only the Red Cross officials called me by my name.

Silvia Cattori: Did these officials visit you often?

Sami al-Haj: When they were authorised to visit us, every two or three months. I talked to them and they brought me letters from my family.

Silvia Cattori: The Bush administration and the officers who had the job of torturing you knew that you were a good man, a journalist merely trying to expose the brutality with which they were treating the Afghan people, not a “terrorist.” Do you know why they treated you so badly?

Sami al-Haj: Most of the soldiers there were following orders from their superiors. They carried out torture with no conscience. But to be true to what happened I must say that some of them were good men. Some soldiers did use their brains.

Silvia Cattori: The CIA agents wrote a report on the torture in Guantánamo. When they were torturing you, did you feel that they were observing you, carrying out experiments on you?

Sami al-Haj: We were under the constant supervision of military psychologists. They were not there to treat us, but to take part in the interrogations, observing the tortured prisoners so that no detail of their behaviour would escape them. The interrogations were the responsibility of Colonel Morgan, a specialist psychiatric doctor. This colonel was stationed in Guantánamo from March 2002. He had served at the Afghan prison in Bagram from November 2001. He gave instructions to the officers who were torturing us, studied our reactions, then noted every detail in order to be able to adapt the torture techniques to each detainee, which had profound psychological consequences.

I spoke to them. I told them that the mission of a doctor is an honourable one, to help people, not torture them. They replied, “We are military personnel and we must follow the rules. When an officer gives me an order, it is my duty to carry it out, otherwise I will be imprisoned just like you. When I signed a contract with the army, I realised at the time that I must obey all orders.”

Silvia Cattori: Amongst the torture techniques used at Guantánamo, I see similarities with those used in Israel on Palestinian political prisoners. Sleep deprivation, for example, is their speciality.

Sami al-Haj: I think that most of the world’s intelligence services came to Guantánamo. I saw British and Canadians. They came to find out about the interrogation techniques, and also to supply the CIA and FBI with advice on how to torture and interrogate from what they had learned.

Silvia Cattori: Are you able to sleep easily?

Sami al-Haj: Not like before Guantánamo. I only sleep three to four hours now. Today, when I met people from the Red Cross, I asked them to help me to overcome my problems and recommend a doctor who could help me. Seven years is not a short period of time.

Silvia Cattori: Wasn’t going on hunger strike a kind of self-inflicted torture? Why did you do it for such long periods, while your jailers took advantage of it to inflict even more suffering and humiliation on you?

Sami al-Haj: Because we felt we couldn’t stay silent — we had to do something. That is the only way we had of making our voices heard. Going on hunger strike is of course a very painful way of taking action and is difficult to endure. But when your freedom is taken away you have to fight to restore it. It was our last resort for telling the Bush administration that a detainee has dignity, that he cannot live on bread alone and that freedom is more important.

Silvia Cattori: What was it like when they force-fed you?

Sami al-Haj: When there were more than 40 detainees on hunger strike, the administration of the camp tried to break our resistance by subjecting us to more torture. We were locked in cold rooms, stripped naked, and prevented from sleeping for long periods. Twice a day the soldiers tied us to a special chair. They put a mask over our faces and inserted a large tube into our noses, not into the stomach. The normal ration was two cans but they punished us by injecting 24 cans and six bottles of water. Having shrunk through long hunger strikes, the stomach cannot hold such quantities. They added products which induce diarrhoea. The detainee, now sitting on that chair for more than three hours, would vomit continuously. They left us in the vomit and excrement. When the session was over they would rip the tube out violently, and when they saw the blood flowing they laughed at us. As they use infected tubes which are never cleaned, the detainees suffer from untreated illnesses.

Silvia Cattori: Is it thanks to that long hunger strike that you were released?

Sami al-Haj: Not only because of that, but it was one of the factors that led the administration to release me.

