Category: Survivors

Prisoner of the U.S. at Guantánamo

Shaker Aamer is the last British legal resident in Guantánamo Bay.   Born in Saudi Arabia in 1968, he moved to the US in his early 20s, then in 1991 went to London, where he worked as a translator with immigration cases.  There he met his British wife, Zin, and settled down. A decade later, with their three children, and soon pregnant with a fourth, they moved to Afghanistan.  Aamer’s father-in-law explains that they wanted “an Islamic atmosphere”. Then 9/11 happened and everything changed.

Aamer was captured in December 2001, without his family, in the mountains near Pakistan. Either Northern Alliance forces or Afghan warlords handed him over to the US military, who took him to Bagram Prison.  The U.S. claims that at the time he was Osama bin Laden’s interpreter and an al-Qaida commander.   After his capture, Aamer confessed to various things under torture.  He was kept awake for over a week, chained in excruciating positions for hours, deprived of sleep and food, and doused in freezing water at the height of the Afghan winter.  His head was slammed against a wall – in the presence of a British agent.

Aamer says he and his family quickly realized their mistake in coming to Afghanistan and, as war swirled around them, decided to return to Britain via Pakistan. During that time the U.S. military offered a lucrative bounty for valuable Al-Qaida prisoners, causing many innocent people to be captured and turned over to the U.S. His supporters say this is what happened to Aamer after he sent his family ahead to keep them out of harm’s way.

In February 2002, he was taken to Guantánamo, where he was detained until October 30^th 2015.  Fluent in English, Aamer stood up for his fellow prisoners from the very beginning, liaising between them and the authorities and translating documents for them.  He was regarded as a significant presence within the prison. He has usually been held in solitary confinement in a 6 foot by 8 foot windowless cell – his punishment for being “noncompliant”.  A leader who helped organize the first hunger strikes, he has been a regular victim of brutal force-feedings, and he has been beaten by the “forcible cell extraction” team more than 300 times.

After 5 years in Guantanamo the US authorities admitted they did not have a case against Aamer and approved his release back to his home country: Saudi Arabia.  Because he is at risk for persecution there he refused to go. Britain agreed to take him back, but the US would not allow it.  According to the Guardian, “Britain accepts privately that it is currently unable to provide the US authorities with assurances that it would have a legal basis for monitoring Aamer on his return to the UK.” (Watt, The Guardian, 16 Jan 15)  Apparently Britain still respects people’s rights, much to the dissatisfaction of the U.S. government.

This limbo went on for 8 more years – suiting both the UK and the US, Aamer’s lawyers say, since he has witnessed so much torture and abuse. Now that he has been released, Shaker has been actively sharing his story and advocating for the release of the rest of the prisoners left at Guantanamo Bay Prison. Please check out the videos below to hear his powerful witness.

Full Interview with Shaker Aamer by the BBC here.

Video of Shaker Aamer advocating for the closing of Guantanamo Bay Prison here.

His name will sound familiar to many since we last organized a nationwide fast in solidarity with Tariq on September 18, 2015 when his habeus corpus hearing happened in DC.

He is a 36- or 37-year-old citizen of Yemen. He was held at Guantánamo for 14 years. He was recommendedfor transfer to Yemen provided that certain security conditions were met in January 2010. He was transferred to Saudi Arabia on April 16, 2016.

In Guantánamo, it was alleged that Baada, who denied being a member of al-Qaeda, trained al-Farouq, and that he and a group of fighters were then assigned to the third line, about 4 km south of the front line near Kabul. It was also alleged that, after the fall of Kabul, he fled to Tora Bora, where he was put on guard duty. One of the most persistent hunger strikers at Guantánamo, he weighed 121 pounds on arrival at the prison, but in January 2006, when he was one of a handful of hunger strikers to continue after the prison-wide strike of 2005 was largely halted, he weighed just 94 pounds . In March 2007, Sami al-Haj (the al-Jazeera cameraman released in 2008) mentioned that he was one of three prisoners who had been on hunger strike — and force-fed — for the previous year.

In a Rollingstone article from June 2015, his lawyer, Omar Farrah shares : “I traveled to Guantanamo to see Ba Odah in March. I met with him again on April 21. Ba Odah had recently passed the eighth anniversary of his hunger strike, but he was not in the mood to reflect: “I don’t feel the days anymore.” Ba Odah doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. “My body gets so numb; no sensation,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the arm of his chair to illustrate the point. Apparently, this is a symptom of starvation. And with military doctors saying Ba Odah is now only 56 percent of his ideal body weight, there is no doubt he is starving. The Defense Department’s force-feeding regimen is not working. When Ba Odah lifted his prison smock, I had to look down. All I managed to write in my legal pad was “does not look like body of human; every bone visible.” Imagine liberation photos of Holocaust survivors, and you will have a sense of what I saw. Ba Odah sat back in his chair and said, “My life is not like it was. This is the hardest I have ever had it.”

