“The World Has Forgotten Me” Says Ahmed Rabbani, 95-Pound Hunger Striker in Guantánamo

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Over 16 and a half years since the ill-conceived prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, and over two and a half years into the presidency of Donald Trump, the terrible injustice of Guantánamo has, sadly, largely slipped off the radar.

The reasons are many — and none reflect well on the US, its institutions and its people. The American people have never cared sufficiently about what is being done in their name at Guantánamo, where the fundamental right not to be imprisoned without due process has been done away with since the prison opened, a product of the country’s all-consuming vengeance after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Few people, it seems, either know or care that very few people accused of terrorism have actually been held at Guantánamo, and that most of those held were foot soldiers in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan, or civilians swept up in incompetent dragnets, and that the majority — whether soldiers or civilians — were not “captured on the battlefield,” but were sold to the US by their Afghan and Pakistani allies.

When it comes to America’s institutions, everyone has failed to live up to their responsibilities — President Obama, for example, who took eight years to fail to close the prison, despite promising to do so on his second day in office; Congress, where lawmakers generally take little interest in anything other than appeasing big business; and the courts, who have failed to fundamentally challenge the lawlessness of Guantánamo.

In addition, the liberal media have failed to sufficiently challenge the ongoing existence of Guantánamo because they are generally reactive, rather than pro-active (unlike the right-wing media, whose interest in any kind of “balanced” reporting is non-existent). So although Trump is a vile racist with a contempt for due process, and wants to keep Guantánamo open, and not to release anyone under any circumstances, and although he also supports the use of torture, and would send new prisoners to Guantánamo if the opportunity arose, so long as he doesn’t do anything specific, the persistent and glaring injustice of the prison’s daily existence is invisible to the mainstream liberal media, and the men languishing there are essentially forgotten.

In the absence of any kind of continuum of outrage, advocates for the prison’s closure have to work harder than ever to get media coverage, and to find new angles to entice the jaded and/or indifferent mainstream media to remember their responsibilities.

One angle that has often worked over the years is to get a prisoner to speak directly to the American people, as, of course, the prisoners have always, as a general rule, been shrouded in secrecy, and remain so under Donald Trump. And one recent success was an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Ahmed Rabbani, a Pakistani taxi driver represented by the lawyer-led human rights organization Reprieve.

Of the 40 men still held at Guantánamo, Rabbani is one of 26 accurately described by the media under President Obama as “forever prisoners” — men neither approved for release nor put forward for prosecution, but held without charge or trial on the basis that they are allegedly too dangerous to release, but that insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial.

These men are eligible for parole-style reviews, known as the Periodic Review Boards, which President Obama established to mitigate the legal and ethical horror of his decision to hold a certain number of prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial. In his last three years in office, the PRBs led to 64 prisoners having their cases reviewed, and 38 men being approved for release. All but two of the men were freed before Obama left the White House, but while the greatest injustice of the Trump years regarding Guantánamo is his refusal to even contemplate honoring the decisions to release these other two men (and three others approved for release under Obama’s first review process back in 2009), the reality of the PRBs under Trump is that they too seem to have become meaningless, the limits of their ability to recommend prisoners for release reached under Obama, based purely on perceptions of contrition and the presentation of convincing post-prison plans for a peaceful life, and their remit also presumably revised under Trump to try and ensure that no more prisoners end up being approved for release.

As a result, Rabbani, a former CIA “black site” prisoner subjected to torture, who has always maintained that he is a taxi driver seized by mistake, is one of the 26 “forever prisoners” who remains imprisoned — and generally silenced — unless his lawyers can find an outlet for his voice.

Last year, some of his paintings were included in a powerful exhibition of paintings by prisoners and ex-prisoners in New York that briefly attracted worldwide attention after the Pentagon responded to it in a heavy-handed manner, and he is also one of the plaintiffs in the only high-profile court case that is currently taxing the pro-Guantánamo lawyers that Trump inherited from George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the Justice Department. He has now found another outlet, via the op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that I mentioned above, which I’m cross-posting below. Because of new rules regarding internet access, readers outside the US cannot currently read the article online, but Reprieve made it available on their website, which is where I took it from.