Silvia Cattori: What should one make of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confessions, where he admits to organising more than 30 terrorist attacks in seventeen countries?

Sami al-Haj: It is possible that they tortured him to the point where he was no longer himself. I never met him because they put him in a special camp. An officer told me that he was very badly injured. I’m sure you can imagine — they subjected him to horrific torture.

Silvia Cattori: When America says that he is the “number 3 al-Qaeda terrorist,” does that bear any resemblance to the truth?

Sami al-Haj: Quite honestly I believe nothing that comes from the Bush administration. Because I was also accused of being a “terrorist.” And I know better than anyone what the truth is. Those people lie too much. I never believe a single word coming from that government. I know a prisoner who was tortured so much that in the end he said, “I am Osama Bin Laden.” He said what they wanted to hear so that the torture would end.

Silvia Cattori: So, is al-Qaeda a creation of the western intelligence agencies?

Sami al-Haj: As far as I’m concerned, I have never in my life met anyone who has said to me, “I belong to al-Qaeda.”

In Guantánamo, I met most of the detainees because the policy of the guards was not to allow the prisoners to live together for a long time in the same cell. They transferred us every week. So we got to know other people. The men I met there are all peaceful people.

Since I left, I have spoken to over a hundred of them. Those who were married have picked up their lives again and the others have got married.

Silvia Cattori: Do those who draw strength from prayer have a better chance of escaping madness?

Sami al-Haj: Of course! If you feel that someone is there with you, especially God, you will be patient and always aware that God is more powerful than human beings. I must pray to God and thank him. I must also thank all those who supported me. I think that even if I spent my whole life saying thank you, I would not manage to thank them all. Now, through my work concentrating on human rights, perhaps I will be able to contribute to making other people’s lives happier.

Silvia Cattori: I feel that the media and the NGOs in this country have not given the importance that was due to defending the rights of these Muslim prisoners. For a long time denouncing the abuses committed against them was seen as a sign of sympathy for the “terrorists.” Did you know that the leaders of Reporters Without Borders, for example, whose mission is to protect journalists, were criticised for waiting five years before talking about your case?

Sami al-Haj: Unfortunately people believed whatever the Bush government told them. Now they know this wasn’t true, they will put the record straight. As I have already said, if someone makes a mistake, it’s not a problem: the problem lies in pursuing the mistake.

If journalists do not feel concerned when other journalists are imprisoned carrying out their job, perhaps one day those very journalists will find themselves in prison and there will be nobody to defend them. We must work together, taking up each and every case. So if we find out that a journalist has been imprisoned it is our duty to support them, no matter what their colour or religion.

As a journalist, I want to commit myself to supporting journalists who work to defend rights and freedom. There is an enormous amount of work to do. We must stop at nothing to ensure the liberation of those who are locked away in Guantánamo and the countless secret prisons where the Bush government is depriving tens of thousands of others of their rights.

That experience in Guantánamo affected us profoundly. What I want to focus on is the need for and the importance of the defence of human rights. After all the damage that has been done, everyone now feels more concerned, I think. It is not acceptable to abandon these people who are suffering. We have an urgent responsibility to show solidarity with them.

Al-Jazeera hopes to work with the free media to gather information relating to human rights and freedoms. I ask all journalists to cooperate with us in this. There were more than 50 nationalities in Guantánamo — it is a worldwide issue, and not just about individual detainees.

It is shameful that in our society, innocent people who have been sold find themselves locked in cages, and that this violation of basic rights should be the doing of a country which claims to be the guarantor of rights and freedoms.

I feel no hatred. We respect the citizens of the USA. It is their present government which should take responsibility for the consequences of these actions.

Human rights and security are inseparable — there can be no security without the respect of fundamental rights.

