[Marinir] James Meek - Welcome to Guantanamo (2) .........

[Hong Gie]

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From: "K.Prawira" <k.prawira@wanadoo.nl>
To: "Milis Nasional" <national@mail2.factsoft.de>
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 3:22 AM
Subject: [Nasional] FW: James Meek - Welcome to Guantanamo: A special
investigation into the prison that shames American justice (2)
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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.

-----Original Message-----
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;
IA-ITB@yahoogroups.com; LISI; kudus1977@yahoogroups.com;
forbis@yahoogroups.com; Hasan M Soedjono; K.Prawira
Subject: Welcome to Guantanamo: A special investigation into the prison that
shames American justice.

Wednesday December 3, 2003

The Guardian

Because the roughly 660 detainees still on Guantanamo have no voice, and
because the US has never explained case by case why it locked them up, the
outside world has only the accounts of their families and the catch-all US
definition of "enemy combatant" to understand who they are and why they are
there.

Most were arrested in Afghanistan but many were handed over to the US by
other countries. "They are an extremely heterogenous group. There are some
40 different nationalities, there's 18 different languages," says Daryl
Matthews, a forensic psychiatrist based in Hawaii who spent a week at the
Guantanamo prison camp in May. "There's a big division between Arabic-speaki
ng and Urdu-Pashto-speaking ones. There are some people who are extremely
well educated and westernised, and some people who are not at all. There are
some very young people and some very old and wise people. There are people
who speak English well, people who don't speak English at all. There are
some who go in with mental disorders there are some very secular, and some
deeply devout."

There is Shafiq Rasul from Tipton in the West Midlands, who took his
wardrobe of designer clothes with him to Pakistan, was captured with his
friends Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed by the Northern Alliance, and was handed
over to the US in Shebergan in northern Afghanistan in De cember 2001.
Jamil al-Banna and Bisher al-Rawi, two refugees living in Britain, were
arrested
in the Gambia in west Africa and handed over to the US by the Gambians.
Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar, two other Britons, were arrested in
Pakistan and handed over to the US by the Pakistanis. David Hicks, an
Australian, who had previously led a life of shark fishing and kangaroo
skinning, and had fathered two children, ended up in the Shebergan prison
after fighting with the KLA in Albania and the Kashmiri insurgency group
Lashkar-e-Taiba. Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali, who grew up in the Swedish
town of Rebro and whose father was Algerian and mother Finnish, had a
promising career as a footballer ahead of him before turning up with the
Taliban in Afghanistan and being captured. Nizar Sassi and Mourad
Bechnellali
grew up in Venissieux, a suburb of Lyons. Their lives came to revolve around
the mosque on Lenin Boulevard before they travelled east. Ibrahim Fauzee, a
citizen of the Maldives, was arrested in Karachi while staying in the home
of a man with suspected al-Qaida links. Tarek Dergoul, from east London,
thought to have been arrested during the battle for Tora Bora in southern
Afghanistan, is reported to have had an arm amputated as a result of wounds.
Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese assistant cameraman with the al-Jazeera TV station,
was picked out and held while leaving Afghanistan for Pakistan after the
fall of Kabul with the rest of his crew. They never saw him again. Another
Briton, Martin Mubanga, from north London, was handed over to the US by
Zambia. Jamal Udeen, from Manchester, born into a devout Catholic home,
and converted to Islam in his 20s and was seized in Afghanistan only three
weeks after he left England.
Airat Vakhitov, one of eight Russians on Guantanamo, thought he had been
liberated when a reporter from Le Monde discovered him in a Tali ban jail,
where he had sat in darkness and been beaten for seven months on suspicion
of spying for the KGB. But he only exchanged the Taliban prison for an
American one. And there is Mish al-Hahrbi, a Saudi schoolteacher.
After he tried to kill himself on Guantanamo, he suffered severe and
irreversible
brain damage.

The road for many detainees, including the small number who have since been
released, began with, they claim, a non-combatant reason for being where
they were when they were caught. Mohammed says he went to work for the
Taliban as a baker; Razaq says he was a missionary. They were held by the
Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan, selected by the Alliance to
receive a cursory interview from US special forces or the CIA, and flown to
Kandahar, where they were held for weeks or months before being flown to
Cuba.

Razaq, in his first interview with a journalist, told me he was convinced
the only reason he was sent to Cuba was because he spoke English. He had
been held by the Northern Alliance for a month in Shebergan prison, in
crowded conditions with little food, when Alliance soldiers came and asked
the group of Pakistani, Arab and Uzbek captives who among them spoke
English. Razaq stepped forward.

