Syndication
The Torture of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi
The Hour
Print this article
Email this article
Other articles by Leonard Fein
More in Forward ForumHere is a thought experiment: Imagine what it would have meant for America today had these steps not been taken, had the military remained segregated. Plainly, and in addition to the continuing insult to black Americans and the reduced effectiveness of the military itself, the nation would be markedly disadvantaged on the world stage.
The time when formal racial discrimination could be indulged in by an international power was plainly over (and then some). And it was just 44 years ago that such discrimination was terminated.
Now flash forward 44 years. Is it thinkable that the United States, if it seeks to remain a great power, can still persist in its violation of international law and common codes of decency, claiming to itself the right to torture people it thinks may have information that would help defend this nation from its enemies?
Well, perhaps you will say that if there’s a ticking bomb and the only way to find where it’s been hidden is to torture your captive, torture may be excused. Surely we do not torture gratuitously, without some urgent (albeit inherently inadequate) purpose?
But: Consider the case of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan meteorologist who has now been held in Guantanamo for more than five years. Al-Ghizzawi has had hearings before two Combatant Status Review Tribunals.
A November 2004 tribunal unanimously determined that there was no factual basis for concluding that he should be classified as an enemy combatant. Ordered to re-open its hearing, the tribunal came again to the same unanimous conclusion.
Shortly thereafter a second tribunal was formed and held a hearing in Washington, D.C. — without the knowledge of Al-Ghizzawi — and decided to find him to be an enemy combatant, this despite the fact that no new evidence was introduced.
It is impossible to say how many of those being held in Guantanamo are, indeed, enemy combatants. The processes that would tell us that are deeply flawed, deeply and fatally. (See, for example, the testimony of former Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Abraham before the House Armed Services Committee on July 26, 2007.)
But it is possible to know what happens in Guantanamo. We know about Al-Ghizzawi because of a detailed statement of the Committee on Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.
Since Al-Ghizzawi arrived at Guantanamo, his health reportedly has deteriorated dramatically. He evidently suffers from hepatitis B and tuberculosis, but has received no medical treatment for either condition despite his repeated requests and those of his lawyer.
On December 7, 2006, he was among several hundred detainees randomly selected and moved to the newest detention camp at Guantanamo, Camp 6, which was designed to hold the majority of the detainees. According to Amnesty International, and in contravention of international standards, all detainees in Camp 6 are held under conditions of “extreme isolation and sensory deprivation for a minimum of 22 hours a day in individual steel cells with no windows to the outside.”
Their cells reportedly are extremely small. The only source of light is fluorescent lighting that is on 24 hours a day and the only air is air-conditioning, both of which are controlled by the prison guards. The detainees reportedly are allowed two hours of “recreation time” a day to be spent in a metal cage measuring four feet by four feet. (That’s 1/3 the size of a ping-pong table.)
Al-Ghizzawi’s lawyer says that his guards frequently give him his “rec time” in the middle of the night or, sometimes, in the middle of the day when the cage is in the hot sun. Detainees in Camp 6 have no access to radio, television or newspapers. They are given one book a week.
According to his lawyer, Al-Ghizzawi’s eyesight has deteriorated so significantly that he is now unable to read. Thus he now spends his time pacing in his cell. All of the detainees at Guantanamo reportedly are forbidden telephone calls and family visits, and most are not allowed to touch another human being. The detainees are not given any blankets. Their only cover is a plastic sheet.
There is no reason to believe that Al-Ghizzawi’s treatment is exceptional. If his is at all an exceptional case, it is exceptional because he has twice been unanimously declared not to be an enemy combatant.
Cannons of crisis, behind us, before us, volley and thunder, deafen our sensibilities. It is hard to focus on one man unjustly tortured — for surely the circumstances of al-Ghizzawi’s detention amount to torture — or even on hundreds perhaps unjustly held, cruelly treated.
And it is hard to know how much damage Guantanamo does to perceptions of America by others, to our blundering effort to “win the hearts and minds” of people worldwide. (The end of segregation in the military, many historians believe, owed less to Truman’s courage than his concern with international opinion, what with the Cold War and the emergence of the Third World.)
The CIA destroyed the tapes of its interrogations; we can only speculate regarding what horrors they contained, what disgust they’d have provoked. But there’s horror aplenty that continues, with our permission, 24/7 — torture of named people in a named place.
Comments
I'm proud to be a Jew when I see someone fighting for social justice like this.