Silvia Cattori: You are right to call on decent people and journalists not to accept the violation of international laws and the cruel and degrading treatment of human beings. But this policy could not have lasted if it had not had the tacit support of the superpower governments — it was with their consent that those labelled “enemy combatants” were tortured. The Patriot Act, for example, passed after the 11th September in the US, was supported by all the European countries. It was within the framework of these secret agreements that CIA and FBI agents were able to kidnap and torture thousands of innocent men like you in Europe.

Sami al-Haj: I want to say this to you: I do not believe in the actions of governments. Because any government, in any country, prefers to govern without confronting the people’s real problems. It may, at times, speak out in support of a certain cause, but in reality it does not support it. It is only for opportunistic political reasons that governments speak out. And they may even, through political expediency, claim to support something in which they do not believe. Forget governments, because they have their own agenda. Yes, we must keep working hard to defend the rights and freedoms of everyone.

Silvia Cattori: Is it fair to conclude that the “terrorists” as presented to us by the Bush administration and the media do not exist?

Sami al-Haj: I can assure you that the Guantánamo detainees that I met are not “terrorists.” I had the opportunity to talk to them and get to know them — they are pacifists.

Silvia Cattori: So you were arrested, then, because it had to be proven to the other European countries that the Muslim “terrorists” really existed?

Sami al-Haj: We were arrested after the attacks of the 11th September, for which no one has yet been able to find those responsible. President Bush did not want to say, “I have made mistakes, I was not able to maintain national security.” He said, “We are going to start a war against terror.” The outcome is that he has brought security to no one.

He bombed Afghanistan, sent soldiers to wage war against whole nations, but did not arrest the people that he set out to arrest. He paid the Pakistanis in return for starting to arrest people and hand them over to his administration.

Eighty-nine percent of the prisoners in Guantánamo were bought, for hard currency, from the Pakistani authorities. Where did they find them? They found them in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

Silvia Cattori: These prisoners were then tortured with the promise that it would end if they accepted becoming spies for the CIA? What a terrifying system!

Sami al-Haj: Yes. Let’s wait for President Bush to leave power. When he has left his seat, I am sure that many people will have something to say about his wrongdoing.

Silvia Cattori: Your testimony is very important. Your youth has been destroyed. And yet you have the magnanimity to transform this disaster into something constructive. You refuse to see yourself as a victim. You are truly amazing! So many prisoners must be hoping for help from people like you.

Sami al-Haj: We must work hard, so that all those who continue to support the Bush administration feel ashamed of their actions. At that point, no one will help them. And when no one helps them, they will stop.

The whole Guantánamo episode is a huge black stain. The Bush administration tried to deceive the public by saying we were terrorists. But the great majority of those men who were imprisoned are innocent, like me.

Silvia Cattori: Thank you for giving us this interview.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

***

Even when they were about to release him, the US military was unwilling to treat Sami al-Haj with dignity.

The final days in Guantánamo Bay were very hard on Sami. There had been so many false promises that Sami was still uncertain whether he was going to leave, and for the last 15 days he stopped drinking water, in addition to refusing food. Only the food and liquid forced into him kept him alive.

The Admiral came himself to process Sami out. He brought a paper and read it out before telling Sami to sign it. The paper said that Sami recognized the right of the United States to take him as a prisoner again if he did anything wrong. Sami refused. He explained that I, as his lawyer, had told him not to sign any such document.

One of the soldiers told Sami quietly that even now they might refuse to allow him to leave. An American official was saying that Sami refused to change his clothes from orange to white, which they would interpret as a decision that he would not go. This was all false.

“I will wear anything if it means being free,” said Sami. “I will even go naked, no problem. I want to get my freedom.”

A kinder soldier told Sami that someone seemed to be trying to stop his travel. The soldier took Sami immediately to his cell from the force-feeding chair to change clothes.

At around 7 pm on Wednesday night [April 30], Sami was taken from his cell in Camp 1. An hour later, the bus started its trip to the airport. The drive took an hour, although it is not very far. There were black plastic trash bags all around the bus windows, so that Sami could not see anything. I have been along that road many times, and it is hard to see what anyone was afraid that he might see — McDonalds, perhaps, or the Guantánamo Golf Course.