His hands were tied and he was taken to a small room with mud walls where he
was made to kneel on the ground in front of two Americans in uniform, one
sitting on a mud bench projecting from the wall and the other standing. The
interview took three or four minutes, and consisted of two questions: "What
is your name, and why have you come to Afghanistan?" Afterwards he was
taken outside. He just had time to see a group of bound men with hoods on
their heads sitting in a row before he, too, was hooded.
They were taken to an airfield and flown to Kandahar.
No signal had passed between his interrogators and the soldiers who hooded
him. In other words, on the basis that he knew English, the US had already
decided to take him to Kandahar, whatever the result of this initial
interview.

Another released Pakistani, Mohammed Saghir, a grey-bearded sawmill owner
who is now 53, tells me that he had not even had a cursory interview at
Shebergan before he was bound hand and foot, blindfolded and helicoptered
to Kandahar.

Shah Mohammed was held at a prison in Mazar-i-Sharif, near Shebergan,
before being sent to Kandahar. He met Hicks, the Australian, while he was
there.
There were early signs of the differential treatment, apparently according
to national background and skin colour, that was to be one of the
characteristics of the US handling of terror suspects. "I spoke to the
Australian, he knew a bit of Urdu," says Mohammed. "He said he had come
for Jihad. He was asked a lot of questions [by the Americans], more than us.
He was taken to a navy ship and I was taken to Kandahar."
Mohammed was to see Hicks again.

The released detainees recount the roughness with which they were treated at
Kandahar, from the moment of their transport there. "One thing I've learned
about the Americans is they are very harsh when they transport people
around," says Razaq. "They had tied up my hands so tight that for two months
I couldn't use my right hand. They haul you from your neck and drop you off
the plane in a very disrespectful manner. For a long time we didn't know it
was Kandahar. We thought they were going to kill us there."

"They would just pick us up and throw us out [of the plane]," says Saghir.
"Some people were hurt, some quite badly." Mohammed says:
"They kicked us out of the plane and threw us on the ground."

The accommodation at Kandahar was uncomfortable. Prisoners slept and sat
in small groups under canvas canopies, on the bare earth, surrounded by
razor
wire and under constant surveillance. They were given a single blanket each.
It was winter. Razaq says that the bottled water they were given to drink
would be frozen in the mornings. He said that for the first 20 days, a
strict no-talking rule was enforced. Saghir describes how no one had been
allowed to sleep for more than an hour. "If someone slept for an hour they
would yell at him: Get him up!"

The prisoners were interrogated steadily, with long intervals between
sessions.
"We used to ask them: 'Why are we being kept here?'" says Mohammed.
"They would reply: 'You will be interrogated, and whoever is found
innocent will be allowed to go.' They never told us we would be taken to
Cuba.'"

Razaq was one of the last to leave Kandahar. He saw the camp emptying around
him. From his testimony, it appears that once a detainee was committed to
Kandahar, the vast US military bureaucracy could only send people to
Guantanamo. "I don't know what made them suspect me, but there were
rumours that they arrested me because they thought I was a very senior
Taliban
official," he says. "In f act, in the last interrogation at Kandahar, the
American interrogator gave me water to drink and assured me I would be
released.

"This assurance was given to me on several occasions. I never knew where
they were taking the people who disappeared. We asked the Red Cross, but
they wouldn't give us any information. But there was this gate through which
we could see people in red costumes in the distance. At the end, it seemed
they just wanted to send everyone to Cuba and I was in the last group."

The last thing the US captors did before dispatching the Kandahar detainees
to Cuba was shave off their beards, a process they found humiliating. Razaq
was told it was because, without showers, they had picked up lice. "We
resisted, but four or five commandos came and they had a machine and just
shaved off my beard and moustache," says Saghir.

For the flight to Cuba, the prisoners were given the orange jumpsuits
familiar from television footage of their arrival at Guantanamo. They were
bound hand and foot, blindfolded, gagged, and their ears were muffled. Once
on board the military transport plane, their feet were chained to the floor,
their hands bound to the handrests, and restraining straps stretched across
their bodies. "The translator told us: 'Don't make any movement, don't
worry, you are being taken home,'" says Mohammed. "I don't remember how
many hours but we left at night from Kandahar and arrived in Cuba in the
evening.
We stopped somewhere and changed planes."