- Thomas Wilner is a partner at Shearman
& Sterling, which has been representing Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantanamo
since early 2002.
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- The American prison camp at Guantanamo
Bay is on the southeast corner of Cuba, a sliver of land the United States
has occupied since 1903. Long ago, it was irrigated from lakes on the other
side of the island, but Cuban President Fidel Castro cut off the water
supply years ago. So today, Guantanamo produces its own water from a 30-year-old
desalination plant. The water has a distinct yellow tint. All Americans
drink bottled water imported by the planeload. Until recently, prisoners
drank the yellow water.
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- The prison overlooks the sea, but the
ocean cannot be seen by prisoners. Guard towers and stadium lights loom
along the perimeter. On my last visit, we were escorted by young, solemn
military guards whose nameplates on their shirts were taped over so that
prisoners could not identify them.
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- Very few outsiders are allowed to see
the prisoners. The government has orchestrated some carefully controlled
tours for the media and members of Congress, but has repeatedly refused
to allow these visitors, representatives of the United Nations, human rights
groups or nonmilitary doctors and psychiatrists to meet or speak with prisoners.
So far, the only outsiders who have done so are representatives of the
International Committee of the Red Cross - who are prohibited by their
own rules from disclosing what they find - and lawyers for the prisoners.
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- I am one of those lawyers. I represent
six Kuwaiti prisoners, each of whom has now spent nearly four years at
Guantanamo. It took me 2 1/2 years to gain access to my clients, but now
I have visited the prison camp 11 times in the last 14 months. What I have
witnessed is a cruel and eerie netherworld of concrete and barbed wire
that has become a daily nightmare for the nearly 500 people swept up after
9/11 who have been imprisoned without charges or trial for more than four
years. It is truly our American gulag.
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- On my most recent trip three weeks ago,
after signing a log sheet and submitting our bags to a search, my colleagues
and I were taken through two tall, steel-mesh gates into the interior of
the prison camp.
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- We interviewed our clients in Camp Echo,
one of several camps where prisoners are interrogated. We entered a room
about 13 feet square and divided in half by a wall of thick steel mesh.
On one side was a table where the prisoner would sit for our interviews,
his feet shackled to a steel eyelet cemented to the floor. On the other
side were a shower and a cell just like the ones in which prisoners are
ordinarily confined. In their cells, prisoners sleep on a metal shelf against
the wall, which is flanked by a toilet and sink. They are allowed a thin
foam mattress and a gray cotton blanket.
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- The Pentagon's files on the six Kuwaiti
prisoners we represent reveal that none was captured on a battlefield or
accused of engaging in hostilities against the U.S. The prisoners claim
that they were taken into custody by Pakistani and Afghan warlords and
turned over to the U.S. for bounties ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 - a
claim confirmed by American news reports. We have obtained copies of bounty
leaflets distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. forces promising
rewards - "enough to feed your family for life" - for any "Arab
terrorist" handed over.
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- The files include only the flimsiest
accusations or hearsay that would never stand up in court. The file on
one prisoner indicated that he had been seen talking to two suspected Al
Qaeda members on the same day - at places thousands of miles apart. The
primary "evidence" against another was that he was captured wearing
a particular Casio watch, "which many terrorists wear." Oddly,
the same watch was being worn by the U.S. military chaplain, a Muslim,
at Guantanamo.
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- When I first met my clients, they had
not seen or spoken with their families for more than three years, and they
had been questioned hundreds of times. Several were suspicious of us; they
told me that they had been interrogated by people who claimed to be their
lawyers but who turned out not to be. So we had DVDs made, on which members
of their families told them who we were and that we could be trusted. Several
cried on seeing their families for the first time in years. One had become
a father since he was detained and had never before seen his child. One
noticed his father was not on the DVD, and we had to tell him that his
father had died.
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- Most prisoners are kept apart, although
some can communicate through the steel mesh or concrete walls that separate
their cells. They exercise alone, some only at night. They had not seen
sunlight for months - an especially cruel tactic in a tropical climate.