When they reached the airport the aircraft waiting was similar to the one that had originally brought Sami from Afghanistan. Sami and the eight prisoners released with him had to enter through the rear of the plane. Walid Ali, another Sudanese, was next to Sami, and then Said al-Boujaadia from Morocco. Amir Yacoub was the third man from Sudan, and there were five Afghans.

Like each man, Sami had his eyes covered, muffs on his ears, and shackles on both his hands and legs. The plane took off at about 10.30pm that night on the first leg of the journey, a 15-hour flight to Baghdad, Iraq.

“When I first requested the toilet the guards said it was not allowed,” Sami said. “So I said I would do it in the chair.” The guards then took him to the toilet, but they would not close the door, unshackle his hands, or take off the eye cover. They said that they would pull his trousers down and sit him down, and added that he would not be allowed to use the tap to wash afterwards.

Eventually, after much argument about how this was senseless and uncivilized, Sami said that he could not use the toilet at all under these circumstances. As a result, the long hours ahead would not be pleasant.

There was no sleep to be had for all that time. When Sami tried to lean slightly one way so that he could rest, he was told that this was not permitted.

Sami ate nothing on the flight. In truth, he never intended to, as he had vowed to himself that he would remain on hunger strike until he was safely in Sudan. He had resolved that he would only break his protest by asking his wife to feed him –- his first normal food for 16 months. But Sami wanted to know what the guards would say, so he suggested to Walid that he ask about food. The guards told him to keep quiet, that they would give it to him when the time came. Eventually, an hour and a half later, he was given a peanut butter sandwich. Sami ate nothing.

Neither did Sami drink, partly because of his ongoing protest, but more particularly because he knew he had to survive without a toilet for the duration of the journey. For the others, there was one bottle of water that they had to pass among themselves.

Baghdad was only a stopover. Everyone had to change planes. The Afghans were to go to Kabul, the rest would go first to Sudan, before the plane would take Said back to Morocco.

On the second leg of the flight, it was another four hours to Khartoum, a total of twenty in all. Twenty more hours of suffering before the aircraft finally touched down. By the end, Sami was weak, far weaker than when he left the prison in Cuba.

Even then, the American soldiers were not content to set him free. Before turning him over to the Sudanese authorities, they took off the metal cuffs, but replaced them with plastic restraints, so tight that they cut into his wrists.

“After the plane, the first thing I knew, I was here in the hospital,” Sami told me. It was a strange contrast to Guantánamo, where I recently met a shackled Sami in Camp Iguana. Now we were talking in the VIP room of the Khartoum hospital, with Sami wearing the white traditional robe of a Sudanese, smiling at those around him.

Earlier, a member of the medical staff had taken me aside to describe how they had feared for him when he had been transferred from the American soldiers onto a hospital gurney. He had been almost unconscious, and his life signs had dropped to dangerously weak levels. For a while, it seemed that Sami had only come home to die.

But fortunately this story turned out happily. While I was with him, the President’s wife came to pay her respects. President Bashir himself had come before her. Now Sami was smiling at his visitors, gently instructing his seven-year old son Mohammed to pass around the tin of sweets.

***

Clive Stafford Smith, lawyer for Sami al-Haj, is the Director of the British charity Reprieve, which is dedicated to those facing injustice in Guantánamo Bay and other secret prisons around the world, and providing free representation to prisoners who cannot afford lawyers.

Andy Worthington was Reprieve’s Communications Officer in 2008, and is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

An edited version of this article was published on the British website Liberal Conspiracy.

Although a few news outlets have briefly mentioned some of the other men released with Sami — two of his compatriots, a Moroccan and five Afghans — their stories remain largely unknown. However, as a result of the research I undertook for my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, I’m able to shine some light on their stories, which otherwise are unlikely to receive much coverage — if at all — outside their home countries.

