[Marinir] James Meek - Welcome to Guantanamo (3) ...

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From: "K.Prawira" <k.prawira@wanadoo.nl>
To: "Milis Nasional" <national@mail2.factsoft.de>
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 3:31 AM
Subject: [Nasional] FW: James Meek - Welcome to Guantanamo: A special
investigation into the prison that shames American justice. (3)
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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

Saghir says that, as with the arrival at Kandahar, the detainees, still
bound,
gagged and blindfolded, were thrown off the plane on arrival in Cuba.
Some had their noses broken, he says. "I got a bruise under my left eye
where my face hit the ground."

The first prisoners were moved from the runway to a truck, from there to a
launch across the bay, and from there to the bare mesh cages which would be
their home for the first few months of 2002, the original detention centre,
Camp X-Ray. Those initial images of blinded, deafened, mute and bound men
in glaring orange became a potent weapon in the hands of those who opposed
the manner in which the Bush administration was coping with terrorism,
particularly in Europe and the Muslim world. A country which would not
countenance an international crimina l court, the pictures seemed to say,
had built a harsh international jail. The bizarre setup of Guantanamo
itself, a fortified American toehold in one of the world's last outposts of
communism, added to the sense of prisoners being cast into the centre of
concentric circles of isolation. Cubans remember, if few others do, that the
world's first concentration camps were built on their island by the Spanish
in the 1890s.

In the first few weeks of Camp X-Ray's existence, the regime was even
harsher than it looked from the pictures of tiny cages. The prisoners were
not allowed to speak to each other, not even in a whisper. "I spent the
first month in utter silence," says Mohammed.

According to Saghir, in this initial, relatively brutal phase of Guantanamo,
there was little tolerance for the practice of Islam, with its requirement
of prayer five times a day. "In the first one-and-a-half months they
wouldn't let us speak to anyone, wouldn't let us call for prayers or pray in
the room," he says. "We were only given 10 minutes for eating. I tried to
pray and four or five commandos came and they beat me up.
If someone would try to make a call for prayer they would beat him up
and gag him. After one-and-a-half months, we went on hunger strike."

US officials at the camp have admitted hunger strikes did take place there-
in some cases, prisoners were force fed - but in the minds of the detainees,
they have been associated with protests that have achieved results.
According to Saghir, it was only after a mass four-day hunger strike that
the no-talking rule was lifted, a loudspeaker was put up to broadcast the
call to prayer, more time was given for meals, and Korans and other books
were provided. Mohammed says that an eight-day hunger strike when a guard
had thrown the Koran on the ground had ended with a personal apology
from a senior officer and a promise that the Koran would not be touched
again.

Razaq, who arrived after Camp X-Ray had already shut down, said that the
culture of protest was a feature of life in Guantanamo. "In the beginning
there was a mass hunger strike, but later on there were individual cases of
people not eating," he says. In other cases detainees would take off their
plastic tags carrying their US identification codes and throw them at the
guards, or would bang o n their metal benches.
Sometimes the guards would use a disabling gas in response.

"When we threw off our tags the guards asked us to hand over our blankets,
but two of our colleagues didn't oblige, so they sprayed them to make them
unconscious, tied them up and took them to the punishment block; during
that transfer they were quite brutal," says Razaq.
"But I didn't see any slapping."

Life in X-Ray became easier after the no-talking rule was lifted.
The camp authorities appear to have instituted a kind of linguistic mosaic,
giving detainees a reasonable chance of finding someone to talk to, but
without allowing too large a cluster of people speaking the same language.
Mohammed sketches out the group of 10 cages he was in in X-Ray.
His immediate neighbours were Hicks, a Bangladeshi, two Arabs whose
names he does not remember, and Rokhanay, from northern Afghanistan.
Slightly further away, but still in talking distance, was Asif Iqbal from
Tipton, another Arab, Abu Nakar, and two southern Afghans, Wasiq
and  Nurullah.
"Asif was at an advantage because he was able to speak to the Americans
in English," says Mohammed. "He was like my translator.
He had just come for a visit to Pakistan and then went to Afghanistan.
He never intended to wage Jihad. He would swear at the guards from time
to time. Sometimes, on some issue, he would just start yelling at them but
the Americans would not respond. David Hicks knew some Urdu as well,
so I would speak to him, and he would speak to Asif."