There's little reason to be surprised by this man's condition, if it is as reported. US military and civilian authorities are prepared to torture even American citizens, as we know from the case of John Walker Lindh, whose time in American custody started when, with his arms tied behind him and suffering from a military bullet in one thigh, he was repeatedly slapped round the head by a CIA agent on a TV news camera. Thereafter in military custody -- meaning within the reach of military doctors and surgeons -- he had the bullet left in his thigh for about two weeks, until he'd been interrogated by military and FBI officials to their satisfaction. Then it was removed. By this time, he apparently had serious respiratory illness. Photos presented in court showed he was tightly bound, naked, on a military cot with a heavy blindfold in place during this ordeal -- the torture known as sensory deprivation. When his matter came to trial, he was required to swear, untruthfully, that he'd been handled nicely while in US custody. That way, he got a good deal -- a 20-year sentence for a shaky offense. All this shows up in official court records.
At Bagram AFP in Afghanistan, a cab driver was literally beaten to death in military custody after authorities determined that he had been arrested in error, but nobody could be found to sign the release papers. A military pathologist has certified that the corpse of drive, Dilawar, "looked like ït had been run over by a bus". Military personnel have been found guilty of offenses related to this incident. All this shows up in official court records.
The first batch of "detainees" -- let's call them prisoners, even if the US military don't like the word -- released from Guantanamo and sent back to Afghanistan in 2002 on the ground that they'd done nothing wrong and had been captured, drugged, flown halfway round the planet and held for months without good cause, included a few who had lost their minds. No follow-up reports made it clear whether these men had lost their minds under military interrogation, or whether they had been savagely mistreated by military authorities for the crime of being crazy, although with no harmful intent to the United States or anybody else.
Prisoners released from Guantanamo without charge to their homelands of Britain and Australia have recounted tortures suffered while in US custody. Law enforcement in their homelands can find no ground to put them on trial for terrorism or anything like that, but it seems that their release comes with a US demand that they continue to be treated as terrorists for the rest of their lives, watched by their domestic spooks, denied passports, being required to report their whereabouts to the police, and the like. In other words, the US government has shown some sort of "courtesy" or "accommodation" to its strong allies in the war against terror, by releasing prisoners it can't find guilty of anything, on condition that their own governments treat them as grade A suspects of the kinds of crime the US hasn't been able to find or prove.
The president long justified the Guantanamo imprisonment on the ground that all prisoners there are killers, and "the worst of the worst". He's stopped saying that because even he has found out that that it's not true now and was never true before.
The claims of ill treatment by the current prisoner Al-Ghizzawi seem to fit in well with the inhumanity routinely shown in moving about Guantanamo prisoners, who don't have to be guilty of anything to be given a very bad time for years on end. There's an extraordinary piece of news film designed to show the kindly and compassionate side of the Guantanamo regime, and it's this: Four military guards go to the prisoner's cell. They don't talk to him. They cuff his hands behind his back, they chain his ankles together, they put sound cancelling headphones on his ears to make him totally deaf and a high-tech sort of blindfold much more expensive and effective that a piece of cloth, to make him blind. Then they take him away, pulling on his arms, one man to each arm. The compassionate thing here is that the prisoner being filmed was being taken to the dentist. His lucky day, apparently. That's the way they take them to interrogation, too, and out to their "exercise" periods. Whether he learns that he's at the dentist by having his mouth pulled open and a compassionate hypodermic needle pierce his gum, is unknown. Neither was it shown whether he is left deaf and blind during his compassionate dental treatment. Is that how, in US prisons, mass murderers are taken to the prison dentist?
A notable part of this film was the complete docility of the prisoner. He knows that's the way these freedom-loving Americans do things, there's no point in complaint or resistance. All four of the military guards are, of course, much beefier than the weedy prisoner, who's very likely spent much of his life back home on the edge of starvation. They're wearing protective clothing to save them from this skinny little man and they're inside a strongly built and heavily guarded jail that's inside a heavily guarded military base. They don't have to be guilty of anything to be treated like this, and to this point -- more than six years after the first prisoners were captured -- they have not faced trial, and not been handed down any sentence. The US government is playing a littler game with them. They're being held pending trials that could one day, one year, result in REAL jail sentences.
Of this, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld used to sing. Those who have seen the film in foreign lands -- and that certainly means hundreds of millions -- feel less respectful of it. And, of course, of the United States.
This seems pretty much as President Bush and the senior military officers who have designed the worldwide series of jails holding prisoners they call enemy detainees want things: no respect from foreigners, but lots and lots of fear. And, of course, no shame for the American administration. They're ... defending freedom. They have signs outside the Guantanamo jail telling us that.
This is a teribloe reflection on the conduct of our government and should be viewed in dispair by all.
I'm indebted to my friend Label Fein for its disclosure.