Slow Murder at Guantánamo as Profoundly Disabled Torture Victim Is Sentenced to Another Eight Years
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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
Three weeks ago, a grave injustice took place at Guantánamo, when Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a 62- or 63-year old Iraqi citizen whose real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, and who is Guantánamo’s most profoundly disabled prisoner, was given the maximum sentence possible by a military jury at his sentencing for war crimes in the prison’s military court. The jury gave him a 30-year sentence, although, under a plea deal agreed in June 2022, that was reduced to ten years, meaning that he will not, apparently, be freed from the prison until June 2032.
The reason this is a problem is that al-Iraqi suffers from a chronic degenerative spinal disease, which has not been been dealt with adequately despite the seven surgical interventions he has received in the medical facilities at Guantánamo. Shamefully, prisoners are forbidden, through US law, from being transferred to to the US mainland to receive specialist medical treatment even though grave physical problems like al-Iraqi’s cannot be properly addressed in Guantánamo’s limited medical facilities. All of these problems were highlighted in a devastating 18-page opinion about al-Iraqi’s treatment, which was issued by number of UN Special Mandates on January 11, 2023, the 21st anniversary of the prison’s opening, and which I wrote about here.
The sentence seems particularly punitive because there is no guarantee that al-Iraqi will even survive until 2032, and it is certainly possible, if not probable that, if he does survive, he will by then be completely paralyzed. Two years ago, when the plea deal was announced (which I wrote about here), sentencing was delayed for two years to allow the US government “to find a sympathetic nation to receive him and provide him with lifelong medical care,” and also to hold him while he serves out the rest of his sentence, as Carol Rosenberg explained at the time for the New York Times, given that he cannot be repatriated because of the security situation in Iraq.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
