Bobby Sands revisited

[Penta]

Published on Sunday, October 2, 2005 by The Nation
Gitmo's Hunger Strikers
by Clive Stafford Smith

"I am slowly dying in this solitary prison cell," says Omar Deghayes, a British refugee and Guantánamo Bay prisoner. "I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?"

This magazine goes to press on the forty-ninth day of the Guantánamo hunger strike. In 1981 near Belfast, Bobby Sands and nine other members of the IRA starved themselves to death. The prisoners had insisted that they be treated as POWs rather than criminals. They died before the British government accepted that its use of kangaroo courts and its policy of "criminalization" did not just betray democratic principles; these methods functioned as the most persuasive recruiting sergeant the IRA ever had. How soon these lessons are forgotten. Three and a half years of internment without trial in Guantánamo, and any US claim to be the standard-bearer of the rule of law has dissolved.

But there are two important distinctions between the experience of Sands and Omar Deghayes: The US military has insisted on secrecy regarding Guantánamo, and the US media have been compliant in their apathy. Despite the traditional British hostility to free speech, every moment of Bobby Sands's decline was broadcast live. In contrast, nothing we lawyers learn from our Guantánamo clients can be revealed until it passes the US government censors. Thus, two weeks went by before the public even knew there was a hunger strike, and the military has been allowed to dissemble on the details since.

From its inception, Guantánamo has relied on a soldier-speak that is replete with half-truths and distortions. In 2002 there was a ripple of concern at the number of Guantánamo detainees trying to take their own lives. The military then announced that suicide attempts had radically declined. It took a foreign journalist to expose the truth: The very word "suicide" had been replaced by the authorities with the term Manipulative Self-Injurious Behavior (SIB)--and there were still plenty of SIBs. The military was lying by semantics.

Similar dissimulation is taking place around the Guantánamo hunger strike, which began June 28. It was suspended July 28, when the military promised various concessions, terrified at the public relations prospect of having six prisoners in the hospital within forty-eight hours of death. The strike started again on August 11, because the detainees concluded that the military had broken its promises.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has insisted that the Guantánamo prisoners are being treated in a manner "consistent" with the Geneva Conventions. To end their hunger strike, the detainees ask simply that they be treated in a manner "consistent with the Geneva Conventions." If Rumsfeld is telling the truth, why would the prisoners have to starve themselves to death?

The Conventions mandate that, unless convicted of a crime, "prisoners of war may not be held in close confinement." In Camp V each detainee is held in a Supermax solitary cell, hermetically sealed from all human contact, allowed out for just one hour each week. The detainees there include juveniles and even Sami Al Laithi, held for more than four months in his wheelchair after being found innocent by the US military's own biased tribunals.

The Conventions forbid coercive interrogations. The prisoners reasonably objected when, on August 5, Hisham Sliti had a mini-refrigerator thrown at him by an interrogator nicknamed King Kong.

The Conventions guarantee the free exercise of religion. So why, the detainees demand, haven't they been allowed to meet with an imam for three years? Why is collective prayer curtailed? And why was a Yemeni prisoner recently beaten and his Koran trampled because he asked to finish his prayers before responding to a guard's demand?

The conclusion is inescapable: The detainees have a series of valid complaints, and Rumsfeld is not telling the truth.

Governments did learn one lesson from Bobby Sands: He is famous because he died. The US military is determined not to allow its prisoners to make this ultimate, tragic political statement. Thus, the military admits to force-feeding prisoners. Recently its spin doctors changed the phrase to "assisted feeding," another attempt to hide the truth of what is going on. During the July hunger strike, prisoners tore the needles out of their arms to prevent drip-feeding, so the military is now using nose tubes. They assure us that none of the twenty-one people in the Guantánamo hospital will be able to kill himself.

But someone committed to self-starvation could easily remove such a tube, if he had any freedom of movement. So we can surmise that there is a line of twenty-one hospital beds, each with a prisoner held tight in four-point restraints. His head must be strapped down, immobile, and forcible sedation seems probable. Hardly the image evoked by the term "assisted feeding."

Deprived of legal rights, the Guantánamo detainees must rely on public scrutiny to protect them. This is also true for detainees in Iraq, where the United States has acknowledged it is bound by Geneva, but where soldiers recently interviewed by Human Rights Watch describe systemic humiliation and torture, encouraged by military higher-ups. The only lasting solution is for the United States to practice what it preaches, rather than hide its hypocrisy behind a smokescreen of secrecy and semantics. Human rights enforcement is the most effective counterterrorism measure the US government can take, and deep down its leaders have always known this. The United States signed the Geneva Conventions more than fifty years ago. Surely Rumsfeld has had enough time to work out how to apply them.

[Sri Lanky]

The only law that applies according to this administration of assholes is divine law sent from the almighty Lord above.

That way,anything can be justified and the Christian fundies that make up the hardcore support for the GOP eat this shit up.

