[Marinir] James Meek - Welcome to Guantanamo (1) ...

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Subject: [Nasional] FW: James Meek - Welcome to Guantanamo: A special
investigation into the prison that shames American justice. (1)
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People the law forgot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098604,00.html
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098604,00.html>

By James Meek.

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From: sidqy suyitno [mailto:sidqy_suyitno@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 10:12 AM
To: cinta bappenas; Alumni TI-79; ITB-79@yahoogroups.com;
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Subject: Welcome to Guantanamo: A special investigation into the prison that
shames American justice.

Wednesday December 3, 2003

The Guardian

It is almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened.
Its purpose is to hold people seized in the 'war on terror' and defined by
the Bush administration as enemy combatants - though many appear to
have been bystanders to the conflict.
Images of Camp Delta's orange-jumpsuited, manacled detainees have
provoked international outrage. But the real horror they face isn't physical
hardship, it is the threat of infinite confinement, without trial or access
to
legal representation. James Meek has spent the past month talking to
former inmates and some of those involved in operating the Pentagon's
Kafkaesque justice system. He has built an unprecedented picture of life
on the base, which we present in this special issue

One summer's day in Cuba in 2002, a 31-year-old Pakistani teacher of English
named Abdul Razaq noticed something unusual in the familiar patterns of
movement among the orange-suited figures in the mesh cages on either side of
him. Two or three cages along from his own, a fellow Pakistani prisoner,
Shah Mohammed, was silently going about trying to hang himself from a sheet
lashed to the mesh. He had the cloth around his throat and he was choking.

Other prisoners in neighbouring cells had noticed and, as they usually did
when a detainee in the United States prison camp in Guantanamo Bay tried to
kill himself, they raised a hue and cry in their many languages.

"First we shouted at Shah Mohammed to stop, but when he didn't, we called
the guards," says Razaq, who was released from Guantanamo in July, and
returned to his home town in October after three months' detention by the
Pakistani authorities. "The guards came in and saved him. It was the first
time he attempted this in my block, then he was taken to another place. He
appeared to be unconscious."

It was one of four suicide attempts by Mohammed while he was in Guantanamo.
He was released in May and lives in the Swat Valley, on the far side of the
Malakand Hills from Peshawar, a few dozen miles from Razaq's home. It is a
district of God-fearing, conservative, cricket-loving yeomen, who are
passionate about their land and liberty, and protective of their right to
bear arms; the fields of sugar cane and toba cco are well tended, and prices
in the gun shops are more reasonable than their counterparts in America. In
the mornings, a crocodile of small boys in black berets, walking to school,
stretches for miles.

Mohammed, who is 23 and a baker by trade, is 5ft 3in and light on his feet.
He has been having nightmares ever since he came back. His face peers out
from behind a lustrous black beard and long hair like a child hiding between
the winter coats in a wardrobe. In Kandahar and Guantanamo, he was
interrogated 10 times.

His face only lights up when you ask about fishing. He has been doing a lot
of it - mostly for trout - since his return. The other day he caught a
five-pounder with his Japanese rod. "The biggest damage is to my brain.
My physical and mental state isn't right. I'm a changed person," he says.
"I don't laugh or enjoy myself much."

Asked why he tried to commit suicide so often, Mohammed is vague.
He talks about worries over troubles at home; his mother's health, his
brother's business, and "my own problems". But his attempts at self-harm
at Guantanamo began after he was confined, without explanation, in a
sealed punishment cell for a month - not, it seems, because he had broken
camp rules, but because the American authorities had nowhere else to put
him while they were finishing new facilities.

In India Block, as the block of punishment cells is known, "there were no
windows. There were four walls and a roof made of tin, a light bulb and an
air conditioner. They put the air conditioning on and it was extremely cold.
They would take away the blanket in the morning and bring it back in the
evening. I was kept in this room for one month. We'd ask them: 'Is this a
sort of a punishment?' And the translator would say, 'No, this is being done
on orders from the general.'"

As treatment for Mohammed's suicidal state of mind, US medics injected him
with an unknown drug, against his will. "I refused and they brought seven or
eight people and held me and injected me," he says. "I couldn't see down, I
couldn't see up. I felt paralysed for one month - this injection, the
effect, I couldn't think or do anything. They gave me tranquillising
tablets. They just told me: 'Your brain is not working properly.' They were
forcing me to take these injections and tablets and I didn't want to do
that. Some people were being injected every month."

In trying to learn what life is like at the US prison camp at Guantanamo,
the few score of released detainees - almost all Pakistanis and Afghans -
are among the scant sources available. Journalists are allowed to "visit"
the facility; the Guardian has been three times, and I was offered a slot,
but journalists, like family members, lawyers and human rights
investigators, have no access to the detainees themselves. Like a tour of
the White House, the visits offer a superficial openness about the lives of
the main occupants.

Yet the testimony of those former detainees, together with rare scraps of
information from censored mail, official statements and the odd comment from
guards and others who have been inside, overlaps into a coherent portrait.
In the almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened to hold
people seized by the US in what the Bush administration has designated "the
war on terror", it has settled from a rough and ready, occasionally brutal
place of confinement into a full-grown mongrel of international law, where
all the harshness of the punitive US prison system is visited on foreigners,
unmitigated by any of the legal rights US prisoners enjoy. To this is added
the mentally corrosive threat, alien to the US constitution, of infin ite
confinement, without court or appeal, on the whim of a single man - the
president of the US. The question, "What is Guantanamo really like?", has
all the appeal of the unknown. But inside it lurks a darker question, with
all the implications for freedom in America and beyond that its answer
contains: "What is Guantanamo?"

One of the few political statements to slip past the censors by a man still
detained there is contained in a short postcard from a French prisoner,
Nizar Sassi, to his family, dated August 2002. "If you want a definition of
this place," he wrote, "you don't have the right to have rights."

The US executive acted quickly in the weeks following the September 11
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Within 26 days, Afghanistan
was being attacked from the air; Kabul fell in nine weeks. Eleven weeks
after the World Trade Centre was destroyed, resistance by Taliban fighters
and their non-Afghan allies in northern Afghanistan was crushed.

But, as US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the military in a
revealing slip in April 2002, "We have been successful in not eliminating
al-Qaida." Having failed to find the suspected mastermind behind 9/11,
Osama bin Laden, his Taliban ally, Mullah Omar, or much in the way of
terrorist infrastructure, the US set about constructing, behind razor wire
on a secure Caribbean island, an incarcerated model of what its "war on
terror"
rhetoric implies.
It has gathered terrorism suspects from all over the world, imposed
discipline and order on them, encouraged them to hate the US and kept
them together for years. It was as if the Bush administration so wanted the
Hollywood fantasy of a central terrorist campus to be true that they built
it themselves.