It’s an important reminder of how the default position for the Guantánamo prisoners is voicelessness, and yet, at the same time, how important it is to hear from them so they can attest to the ongoing dehumanization that the prison inflicts on the men still held there — for the most part, like Rabbani, “forever prisoners” stranded beyond any recognizable form of due process, and dealt with on a daily basis in a manner that, at best, is opaque, and, at worst, still veiled in horrendous and unjustifiable secrecy.

Far too few Americans even know that only the prisoners’ lawyers are potentially able to bring messages about them to the outside world, and, in addition, that this is entirely subject to their notes being cleared by the Pentagon’s censorship review process. What happens is that every word that is uttered between prisoners and their lawyers, as written down by the lawyers in attorney-client meetings, is presumptively classified, and remains so unless military officials deign to mark it as unclassified.

In Rabbani’s op-ed, he not only points out how he is still, essentially, arbitrarily detained, but also reminds the world of the plight of hunger strikers at Guantánamo like himself, telling us that he currently weighs just 95 pounds, and reflecting on the torture to which he was subjected by the CIA, and which haunts him still.

It is a grim and bleak story, and yet a hugely important one, which shames America, and which deserves to be far more widely reported until the day finally comes when the disgusting and disgraceful prison at Guantánamo Bay is finally closed for good.

I’m stuck in Guantánamo and the world has forgotten about me
By Ahmed Rabbani

Ahmed is a taxi driver from Karachi, Pakistan, who has been detained without trial at Guantánamo Bay for almost 14 years. He is represented by Reprieve.

The world has forgotten me.

Though I once had friends, now I have nobody. Though I once had a government, Pakistan has turned its back on me. Though I once was a human being, I have been reduced to a number (1461) and abandoned in a dark hole: the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

I am officially a prisoner of war, though the only battle I ever fought back home, as a taxi driver in Karachi, was the rush hour traffic. I was mistaken for an extremist, captured by Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s government and sold to the CIA for a bounty. I’ve now been detained at Guantánamo, without trial, for nearly 14 years.

President Trump’s lawyers argued in court last week that I and other Guantánamo prisoners who have filed habeas corpus petitions could be held by the U.S. government for a hundred years, if that is how long the “conflict” lasts.

We are said to be the most dangerous prisoners in the world. Yet in the years since this prison was opened, there have been no murders here, no escape attempts, no drugs. The only deaths have been those of the nine men ho succumbed to health problems or took their own lives. The only alleged sexual abuse has been at the hands of American interrogators.

The Miami Herald reports that, to operate Guantánamo Bay prison, it costs $11 million per prisoner per year. That would be more than $30,000 a day just for me.

I have gone on hunger strikes many times to peacefully protest my imprisonment. I am back to not eating, but this time it’s not a strike. I have chronic stomach problems so acute that I cannot consume hard food without vomiting blood. I am slowly disappearing, dropping a pound a week. I currently weigh 95 pounds.

I have asked for papaya and figs, as well as lamb, the only meat soft enough for my stomach to digest. Although a previous commander said I could have what I needed, I am not getting it.

For a while we had a physician whom we called Dr. Unfortunately. “Unfortunately you can’t have this,” he would say. “Unfortunately you can’t have that.”

Now we have Dr. Surprise. “They have approved your food, except the lamb,” he said recently. “I am surprised you are not getting it.”

Instead of giving me papaya and figs and lamb, the guards force-feed me cans of nutritional formula. They used to let us receive liquid food while watching television. Now they strap my hands and legs down in a restraint chair. (We call it the “torture chair.”)

I have withstood a lot of torture. Before they brought me to Guantánamo, the Americans took me to a black site in Kabul known as the Dark Prison, where my hands were shackled overhead for days on end. Do you have any idea how painful that is, with your shoulders gradually dislocating? Maybe you read in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report about the prisoner who tried to cut off his own hand to end the pain. That was me.

Torture makes you go mad. Sometimes I catch myself going mad again now. Every time I am force-fed, every time I meet with my lawyer, every time I see a doctor, they use some kind of metal detector device to do a cavity search. They have never found anything in all these years. What I am meant to be hiding, I have no idea. It is pointless. But I have to wonder if the radiation it emits isn’t my own private Hiroshima or Nagasaki — four, six, eight times a day. Maybe I am paranoid, but I feel that something bad is happening to me, deep inside.

When someone says, “Good morning,” I do not respond anymore. There is no morning and no evening. There is only despair.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

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