Ba Odah finds redemption in protest, one organized around the principle of non-participation. Ba Odah refused to submit to a CSRT – the sham tribunals established by the Bush administration to determine who, among the hundreds of men then at Guantanamo, were “enemy combatants.” Ba Odah was similarly reluctant (and, in any event, physically unfit) to litigate his habeas petition. And, as I recounted, from 2008 until 2010, he would not even sit down with his own lawyer. It goes without saying, however, that Ba Odah’s refusal to eat is the most uncompromising form of resistance through non-participation. “I tell them again and again that I don’t want any food from them….I just don’t want it. All I want is for them leave us alone, lingering in these cells. They want me to eat, but first I have to be subjected to humiliation….The provocation is never-ending.” Therefore, Ba Odah says, his hunger strike will never end. “My method of delivering my message is through hunger strike. You can cut me to pieces, but I will not break it. I will stop on one of two conditions: I die, or I am freed and allowed to return to my family.” (Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/tariq-ba-odahs-eight-year-hunger-strike-at-guantanamo-bay-20150706#ixzz43Bnp14jc )

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Tariq Ba Odah in his own words

They are artists of torture,
They are artists of pain and fatigue,
They are artists of insults and humiliation.

Where is the world to save us from torture?
Where is the world to save us from the fire and sadness?
Where is the world to save the hunger strikers?

– Adnan Latif
Poems from Guantánamo*
Continue reading Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif

He is a 44-year-old citizen of Mauritania. As of January 2010, the Guantánamo Review Task Force had recommended him for prosecution. As of Nov. 20, 2015, he has been held at Guantánamo for 13 years three months.

Andy Worthington writes : “Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of Guantánamo Diary, has become a New York Times bestseller, even though Slahi is still held at Guantánamo. He wrote it in the prison as a hand-written manuscript in 2005, but it took until 2012 for it to be approved for release by the U.S. authorities — albeit with over 2,500 redactions.

A Mauritanian, born in 1970, Slahi was singled out for a specific torture program, approved by Donald Rumsfeld, in 2003. He had aroused U.S. suspicions because he was related to Abu Hafs, the spiritual advisor to Al-Qaeda (who, lest we forget, opposed the 9/11 attacks), and because, while living in Germany in 1999, three would-be jihadists, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an alleged facilitator of the 9/11 attacks, had stayed for a night at his house.

However, although Slahi had trained and fought in Afghanistan in 1991-2, when, apparently, he had sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda, that was the extent of his involvement with terrorism or militant activity, as Judge James Robertson, a District Court judge, concluded in March 2010, when he granted Slahi’s habeas corpus petition.

The Obama administration appealed Judge Robertson’s ruling, and in November 2010 the court of appeals — the D.C. Circuit Court — backed the government, vacating Judge Robertson’s ruling, and sending it back to the lower court to reconsider. That never happened, and Slahi ended up abandoned. The high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 had recommended him for prosecution in its final report two months before his habeas corpus petition was granted, and this stood until April 2013, when he was determined to be eligible for a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards, along with 24 other men who had initially been recommended for prosecution by the task force, and 46 others who had been recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the profoundly dubious basis that they were too dangerous to release, but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

Other resources to learn more about Mohamedou:

His book : http://guantanamodiary.com/

An interview with Mohamedou’s editor here.

Russian Ballet Dancer, Held Without Charge at Guantánamo Since 2002

Ravil Mingazov has been held at Guantánamo Bay without charge since 2002. He was born in Russia in 1967, became a ballet dancer with several dance troupes, was conscripted into the Russian army at 19 and first served in the Army ballet troupe. After his conscription ended in 1988, he served voluntarily until 1996 and later returned to the military in the food supply section, where he took over a program which was in “bad shape” and transformed it into a model program, the “best in all the Army’s.” He was rewarded with a watch.
Continue reading Ravil Mingazov

Yemeni Laborer, One of the First Men to Arrive at Guantánamo, Held Without Charge Since 2002

For fourteen years, Samir Nasy Hajan Mukbel (ISN-043) was held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, indefinitely and without charge or trial. Samir was on the first plane to bring prisoners to Guantánamo Bay, GTMO, on January 11, 2002. He was transferred to Oman on January 13, 2016.

Samir was born in Taiz, Yemen in 1977, to a poor working family. He is 33 years old and the eldest of twelve brothers and sisters. At a young age his family relied upon him to provide for them financially since Samir’s father could no longer work at his factory job due to illness. Samir worked in a plastics factory in Taiz making only $50 dollars a month. At that time, in mid- 2000, a friend, Marwan, convinced him to go to Afghanistan with the lure of more jobs that were better paying.
Continue reading Samir Nasy Hajan Mukbel