The Guantánamo Experiment: A Harrowing Letter
by Yemeni Prisoner Emad Hassan
By
Andy Worthington,
Eurasia News,
20
155 men are
still held at Guantánamo, and yet, despite the fact that most of
these prisoners have been held for 12 years without charge or trial,
many of them are completely unknown to the general public.
A case in
point is Emad Hassan, a Yemeni prisoner whose representation has
recently been taken on by
Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose founder and
director is Clive Stafford Smith. Reprieve recently received a letter
from Emad, after it was unclassified by the Pentagon censorship board
that evaluates all correspondence between prisoners and their lawyers —
and the hand-written notes of any meetings that take place — and decides
whether it can be made available to the public.
When the
cleared letter was released, Reprieve secured publication of it in the
Middle East Monitor, where it was published to mark the 12th opening
of the prison on January 11. In the hope of securing a wider audience
for Emad’s words, I’m cross-posting it below, not only to let people
know about Emad’s particular story — to humanize another of the men so
cynically dismissed as “the worst of the worst” by the Bush
administration — but also because of his detailed description of how
hunger strikers at Guantánamo are being abused by the authorities.
First,
though, allow me to introduce Emad, who is one of the 55 Yemeni
prisoners in Guantánamo who were
cleared for release in 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency
Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he
took office in January 2009. After a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for Detroit on
Christmas Day 2009, with a bomb in his underwear, and after it was
discovered that he had been recruited in Yemen, President Obama
imposed a ban on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, despite the
recommendation of his task force. This ban stood until May last year,
when, in response to the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo that
began last February and attracted worldwide criticism of President
Obama’s inaction, the president responded by
finally dropping the ban, although no Yemenis have been released in
the last nine months.
The Yemenis’
release was also blocked by Congress, which imposed general restrictions
on the release of prisoners, particularly from 2010 onwards. These
restrictions were only finally
eased in December, in amended legislation that was introduced by
the Senate Armed Services Committee, under the leadership of Sen. Carl
Levin, but although these changes are important, it should be noted
that, all along, President Obama
had the power to override Congress if he regarded it as being “in
the national security interests of the United States,” and, as he has
repeatedly demonstrated in his eloquent speeches, it is demonstrably
clear that the ongoing existence of Guantánamo is not “in the
national security interests of the United States.”
Emad Hassan,
then, is one of the Yemenis who needs to be released to break this
absurd and unjust refusal of the US government to release Yemenis that
its own Presidential task force said should be released, but who is he?
I have
previously written about him, in my book
The Guantánamo Files, and also as one of 15 prisoners seized
in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on the same night that another
house raid led to the capture of
Abu Zubaydah, who was mistakenly identified as a senior figure in
al-Qaeda, and for whom the CIA’s torture program was specifically
developed.
Most of the
men in the house in which Hassan was seized have maintained, throughout
their long imprisonment, that it was a student house, providing
accommodation to young men studying at the nearby Salafia University.
Moreover, in May 2009, in the District Court in Washington D.C., as I
explained in an article entitled, “Judge
Condemns ‘Mosaic’ Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses“:
Judge Gladys
Kessler, ruling on the habeas corpus petition of one of the men, Alla
Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, savaged the government for drawing on the testimony
of witnesses whose unreliability was acknowledged by the authorities,
and for attempting to create a “mosaic” of intelligence that was
thoroughly unconvincing, and she also made a point of stating, “It is
likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the
[redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was
located close to a university.”
Many of the
men seized in the house raid have since been released (see
here,
here,
here and
here).
In
Guantánamo, Hassan has repeatedly stated that he never set foot in
Afghanistan (until the US took him there after his capture), and that he
was near the end of a seven-month trip to the university to study the
Koran when he was seized. He has also explained that, while in Pakistani
custody, “the person who was in charge came and told us we didn’t have
anything to worry about,” and that “our sheet was clean.”
As I also
explained, it may be that Hassan “aroused the wrath of the authorities
in Guantánamo because of his refusal to accept the conditions in which
he and the other prisoners are held,” and noted:
In 2006, one
of his lawyers, Douglas Cox,
explained how he was “regarded as a leader by other detainees,” and
how he “went on a hunger strike. A few months into it, military doctors
started force-feeding him by inserting a tube through his nose. The
process was so painful that Hassan felt he couldn’t take it anymore. He
didn’t want to quit, though, because he thought he would be letting down
the other detainees.” Weight records released by the Pentagon show that,
although Hassan only weighted 113 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, his
weight dropped at one point in December 2005 to a skeletal 85 pounds (PDF).
What I
didn’t know, until recently, when I spoke to Clive Stafford Smith about
Emad Hassan, and read
Reprieve’s profile of him, is that he has been on a persistent
hunger strike since 2007 (I identified two other long-term hunger
strikers
here).
As Reprieve
explained:
Hunger
strikes are a universally regarded form of peaceful protest. Yet the
Guantánamo authorities do not share this view – they have compared their
response to strikers to adapting to new warfare tactics. Strikers are
punished for their disobedience, violently removed from their cells,
strapped to a chair and have tubes shoved up their noses through which a
nutritional supplement is pumped. This has led to dire health problems
for Emad. He has severe pancreatitis and one of his nasal passages has
completely closed up. In his own words:
“Sometimes I
sit in the chair and vomit. Nobody says anything. Even if they turned
their backs I would understand. I’m looking for humans. All I ask for is
basic human rights.”