While none have the extraordinary impact of Sami’s story — which, I note, has the Pentagon so scared that three officials told ABC News on Friday that he was “a manipulator and a propagandist,” who produced a “constant drumbeat of allegations” about the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo — they do nothing to support the administration’s constantly unraveling claim that the prisoners are “the worst of the worst.” This claim, made by Rear Admiral John D. Stufflebeem on January 28, 2002, has been parroted at the highest levels of government in the years since, even though 501 prisoners have now been released, and the administration has stated that it only intends to try between 60 to 80 of the 273 prisoners who remain in Guantánamo.

On the cargo plane containing Sami al-Haj that landed in Khartoum in the early hours of May 2 were Amir Yacoub al-Amir and Walid Ali, who, like Sami, were bound like beasts for their journey despite finally being transported to freedom. Both had also been held for over six years without charge or trial, but unlike Sami, whose plight was widely publicized by al-Jazeera, by his lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve, and by groups campaigning for the rights of journalists, including the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Sans Frontières, both of these men had barely registered on the media’s radar.

Amir Yacoub al-Amir, great-grandson of Sudan’s Caliph

36-year old Amir Yacoub al-Amir was one of at least 120 prisoners (around 15 percent of Guantánamo’s entire population), who were captured not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, without ever having been anywhere near the battlefields of Afghanistan. In his tribunal at Guantánamo (one of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals convened in 2004 and 2005 to assess whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” without rights), al-Amir strenuously denied an allegation that he was associated with al-Qaeda, saying, “I disagree with al-Qaeda on everything,” and also denied being associated with the Taliban.

Seized from a car in Peshawar in March 2002, while visiting Pakistan, al-Amir’s story echoes reports by numerous other innocent men seized in Pakistan, who said that they were captured and sold for money, a situation that was confirmed at the highest levels in 2006, when, in his autobiography, President Musharraf boasted that in return for handing over 369 terror suspects (who were mostly transferred to Guantánamo), “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.” In Guantánamo, al-Amir explained that he was seized because the Pakistani government “was capturing any Arab and giving them to the United States as terrorists.”

Like Sami al-Haj, al-Amir was represented by Reprieve, and in 2007 Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith, traveled to Sudan to meet his family, where he discovered that his great-grandfather, a cousin of the Khalifa (Caliph), had, with numerous other relatives, been captured and imprisoned by the British army, after the fall of General Gordon’s regime in 1885, in conditions that were remarkable similar to those prevailing at Guantánamo. In a New Statesman article, Stafford Smith described how the prisoners were “dispatched (or, in modern terms, rendered)” to Egypt, where conditions were so brutal that al-Amir’s great-grandfather died, and noted that, during his visit, members of the government, and other relatives of the Khalifa, “expressed concern that Amir Yacoub had been illegally rendered, and was now being held, like his great-grandfather, by the hyperpower of the day, in a brutal and lawless prison far from home.”

Walid Ali, survivor of an Afghan massacre

33-year old Walid Ali (on the left in the photo, with al-Amir), whose story has only ever been reported in The Guantánamo Files, explained in 2005 to his Administrative Review Board — convened to assess whether the prisoners were still regarded as a threat to the United States or as an ongoing source of intelligence — that he had traveled to Pakistan to teach the Koran, but had then been drawn to the conflict in Afghanistan, where he joined the Taliban, serving as a guard for 25 to 30 days.

Like several other prisoners, Ali told the Board that he had been inspired to help the Taliban fight the Russians, which was not as far-fetched as it sounds, as General Rashid Dostum, the Northern Alliance’s pre-eminent Uzbek commander, had served with the Russians throughout the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, before repeatedly switching his allegiance during the chaos of the 1990s. In his hearing, Ali appeared genuinely bewildered that Dostum had become an ally of the United States, and that he was therefore accused of fighting Americans.