One prisoner told me, "I have spent almost every moment of the last
three years, and eaten every meal, here in this small cell which is my
bathroom." Other than the Koran, prisoners had nothing to read. As
a result of our protests, some have been given books.
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- Every prisoner I've interviewed claims
to have been badly beaten and subjected to treatment that only could be
called torture, by Americans, from the first day of U.S. captivity in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by their wrists and beaten, hung
by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and paraded before female guards,
and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten again
upon arrival in Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27,
said his ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt the
indentation in his ribs. "Beat me all you want, just give me a hearing,"
he said he told his interrogators.
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- Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25,
is a teacher who left Kuwait City in 2001 to work in Afghan, then Pakistani,
schools. After 9/11, he and four other Kuwaitis were invited to dinner
by a Pakistani tribal leader and then sold by him into captivity, according
to their accounts, later confirmed by Newsweek and ABC News.
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- On Aug. 8, 2005, Fawzi, in desperation,
went on a hunger strike to assert his innocence and to protest being imprisoned
for four years without charges. He said he wanted to defend himself against
any accusations, or die. He told me that he had heard U.S. congressmen
had returned from tours of Guantanamo saying that it was a Caribbean resort
with great food. "If I eat, I condone these lies," Fawzi said.
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- At the end of August, after Fawzi fainted
in his cell, guards began to force-feed him through tubes pushed up his
nose into his stomach. At first, the tubes were inserted for each feeding
and then removed afterward. Fawzi told me that this was very painful. When
he tried to pull out the tubes, he was strapped onto a stretcher with his
head held by many guards, which was even more painful.
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- By mid-September, the force-feeding had
been made more humane. Feeding tubes were left in and the formula pumped
in. Still, when I saw Fawzi, a tube was protruding from his nose. Drops
of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it with a napkin.
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- We asked for Fawzi's medical records
so we could monitor his weight and his health. Denied. The only way we
could learn how Fawzi was doing was to visit him each month, which we did.
When we visited him in November, his weight had dropped from 140 pounds
to 98 pounds. Specialists in enteral feeding advised us that the continued
drop in his weight and other signs indicated that the feeding was being
conducted incompetently. We asked that Fawzi be transferred to a hospital.
Again, the government refused.
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- When we saw Fawzi in December, his weight
had stabilized at about 110 pounds. The formulas had been changed, and
he was being force-fed by medical personnel rather than by guards.
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- When I met with Fawzi three weeks ago,
the tubes were out of his nose. I told him I was thankful that after five
months he had ended his hunger strike. He looked at me sadly and said,
"They tortured us to make us stop." At first, he said, they punished
him by taking away his "comfort items" one by one: his blanket,
his towel, his long pants, his shoes. They then put him in isolation. When
this failed to persuade him to end the hunger strike, he said, an officer
came to him Jan. 9 to announce that any detainee who refused to eat would
be forced onto "the chair." The officer warned that recalcitrant
prisoners would be strapped into a steel device that pulled their heads
back, and that the tubes would be forced in and wrenched out for each feeding.
"We're going to break this hunger strike," the officer told him.
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- Fawzi said he heard the prisoner next
door screaming and warning him to give up the strike. He decided that he
wasn't "on strike to be tortured." He said those who continued
on the hunger strike not only were strapped in "the chair" but
were left there for hours; he believes that guards fed them not only nutrients
but also diuretics and laxatives to force them to defecate and urinate
on themselves in the chair.
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- After less than two weeks of this treatment,
the strike was over. Of the more than 80 strikers at the end of December,
Fawzi said only three or four were holding out. As a result of the strike,
however, prisoners are now getting a meager ration of bottled water.
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- Fawzi said eating was the only aspect
of life at Guantanamo he could control; forcing him to end the hunger strike
stripped him of his last means of protesting his unjust imprisonment. Now,
he said, he feels "hopeless."
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- The government continues to deny that
there is any injustice at Guantanamo. But I know the truth.
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