[Penta]

More on the hunger strike and Omar Deghayes:

Behind barbed wire in Guantanamo

By Letta Tayler
Newsday Staff Correspondent

10/03/05 "Newsday" -- -- By the third week of the hunger strike, the fasting inmate wrote, the cellblocks echoed with groans. Emaciated prisoners were vomiting blood or dropping unconscious to the floor. The military hospital overflowed with strikers being force-fed through their noses.

"We are dying a slow death in here," wrote the inmate, British resident Omar Deghayes. "We have not been charged with any crime. I do not understand what America is doing."

Deghayes, 35, was chronicling a six-week hunger strike in June and July among scores of inmates protesting conditions at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The strike resumed in early August and today entered its ninth week, posing the latest challenge to the Pentagon's already controversial handling of suspects in its war on terror.

Like many of the 500 inmates at Guantanamo, all but four of whom are being held indefinitely without charges, Deghayes insists he is innocent. Though the Pentagon calls him an Islamic militant who honed his skills in Afghanistan, his lawyer has dug up evidence that suggests he may have been seized in a case of mistaken identity.

His writings, which his lawyer declassified in a painstaking procedure, open a rare window into life inside the top-security prison and the reasons its inmates, all foreign Muslim men, say they're on hunger strike.

"Disrespect to all religious rituals," the Libyan-born Deghayes wrote in English, his second language. "And this is the fourth year in prison without any charges ... No medicine ... No facilities to wash. Nor the sun."

"Degraded and abused," Deghayes, who says Guantanamo guards beat him so badly they blinded him in one eye, wrote of prisoners in another entry.

The Pentagon downplays the protest's significance, saying the number of strikers has dropped to 27, 20 of whom are being force-fed in a hospital. It said that is down from 131 in mid-September.

It also denies any abuse. "Our detention mission is conducted in a humane manner that protects the security of both detainees and personnel," said Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, Guantanamo's commander, in recent court papers.

But military officials won't say what prompted the strike or explain why their numbers dropped. Nor will they allow relatives, independent medical teams and most defense lawyers to visit or telephone striking prisoners, saying national security concerns preclude such access.

The few defense attorneys who have recently visited the base maintain the number of strikers peaked at 200 and remains far higher than the military admits. Last week, a half-dozen of them filed motions in federal court seeking immediate visitation rights to fasting inmates and court oversight of the strike, saying they don't trust the Pentagon to tell them the truth. Those motions are still pending.

Amid the information blackout, Deghayes' writings are among the few firsthand accounts of both the strike and life in general inside the prison, which the Pentagon calls a key outpost in the war on terror and Amnesty International slams as a "gulag."

"Many are falling, and sounds of illness," Deghayes wrote of the strike in late July. "... If the authorities here don't do something fast to improve things I think ... [the number of hunger strikers who risk dying] will go out of control."

A few days later, Deghayes described hope rippling through the cellblocks because authorities promised better food and conditions, temporarily ending the fasting. "They gave me a comb. I brushed my hair and beard for the first time" since he arrived in Guantanamo three years ago, he exulted.

Then word spread of inmates being abused or sexually humiliated. One inmate said his Quran was mishandled. In one of his last declassified entries in early August, Deghayes accurately predicted: "The strike will start again."

The hunger strike presents an unusual catch-22 for the Pentagon. Already accused by human rights groups of flouting international conventions governing prisoners of war, the Pentagon is now being blamed for violating inmates' rights by keeping them alive.

The group Physicians for Human Rights is urging an independent medical assessment of the fast, noting that the American Medical Association ethical code bans force-feeding prisoners who are on hunger strike. The Pentagon counters that it must intervene because the hunger strike amounts to a suicide attempt they are ethically bound to thwart.

Clive Stafford Smith, a prominent British civil rights attorney who represents Deghayes, is convinced his client is among the remaining group of strikers. "He's as headstrong as can be," Stafford Smith said.

In some ways, Deghayes' cosmopolitan background sets him apart from many Guantanamo inmates. Two courses shy of a British law degree, he comes from a prominent Libyan family that fled to exile in Britain after his father, a union activist, was tortured to death in 1980 by the regime of Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

Though he lived in Afghanistan for nearly two years under the Taliban, his heroes include Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

But the circumstances of his capture and detention are in other ways typical. Like hundreds of other Muslim men, he was seized in Pakistan in early 2002 as the United States cast a wide net for al-Qaida following the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Lawyers for the Pentagon and prosecutors in Spain contend Deghayes may have al-Qaida connections. One of the main pieces of evidence against Deghayes, Stafford Smith notes, is a terrorist videotape seized in the late 1990s in an apartment in Madrid that contains an image of a bug-eyed militant whom Spanish authorities identified as a "Mr. Deghayes."

A face identification expert hired by Stafford Smith notes that Deghayes and the man in the video have "distinctly" different nostrils and eyes; among other issues, Deghayes' right eye, even before he was blinded, has drooped since childhood when another boy accidentally injured it with a play sword. Both eyes of the man in the video bulge.