Ali was one of at least 50 Guantánamo prisoners to survive a massacre at the Qala-i-Janghi fort (and improvised prison) in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. They, along with the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, were the only survivors out of up to 400 foreign Taliban fighters — mainly from the Gulf countries, North Africa, Pakistan and Uzbekistan — who had left the city of Kunduz, the Taliban’s last outpost in the north of Afghanistan, after a surrender was negotiated between senior Taliban leaders and the Northern Alliance.

Tricked into believing that they would be allowed to return home after giving up their weapons, some of the men responded to the betrayal — and fears that they were to be executed — by starting an uprising (in which a CIA agent, Johnny “Mike” Spann, was killed), which was savagely put down by US bombers, representatives of the US and British Special Forces, and Alliance soldiers. The survivors — many of whom had their hands tied behind their backs when the fighting started, and were subsequently wounded — hid in a basement while the battle raged, and it’s probable, therefore, that most did not actually have anything to do with the uprising. After seven days, in which they were shot at and bombed, and finally flooded out, the survivors were transferred to General Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan, and were then taken to Guantánamo via the US prison at Kandahar airport.

In a written statement to his ARB, Ali told one of the most complete stories of being caught in the crossfire and suffering in the basement:

“They handcuffed us so tightly that the circulation was cut off, and I became unconscious. What happened after is … all I know is they were firing bullets at us while we were handcuffed and American airplanes came and started firing at us and killed a lot of us. I was handcuffed and wounded in my back with a bullet and it went to my belly where it is now. And I feel the pain of it … While I was on the ground an American airplane fired a bomb and shrapnel hit my head and it is still there in my head. And then I went unconscious and I did not feel anything until I woke up in a room underground … Of course, they used all [kinds of] different weapons in order to kill us. They even used water and electricity. And they threw a bomb on us. And a lot of times they opened water on us to the point [that] we had water up to our necks. Of course, the wounded ones couldn’t stand up and they were killed in the water.”

Said al-Boujaadia, cleared for 18 months

Some time after the plane carrying Sami al-Haj and his compatriots touched down in Khartoum, it dropped off another prisoner in Morocco. 39-year old Said al-Boujaadia, also represented by Reprieve, had surfaced briefly in the media last December, but his story was largely unknown until last month, when I wrote an article that focused on his particular route to Guantánamo.

In 2001, al-Boujaadia traveled to Afghanistan with his Afghan wife, whom he had met and married on a previous visit, and their three children. Like many others, his life fell apart after the 9/11 attacks, and the US-led invasion that began in October. Although he managed to secure the safe escape of his family, he, like almost a third of the Guantánamo prisoners — a mixture of missionaries, charity workers, migrants and Taliban foot soldiers — was captured as he attempted to help another family cross the Pakistani border to safety.

Although he was cleared for release in late 2006, when his review board decided that he did not pose a threat to the United States, his planned departure, in March 2007, never took place, because he was 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 — including videotaping a statement from him, or allowing him to testify from Morocco — but these options were turned down by the military authorities, who continued to hold him without even offering him an explanation.

On December 6, 2007, over a year after he was cleared for release, al-Boujaadia finally testified on Hamdan’s behalf. His testimony was apparently required because he was seized on the same day as Hamdan, but although he recalled seeing Hamdan lying face down on the floor in the makeshift Afghan prison he was taken to after his capture, he had no other information to offer. Even so, it took the authorities another five months to release him.

Imprisoned on his return, al-Boujaadia is happy to submit to any investigations that the Moroccan government thinks appropriate, as Clive Stafford Smith reported during a visit to Morocco in March. As Stafford Smith added on Friday, however, “We respectfully request that the Government of Morocco complete any investigation of Mr. al-Boujaadia quickly, so he may be swiftly reunited with his wife, his children and his elderly mother.”