I also
learned from Reprieve that Emad had initially traveled from Yemen to
Pakistan to study “as he was not able to access specialised higher
education in Yemen.” Reprieve described him as “an intellectual with a
passion for poetry, ranging from the great Sufi poets like Rumi, to
English poets such as Wilfred Owen.”
As Reprieve
also explained, during an interrogation that followed his capture, Emad
“was asked if he knew Al-Qaeda and he responded: ‘Yes, I know Al Qa’idah
well.” He was talking about a small village
near where he grew up in Yemen. But this didn’t matter.”
As Reprieve
also noted, since December the prison authorities have “stopped
providing any information on hunger strikers in a bid to stop
attention to their cause,” although
Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, recently
reported that 35 men are currently on a hunger strike, and 17 of them
are being force-fed.
Emad is one
of them. As Reprieve explained, he “would like nothing more than to be
released, as promised, back to the arms of his loving family. But
because the US considers Yemen to be a dangerous a place to send former
Guantánamo detainees, he is being punished for his nationality. Emad has
said that he will continue on his peaceful protest until he and his
fellow cleared men can go home where they belong.”
The
Guantánamo Experiment: A letter from Emad Hassan to mark the 12th
anniversary of the opening of the prison
Middle East Monitor, January 10, 2014
Here we are
in Guantánamo as we come to the 12th anniversary of this terrible place.
The treatment here is often described by the public relations officer as
next door to perfect. Indeed, now I am into my seventh year of being
force fed, it’s quite a Club Med holiday camp!
We heard
some good news about President Obama wanting to send people home, but we
do not want to hang our hopes on it. Hope is like a mirage; you can see
it, but can’t touch it.
It does not
really need to be said, but it is a grave violation of professional
ethics for doctors to participate in torture or cruel treatment. Surely
health care professionals should not condone any deliberate infliction
of pain and suffering on detainees? This would seem to be a fairly basic
proposition.
Yet who is
better than a doctor to cause excruciating pain without damaging the
body? There is a wide divergence here between the morality of a doctor’s
role and the reality of his actions. It is very, very sad. When a
surgeon no longer uses his scalpel to cure a disease, he becomes no
better than a butcher.
In 2005,
when the doctors were still human beings, the hunger strikers didn’t
worry about their health because there was level of trust with the
medical team. One of the doctors refused to go along with force feeding,
because he believed that his medical ethics were more important than the
order of a military colonel. But then things changed. The military only
recruited doctors who agreed, before they arrived here, that a military
order was more important than morality. The new wave of doctors allowed
the military officers to instruct them on how to conduct the medical
procedure of force feeding.
As a child,
I was taught to disdain German doctors for what they did in World War
II, experimenting on prisoners. Yet here the doctors now experiment to
try to find the best way to force us to bend to the military’s will: is
it more effective for them to make the force feeding process more
painful, by forcing the liquid down my nose faster and by pulling the
110 centimeter tube out of my nostril after every feed? Or, is it more
effective to refuse my request for a blanket to keep me warm, now that
my weight has fallen so low? They experiment all the time, and this is
virgin territory for experimental science, since no other doctor would
be allowed to force feed a prisoner at all.
But in
recent days, sad to say, I have seen the truly ugly faces of those
doctors, nurses, and other medical staffers. I have been subjected to a
novel regime for 36 days. This new system is not an occasionally
“uncomfortable procedure,” as the public relations has described it. No,
it has been a HORRIFIC, BARBAROUS TORTURE. I am not even sure I can find
the words to tell you truly what it is like …
It is
difficult to take it anymore. First they force the 110 centimeter tube
in me. They cannot do it in the right nostril any more, as that is now
firmly closed up. So they have to force it up the left nostril. It is
very painful these days, but that is no bar to medical practice. They
used to leave the tube in so that we did not have to undergo this pain,
but then a general said they wanted to make our peaceful protest less
“convenient,” so they came up with the less “convenient” system of
pulling the tube out each time.
That has
been a technique since 2006, so it is nothing new. But the latest
experiment is different. Now they begin with 1500cc of formula called
TwoCal — four cans in the morning and four in the night, served up each
time with 700cc of water. Once I finish each ‘meal,’ they fill the feed
bag with 50cc of an anti-constipation medication and 450cc of water. As
this scientific study shows — at least in the experience of this guinea
pig, your correspondent — this method accelerates the stomach function
and makes the hunger striker defecate on himself in the chair.
When this
stage is complete, they add another 700cc of water — why? Have I not
suffered enough? When I dared to ask this question, the medical
professional answered sarcastically, “to wash the feeding bag.” This
process is completed in 30-45 minutes, which is much faster than before,
but then why allow the detainee to be fed slowly when you could cause
much more pain by speeding up the process? Yet it is not over quickly,
as they leave you in the torture chair for two hours, suffering. Then
they pull the tube out of your nose again, ready to force it back in for
the next session.
If I vomit
on myself at any time during the procedure, they start the atrocity all
over again, though they don’t necessarily let me wash off before it
begins.
And that’s
exactly what has been happening to me every day, twice daily. Except for
last night — which will long burn alive in my memory. But I will write
about it in the next message, God willing.
As you enjoy
your holiday season, please spare a thought for those of us who continue
to hold the embers, trying to keep the flame alive in Guantánamo Bay —
even as the doctors try to break our peaceful hunger strike protest. And
remember, if you will, that all we ask for is what President Obama keeps
promising: freedom or a fair trial.
December
16th 2013
Emad Hassan (ISN 680, cleared for several years…)
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