The Guantanamo prisoners have no way of knowing what is happening in
the outside world, whether it concerns football scores or the war in Iraq.
Apart from the guards and interrogators, the only contact the prisoners have
is with officials of the international committee of the Red Cross and with
occasional visitors from the intelligence services and foreign ministries of
their home countries. The ICRC never talks about conditions in Guantanamo
and little else has leaked out.

Swedish activists campaigning for the release of Mehdi Ghezali have used
Sweden's freedom of information laws to obtain a censored version of a
report by an intelligence officer, Bo Eriksson, on a visit to Guantanamo
with another Swede in February 2002. It and other documents reveal that the
US was so obsessed with security that it drafted in a Swedish-speaking US
army officer to listen in on the meeting between the agents and Ghezali,
and, even so, got an envoy in Stockholm to ask the Swedes for a copy of
their report into the meeting that they had already listened in on.

"The cells measure approximately 2x3 metres with walls of wire mesh,
concrete floors and metal ceilings," wrote Eriksson. "Inside the cells, the
detainees have a mattress, a blanket, a hand towel, a couple of buckets
and water bottles made from soft plastic. Outside their cells, the detainees
wear orange overalls and plastic slippers. Their freedom of movement is not
restricted to the cells, although outside their cells they wear hand and
feet restraints. The handcuffs are fastened to a belt around their waist
allowing them only restricted movement with their hands and arms.
[Ghezali] only just managed to drink water from a mug with hand
restraints on.

"The leg restraints mean that when detainees are moved they have to move
forward taking very small steps. One of the guards keeps a hand on the back
of the detainee's neck the whole time, bending the detainee's head forwards
so that he is looking at the ground the whole time he is being moved.They
are not tortured, nor do they receive any other degrading treatment. The
mesh cell walls mean of course that the detainees never have a moment's
privacy. On one occasion, detainees had suspended a plastic sheet on the
fence to prevent people from looking in but they had been forced to remove
it since it became unbearably hot despite the cool breeze from the sea."

In April 2002, the prisoners were moved to new accommodation, Camp
Delta, and Camp X-Ray was closed. Their beards grew back.
The new facilities, which make up the main part of the prison camp to this
day, feature blocks of 48 cages each, with two rows of mesh cages
separated by a narrow corridor.
The blocks have no external walls, only a pitched roof; they stand on
concrete
bricks in areas of raked gravel surrounde d by high, opaque green fences
topped by razor wire. The cages are about as long and wide as a tall man
lying down, and contain a metal bunk, a tap and a toilet. Besides this
standard type of accommodation, there are at least six others. There is the
more relaxed regime of Camp Four, where docile, cooperative prisoners are
rewarded with dormitory-style living and free association with other
detainees. Within Camp Four, there is a further category of prisoners,
believed to include Britons Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi, kept isolated
from other prisoners in preparation for being put on trial. In Camp Delta,
there is a special block set aside for three juvenile prisoners, with a view
of the ocean and a less repressive confinement. There is Delta Block, w here
prisoners with mental problems are kept under special observation; and India
Block, and possibly one other block, which contain the punishment isolation
cells.

The Guardian has also learned that a very small number of prisoners, thought
to be between two and five, are kept permanently isolated in a special,
super-secure facility within Camp Delta.

Mohammed, Saghir and Razaq all had experience of the punishment cells.
Saghir says that he was locked up in one of the windowless metal boxes for
more than a week when an Arab spat at a guard and the entire line of 24
cages was punished with solitary.

One of the US justifications for holding the Guantanamo prisoners for so
long in isolation is that they need to be interrogated for valuable
intelligence.
There has been an enormous amount of interrogation; each prisoner has
typically been questioned between 10 and 20 times, which would,
assuming interviews last 90 minutes on average, have generated some
15,000 hours of transcripts, containing perhaps 200 million words, the
equivalent of around 250 Bibles. Yet without exception, the detainees say
they were questioned by different interrogators each time, and each time
the questions were the same.