In a second article to follow, Andy looks at the stories of the Afghans released with Sami al-Haj, Amir Yacoub al-Amir, Walid Ali and Said al-Boujaadia.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Anti-war.com and AlterNet.

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers (and variations on the spelling of their names) are as follows:

ISN 720: Amir Yacoub al-Amir (Yacoub Mahmoud) (Sudan)
ISN 81: Walid Ali (Sudan)
ISN 150: Said al-Boujaadia (Morocco)

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).

Sami, along with British resident Binyam Mohamed, who remains in Guantánamo, is featured in Lush’s “Guantánamo Garden” bath ballistic, which dissolves to reveal a picture of one of the two men, and a link to the website of the legal action charity Reprieve, which represents Sami, Binyam and 35 other prisoners in Guantánamo, and is the beneficiary of the company’s latest campaign.

Lush is to be congratulated for fearlessly celebrating Sami’s release — and for pointing out that thousands of other men are still being held without charge or trial in US-run prisons around the world — because, as I reported when the initiative began, the company immediately ran into trouble in Reading, where the owners of the Oracle shopping centre objected to a similar poster requesting “A Fair Trial for Sami/Binyam” by claiming that it contravened the terms of the lease, which stipulated that retailers were prohibited from displaying signs which, “in the reasonable opinion of the Landlord,” are of a “distasteful, offensive or political nature.”

This act of political censorship provoked a stern rebuke from Reprieve, whose Director, Clive Stafford Smith, pointed out, “The management of the Oracle at Reading has failed to demonstrate why a fair trial is either distasteful or political,” and added that “numerous avowedly political campaigns have been — and continue to be — presented in the centre’s stores. Topshop, for example, has rightfully campaigned for Fair Trade, and Lush itself has campaigned against animal testing and against unnecessary packaging, without attracting criticism from the management.” He concluded that the Oracle’s position was, inexplicably, “Fair trade is okay, fair trials are not.”

The Oracle was not the only venue for critics who seemed to have swallowed the US administration’s long-derided claims that men held without charge or trial can be described as “the worst of the worst.” Lush’s own customers, commenting on the “Guantánamo Garden” page, seemed to be divided about the merits of the campaign, and it remains to be seen whether this latest statement by Lush will bring forth critics anxious to deride the company for promoting the release of a “terrorist.”

I think not, somehow, but I may be wrong.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on Indymedia.

After an emotional reunion with Mohammed, Sami summoned the strength to greet Sudan’s President, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who visited him in his hospital room, accompanied by dozens of ministers, and then gave the world another message via Opheera McDoom of Reuters, explaining that the prisoners in Guantánamo had been subjected to “all kinds of torture,” but that what affected them most deeply was when the guards insulted Islam or desecrated the Holy Qu’ran.

”Security and human rights are inseparable issues — you cannot have one without the other,” he said, adding, “Human rights are not only for times of peace — you need to hold onto them always even during difficult times and times of war.” He concluded with some choice words for his former captors, which — in light of the well-documented abuse he suffered in US custody, and the agonies of his 480-day hunger strike — will no doubt reverberate around the world: ”My last message to the US administration is that torture will not stop terrorism — torture is terrorism.”

Sami and Mohammed (from al-Jazeera).

For a 15-minute al-Jazeera broadcast about Sami, featuring scenes of his arrival and his emotional reunion with his son Mohammed, see below:

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK), and in 2008 was the Communications Officer for the legal action charity Reprieve, which has represented Sami since 2005. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

A composite article, based on this and my previous two articles on Sami’s release, was published on AlterNet.

Speaking to reporters from a hospital bed, Sami said, “I’m very happy to be in Sudan, but I’m very sad because of the situation of our brothers who remain in Guantánamo. Conditions in Guantánamo are very, very bad and they get worse by the day. Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values.”

