From the Archive
Daily Update – Day 4 of the Fast for Justice
Dear friends,
As another day in DC comes to a close…and the last few remain in our makeshift office – a small room off the larger church basement space were other folks are sleeping – conversation continues about planning, and remembering, and resisting, and learning.
Our update is shorter today, as much of our time has been spent planning our next few days which include a Torturer’s Tour, a From Ferguson to Guantanamo panel discussion, and a demonstration marking January 11th and the beginning of 14 years of torture and indefinite detention.
We were also able to put together two short videos of some of our public presences this week, focused on #FreeFahd & #WeStandWithShaker. Please take two minutes to watch and share.
We have also included in this update a poem written by Luke Nephew, penned under the influence of reading the words from Guantanamo of Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel – which follow Luke’s words below.
In Peace,
Witness Against Torture
www.witnesstorture.org
*Please share your fasting experiences with us so we can pass them on to the larger community.*
CLICK HERE FOR OUR WASHINGTON, DC SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
WITNESS AGAINST TORTURE SOCIAL MEDIA
‘like’ us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/witnesstorture
Follow Us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/witnesstorture
Post any pictures of your local activities to http://www.flickr.com/groups/witnesstorture/, and we will help spread the word on http://witnesstorture.tumblr.com/
Thursday, January 8
Today was Day 4 of our fast and the temperature in Washington was well below freezing all day. People are tending to each other very well as we get hungrier, spacier, and (arguably) funnier.
This morning we welcomed some new members to our community (we’re up to 40 now) and did some planning and community-building. Later, we all went to see the movie Selma. It’s a very powerful and moving film about Martin Luther King and the struggle in Selma in the 60’s that led to the Voting Rights Act. The spirit of activism from the civil rights movement fed our own spirits. The images of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church evoked thoughts of other children and places around the world where our military’s bombs fall from drones.
After the movie, many of us fanned out to various sites around the city to scout out possibilities for our actions on the 11th and 12th. Then in the evening, we circled up and got in small groups to think through different options for those days. Looking forward…
History’s Most Necessary Writer
By Luke Nephew
The hunger that the Samir feels
Is no longer knowing at his stomach
It grates over his entire being,
Shredding his peace into pieces
Beating salt into his mind’s open wounds
Most of the time he must focus on just breathing
In
And out
Don’t begin
To doubt
Just in and out of now, out of here
Traveling as far as memory and imagination can take him
He leaves
He breathes- this how he escapes from the most powerful military in history
An innocent man versus marines, sergeants, racist privates,
His hungry stuttering breadth is the extent of his riot
Can no longer waste fury on the injustice of his engagement
He can only breathe in and out the belief this hunger strike will change it,
He is dying
His pain enflaming
His anguish knotting him tighter and tighter
Today he has become
History’s most necessary writer
Capital Letters: AMERICAN TORTURE: THIS HOW FAR WE HAVE NOT COME
They publish a piece of his breadth in the New York Times, will he survive?
His exhale prays that he is not the scribe of a suicide note for the 164 lives
Living death inside the prison, he coughs out curdled fear,
he is still here- that fact alone makes him the writer of a million poems of resistance:
His inhale is filled with tales of Love
Stories his memory paints before he faints, prayers for fresh air, his mother’s face,
His cough is a soliloquy to honor the laughter of daughters, eyes glowing as they look at their father, he is wheezing an ode to hugs
he wants to be hugged
after the force feeding sessions when he’s thrown back in his cell he sighs
a slow trembling elegy, a goodbye
and hours later his breadth scripts the small gifts his imagination lifts into haikus
for little pleasures he remembers buying vegetables, drinking tea and talking softly as the sun sets-
His pen is his breadth- He is STILL writing for for life in the grip of death
History’s most urgent writer- taken, tortured, force-fed-
Composing you chapters to document the devastation of his capture,
and the miraculous survival of human hope-
He’s not done loving
Not yet
I beg him to keep pen to paper, air in lungs-
Please don’t get tired of cutting through the wire
Of revealing our reality, our truth set on fire
Never stop burning for freedom
Please Please do not stop breathing.
Gitmo Is Killing Me
By Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba
ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.
I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.
I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.
When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.
I was wrong to trust him. There was no work. I wanted to leave, but had no money to fly home. After the American invasion in 2001, I fled to Pakistan like everyone else. The Pakistanis arrested me when I asked to see someone from the Yemeni Embassy. I was then sent to Kandahar, and put on the first plane to Gitmo.
Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray.
I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.
I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping.
There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren’t enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings; nothing is happening at regular intervals. They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up.
During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily. I called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was being done correctly or not.
It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity.
When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding.
The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.
I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.
Where is my government? I will submit to any “security measures” they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.
I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.
The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.
And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.
I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.
Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, told this story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call.
Join us on social media