Moreover, a terrorist tracking expert at the British Broadcasting Corp. is convinced the man in the video is a notorious Saudi militant, Abd-al-Aziz al-Ghamdi. That militant, who also is known as Abu Walid, led Arab fighters in Chechnya from 2002 until his reported death last year.

"I'm 100-percent certain he is Abu Walid and not Omar Deghayes," the expert, Paul Tumelty, told Newsday.

Stafford Smith describes the other accusations the U.S. government has released about Deghayes as equally flimsy.

One accusation is that Deghayes "left England for Afghanistan in order to live in an Islamic society" -- an action he's never denied. Another is that he received "small arms training" during high school in Libya -- which he notes was mandatory when he lived there.

A third is that he is a member of Fighting Islamic Group, a Libyan militant organization allied with al-Qaida that seeks to overthrow Gadhafi -- though the government doesn't provide any evidence. Deghayes readily admits he hates Gadhafi's regime for killing his father. But he has urged the American authorities to check with captured FIG members, including some in Guantanamo, who can attest he wasn't part of that group.

Military officials refused to discuss details of Deghayes' case.

During interviews in London and in Brighton, the British coastal city where Deghayes lived with his mother and four siblings after his father was killed, friends and relatives described his detention as history repeating itself with a cruel new twist.

"What happened to my husband is now happening to my son," said Deghayes' mother, Zohra Zawawi, 63, as she burst into tears. "But the country that's doing this is supposed to be defending democracy."

"Convicted child molesters have more rights than Omar. So do thugs and killers," said one brother, businessman Taher Deghayes, 39.

Friends and family described Deghayes as an intellectual who loved conservative Islam but dreamed of becoming a British lawyer. "He was not a sheep," said his sister, Amani Deghayes, 31, who is a lawyer herself.

He often preached at local mosques, but one of his messages was that violence had no place in Islam. Deghayes made the same case from prison in a recent diary entry about Guantanamo. "I do not see how such bombings in London can enhance any Islamic cause," he wrote, adding that the road to change was "media and public awareness."

Asked why Deghayes would choose to live in Afghanistan, his friends and relatives said he was prompted by frustration over failing his last two law courses, as well as curiosity about life in an Islamic state and a desire to perform charity for drought victims. Upon his arrival in 1999 he married an Afghan woman and, they said, devoted himself to wheat farming and charity projects in a village outside Kabul.

Newsday was unable to verify Deghayes' activities in Afghanistan. Residents of both the street where relatives say he lived and the village where they say he farmed did not recall him. But with the turmoil and mass flight of citizens that ensued during the final years of the Taliban and after the U.S.-led invasion, many people who might have vouched for him could be dead or missing.

After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, Deghayes fled to Pakistan with his wife, Miriam, and son Suleiman, now 4. Relatives said he was trying to obtain visas to bring his wife and son to Britain when he was seized in the city of Lahore in early 2002.

A campaign to free Deghayes or try him in a civilian court is gaining momentum in Britain, where he was granted permanent residency in 1987. His mother and four siblings already are British citizens.

"The war on terrorism cannot be won by bypassing fundamental principles for those suspected of terrorism," said Kevin Martin, president of the prestigious British Law Society, of which Deghayes was a student member in the late 1990s. "The Law Society firmly believes that no detainee should be held without charge or trial."

But Deghayes and four other British residents imprisoned at Guantanamo remain known as "The Forgotten Five" to distinguish them from nine British citizens who have been released from the prison camp following pressure from Britain, a key U.S. ally in the war on terror.

Because they aren't citizens, Britain has abandoned these residents to life behind barbed wire, critics say.

In his first public comment on the case, Home Secretary Charles Clarke said he'd "pay attention" to the appeals to intervene in Deghayes' case. But a Foreign Office spokeswoman in London said Britain had relayed concerns about detained British residents to Washington but was powerless to do more. "Unfortunately, we don't have authority," the spokeswoman said, adding that the residents were the responsibility of their homeland governments.

In the case of Deghayes, that means Libya, a country still governed by the regime that killed his father. One of the greatest fears of Deghayes' relatives and human rights groups including Amnesty International is that Washington will ship him back to Libya, rather than Britain, if it releases him.

"If Omar is sent back to Libya, that could be the end of him," said Deghayes' sister Amani.

In September 2004, Libyan agents who visited Guantanamo interrogated Deghayes and threatened to kill him if he were returned to Libya, Stafford Smith said.

Deghayes' mother, Zawawi, has received only a couple dozen letters from her son since he was imprisoned. Most are heavily censored and take months to arrive. In one, he wrote that his hair had turned white. In another, he continued to plan for life after his release, asking his mother if they could pursue a childhood dream of starting a charity in Africa.

"I wrote back that I'd love to do it," his mother said. "That is, if I'm still alive by then."

Staff correspondent Jim Rupert contributed to this story from Kabul, Afghanistan

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.