He added, “In Guantánamo, you have animals that are called iguanas, and rats that are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than 50 countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges. And they will not give them the rights that they give to animals.” “For more than seven years,” he continued, the prisoners “did not get a chance to be brought before a civil court to defend their just case, and to get the freedom they were deprived of. They [the Americans] ignored every kind of law, every kind of religion, but thank God I was lucky because God allowed that I be released.”

“Although I’m happy,” he continued, “there is part of me that is not, because my brothers remain behind, and they are in the hands of people that claim to be champions of peace and protectors of rights and freedoms, but the true, just peace doesn’t come from military force, or threats to use smart or stupid bombs, or to threaten with economic sanctions. Justice comes from lifting oppression, and guaranteeing rights and freedoms, and respecting the will of the people, and not to interfere in a country’s internal politics.”

Wadah Khanfar, the director general of al-Jazeera, who was in Khartoum to welcome Sami back, was “overwhelmed with joy” at Sami’s safe return, but was critical of how the US military had treated him, persistently attempting to recruit him to spy on al-Jazeera, to “prove” a link between the network and Osama bin Laden that does not exist.

“We are concerned about the way the Americans dealt with Sami, and we are concerned about the way they could deal with others as well,” he said, adding, perhaps in response to rumours that, as a condition of his release, the US administration had stipulated that Sami must not leave Sudan, and must not work as a journalist, “Sami will continue with al-Jazeera, he will continue as a professional person who has done great jobs during his work with al-Jazeera. We congratulate his family and all those who knew Sami and loved Sami and worked for this moment.”

To watch the interview with Sami on YouTube, see below:

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

Instead, one prisoner died — of cancer — and another prisoner was actually transferred into Guantánamo from a secret prison run by the CIA. My suspicion, which I have spoken about, but not to date written about, was that, having announced in February that six prisoners allegedly connected with the 9/11 attacks were to face a trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo, the administration was happy to drag its heels over the fate of the roughly 200 prisoners (out of the remaining 272) who are unlikely ever to face a trial, in the probably mistaken belief that the 9/11 trials — which will, inevitably, be wracked with allegations of torture — will secure the legacy of the Bush administration and divert attention from these other men.

The most celebrated Guantánamo prisoner in the Middle East — if not in the West — Sami, whose story I reported at length here, just a few weeks ago, was seized by Pakistani forces on December 15, 2001, apparently at the behest of the US authorities, who suspected that he had conducted an interview with Osama bin Laden. As with much of their supposed intelligence, this turned out to be false, but as his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, the Director of the legal action charity Reprieve (which represents Sami and 34 other Guantánamo prisoners), explained last year, “name me a journalist who would turn down a bin Laden scoop.”

As a trained journalist, Sami’s insights into the horrors of Guantánamo have been unparalleled. Subjected to clearance by the Pentagon’s censors, his letters and his conversations with his lawyers at Reprieve have shed light on the abuse of the Koran, suicide attempts, hunger strikes and the number of juveniles held at the prison.

For the last 16 months of his imprisonment, Sami was himself a hunger striker. Although the ethics of the medical profession stipulate that a mentally competent hunger striker cannot be force-fed, the US authorities disagreed. Twice a day, for the last 480 days, Sami was strapped into a restraint chair, secured with 16 separate straps, and force-fed against his will via a tube inserted into his stomach through his nose.

Greeting the news of his release, Clive Stafford Smith said, “This is wonderful news, and long overdue. The US administration has never had any reason for holding Mr. al-Haj, and has, instead, spent six years shamelessly attempting to turn him against his employers at al-Jazeera. We at Reprieve send him our best wishes as he is reunited with his wife and his seven-year old son Mohammed, whom he has not seen since Mohammed was a baby.”

Also released — subject to final confirmation — were two other Sudanese prisoners, a Moroccan and six Afghans, whose stories I’ll report on in the following days.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK), and was the Communications Officer for Reprieve in 2008. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post.

Note: Sami’s prisoner number was ISN 345. For more on his story, see here, here and here.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).