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Title: Letter from Guantanamo: Jumah al-Dossari
Source:
Boing Boing
URL Source: http://www.boingboing.net
Published: Jan 19, 2007
Author: Boing Boing
Post Date: 2007-01-19 20:55:23 by Zipporah
Keywords: None
Views: 34
Comments: 2
The LAT's editors precede his written account with, "This article was excerpted from letters he wrote to his attorneys. Its contents have been deemed unclassified by the Department of Defense." In January 2002, I was picked up in Pakistan, blindfolded, shackled, drugged and loaded onto a plane flown to Cuba. When we got off the plane in Guantanamo, we did not know where we were. They took us to Camp X-Ray and locked us in cages with two buckets — one empty and one filled with water. We were to urinate in one and wash in the other. At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense lights in my face. They have placed me in cold rooms for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for prayers. They have wrapped me in the Israeli flag and told me there is a holy war between the Cross and the Star of David on one hand and the Crescent on the other. They have beaten me unconscious. What I write here is not what my imagination fancies or my insanity dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees, representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators. (...) I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans. But, why, after five years, is there no conclusion to the situation at Guantanamo? For how long will fathers, mothers, wives, siblings and children cry for their imprisoned loved ones? For how long will my daughter have to ask about my return? The answers can only be found with the fair-minded people of America. Link to story on LA Times website. Or you can listen to a robot read it here. More about Mr. Dossari's case at Amnesty International: Link.
Letter from Guantanamo: Jumah al-Dossari
In the Los Angeles Times, this personal account from Jumah al-Dossari, a 33-year-old man from Bahrain who has been held at the Guantánamo Bay detainment camp for the past four years. He claims to have been tortured while in American custody, including beatings, death threats, prolonged isolation, exposure to extreme cold and sexual assaults. While detained, he has attempted to kill himself more than 12 times: slitting his own throat once, hanging himself in the toilet another.
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#1. To: Zipporah (#0)
talmudic Deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group (GENOCIDE) and it's coming to your town soon
Diary of a Guantánamo Attorney By H. Candace Gorman I fell into the world of Guantánamo in October 2005. The Chicago Council of Lawyers had organized a luncheon discussion on the legal issues surrounding the infamous detention facility at the U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba. I received an e-mail thanking me for my attendance (I should have gone but didn’t) and asking for volunteers to represent the nearly 200 known unrepresented prisoners at the base. I had assumed that I was well-informed about our criminal president and his assault on the rule of law; it never occurred to me that four years after being captured (and more than one year after the Supreme Court affirmed their right to hearing and counsel) individuals were still being held without legal representation. I replied to the e-mail, offering my services. During a conference call for volunteer lawyers, I got a sense of what the job might entail. For example, attorneys are required to turn their client notes over to the government after visiting prisoners. I naively asked, “What about attorney-client privilege?” This, like so many other protections and legal principles, doesn’t apply to Guantánamo. Attorneys often return from the base with urgent news, but have to wait weeks for the government to clear their notes. The government rarely, if ever, classifies the content; this procedure simply delays and encumbers our work. At a workshop for volunteer lawyers organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), I came to learn of the horrific particulars of prisoner life in Guantánamo: the hunger strikes, the suicide attempts and the dubious circumstances under which prisoners had been captured. The vast majority of Guantánamo’s inmates were apprehended in Afghanistan and elsewhere by third party forces, after the United States promised enormous bounties for “murderers and terrorists.” That December, I was assigned a detainee by CCR; his name was Abdul Al- Ghizzawi, a Libyan who had been living in Afghanistan before his capture. Another prisoner had written a letter identifying Al-Ghizzawi as someone who desired an attorney. Because the government would not release the names of detainees, prisoners often reached lawyers through such indirect means. I got to work preparing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus—a petition that challenges the legality of a prisoner’s detention and requests that the court order the authorities to either release the individual or justify his imprisonment with formal charges. It has been a year since I filed the petition, and Al-Ghizzawi is still languishing in Guantánamo. Initially, the government did everything possible to delay and obstruct access to my client. I knew only that my client was ill, that he wanted an attorney and that the government opposed entering the protective order that would allow me to visit and communicate with him. Shortly after I filed the habeas petition, in a false gesture of munificence, the government invited my input into the Justice Department’s review of Al- Ghizzawi’s status. What could I possibly say? As I wrote the review board, “Without knowing the reasons for Mr. Al-Ghizzawi’s detention, it is impossible to address those reasons or the factual basis for continuing to detain him.” I added that I would supplement the submission once I had had a chance to meet and interview him. Eventually, after what then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would call a “long hard slog,” the protective order was entered. In July, eight months after filing the habeas petition, I was finally allowed to go to Guantánamo and meet with my client, a sick and visibly jaundiced man who pined for his wife and young daughter. Al-Ghizzawi was a shopkeeper who sold bread, honey and other goods in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. When the American bombs started falling, he took his wife and daughter to the village where his in-laws lived. He then became one of those unlucky foreigners captured and turned in for a bounty. According to the Bush administration, all of the detainees were apprehended “on the battlefield”— in this case, the quiet home of Al-Ghizzawi’s in-laws. My ultimate aim is to release Al-Ghizzawi and reunite him with his family. However, my immediate goal is to keep him alive. The medical staff at Guantánamo have diagnosed Al-Ghizzawi with tuberculosis and hepatitis B but failed to inform or treat him for either condition. I have been fighting for access to Al-Ghizzawi’s medical records, but a D.C. district judge ruled that we had not demonstrated that he would suffer “irreparable harm” in being denied his records. Imagine, I need his records in order to prove that he will suffer “irreparable harm,” but cannot access them without first proving “irreparable harm.” (I have appealed that ruling.) This is just one example. As I will relate in this space in the coming months, there is no rhyme or reason to the world of Guantánamo—only a cruel inhumanity. Adrian Bleifuss Prados, the author’s law clerk, contributed to this column. H. Candace Gorman is a civil rights attorney in Chicago.
#2. To: Zipporah (#0)
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