An initimate look
Please read it before you make a decision (ie Conserv vs Guardian). A veery interesting look. This is not to say that serious terrorists are not included in Gitmo
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098604,00.html
People the law forgot
It is almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened. Its purpose is to hold people seized in the 'war on terror' and defined by the Bush administration as enemy combatants - though many appear to have been bystanders to the conflict. Images of Camp Delta's orange-jumpsuited, manacled detainees have provoked international outrage. But the real horror they face isn't physical hardship, it is the threat of infinite confinement, without trial or access to legal representation. James Meek has spent the past month talking to former inmates and some of those involved in operating the Pentagon's Kafkaesque justice system. He has built an unprecedented picture of life on the base, which we present in this special issue
Continued in part two
Wednesday December 3, 2003
The Guardian
One summer's day in Cuba in 2002, a 31-year-old Pakistani teacher of English named Abdul Razaq noticed something unusual in the familiar patterns of movement among the orange-suited figures in the mesh cages on either side of him. Two or three cages along from his own, a fellow Pakistani prisoner, Shah Mohammed, was silently going about trying to hang himself from a sheet lashed to the mesh. He had the cloth around his throat and he was choking.
Other prisoners in neighbouring cells had noticed and, as they usually did when a detainee in the United States prison camp in Guantanamo Bay tried to kill himself, they raised a hue and cry in their many languages.
"First we shouted at Shah Mohammed to stop, but when he didn't, we called the guards," says Razaq, who was released from Guantanamo in July, and returned to his home town in October after three months' detention by the Pakistani authorities. "The guards came in and saved him. It was the first time he attempted this in my block, then he was taken to another place. He appeared to be unconscious."
It was one of four suicide attempts by Mohammed while he was in Guantanamo. He was released in May and lives in the Swat Valley, on the far side of the Malakand Hills from Peshawar, a few dozen miles from Razaq's home. It is a district of God-fearing, conservative, cricket-loving yeomen, who are passionate about their land and liberty, and protective of their right to bear arms; the fields of sugar cane and tobacco are well tended, and prices in the gun shops are more reasonable than their counterparts in America. In the mornings, a crocodile of small boys in black berets, walking to school, stretches for miles.
Mohammed, who is 23 and a baker by trade, is 5ft 3in and light on his feet. He has been having nightmares ever since he came back. His face peers out from behind a lustrous black beard and long hair like a child hiding between the winter coats in a wardrobe. In Kandahar and Guantanamo, he was interrogated 10 times.
His face only lights up when you ask about fishing. He has been doing a lot of it - mostly for trout - since his return. The other day he caught a five-pounder with his Japanese rod. "The biggest damage is to my brain. My physical and mental state isn't right. I'm a changed person," he says. "I don't laugh or enjoy myself much."
Asked why he tried to commit suicide so often, Mohammed is vague. He talks about worries over troubles at home; his mother's health, his brother's business, and "my own problems". But his attempts at self-harm at Guantanamo began after he was confined, without explanation, in a sealed punishment cell for a month - not, it seems, because he had broken camp rules, but because the American authorities had nowhere else to put him while they were finishing new facilities.
In India Block, as the block of punishment cells is known, "there were no windows. There were four walls and a roof made of tin, a light bulb and an air conditioner. They put the air conditioning on and it was extremely cold. They would take away the blanket in the morning and bring it back in the evening. I was kept in this room for one month. We'd ask them: 'Is this a sort of a punishment?' And the translator would say, 'No, this is being done on orders from the general.'"
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