[Ppnews] Obama Refuses to Free Saudi on Hunger Strike in Gitmo Even Though He's Cleared for Release

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington03202009.html

March 20-22, 2009


Obama Administration Refuses to Free a Saudi on 
Hunger Strike in Gitmo Since 2005, Even Though He's Cleared for Release


The Case of Ahmed Zuhair

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Ahmed Zuhair, a 35-year old Saudi prisoner at 
Guantánamo -- and a father of ten -- has been on 
a hunger strike since June 2005, at the start of 
a fraught summer at the prison in which up to 200 
prisoners (over a third of Guantánamo’s total 
population at the time) embarked on a mass hunger 
strike in protest at their ongoing -- and 
seemingly endless -- imprisonment without charge 
or trial, and also as a protest against the 
day-to-day conditions in the prison, where casual 
brutality was still widespread, and a severe 
regime of punishment was still in place.

This regime had been instigated by Maj. Gen. 
Geoffrey Miller, the prison’s commander from 
November 2002, whose approach to dehumanizing the 
prisoners, and making every shred of comfort in 
their lives dependent on cooperation with the 
interrogators, impressed Donald Rumsfeld to such 
an extent that, in the fall of 2003, he sent him 
to Iraq to “Gitmo-ize” the prison system there, 
leading directly to the implementation of the 
sadistic regime that was exposed when the Abu 
Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004.

There was a brief hiatus in the hunger strike in 
August 2005, when the prisoners were allowed to 
form a very short-lived Prisoners’ Council. This 
secured some concessions from the authorities, 
including an increase in the amount of food they 
were given, and the implementation of a new 
system of punishments and rewards, which brought 
to an end the exclusive use of orange uniforms, 
and the introduction of a graded system that gave 
white uniforms to “compliant” prisoners, and 
tan-colored uniforms to those who were somewhere 
between “compliant” and “non-compliant.” However, 
the authorities failed to effect major changes to 
how Guantánamo was run, and, after another 
violent incident, when an interrogator threw a 
mini-fridge at a prisoner during an 
interrogation, the mass hunger strike resumed, 
and was even more widespread than it had been before.


Illegal force-feeding

The authorities responded, as they had with the 
many other hunger strikes throughout the prison’s 
ignoble history, by force-feeding prisoners who 
refused to eat, even though medical ethics have 
long prohibited force-feeding mentally competent 
hunger strikers, recognizing that it is often the 
only manner in which they can make protests about 
the conditions of their confinement. By January 
2006, the strike was finally brought under 
control when the authorities imported a number of 
restraint chairs to make sure that it “wasn’t 
convenient” for the strikers to continue, as Gen. 
Bantz J. Craddock, the head of the US Southern 
Command, explained to the New York Times.

In conversations with their lawyers, prisoners 
explained how the restraint chairs worked. Emad 
Hassan, a Yemeni, said, “The head is immobilized 
by a strap so it can't be moved, their hands are 
cuffed to the chair and the legs are shackled. 
They ask, ‘Are you going to eat or not?’ and if 
not, they insert the tube. People have been 
urinating and defecating on themselves in these 
feedings and vomiting and bleeding. They ask to 
be allowed to go to the bathroom, but they will 
not let them go. They have sometimes put diapers 
on them.” Another prisoner, the Bahraini Isa 
al-Murbati (released in August 2007), told his 
lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, that, after he 
refused to be force-fed voluntarily, “soldiers 
picked him up by the throat, threw him to the 
floor and strapped him to the restraint chair.” 
Colangelo-Bryan added that his client explained 
that, after he was “fed two large bags of liquid 
formula, which were forced into his stomach very 
quickly,” he “felt pain like a ‘knife in the stomach.’”

Prisoners also explained, as the Times described 
it, that “medical staff also began inserting and 
removing the long plastic feeding tubes that were 
threaded through the detainees' nasal passages 
and into their stomachs at every feeding, a 
practice that caused sharp pain and frequent 
bleeding.” They added that, until that point, 
“they had been allowing the hunger strikers to 
leave their feeding tubes in, to reduce discomfort.”

As indicated above, Gen. Craddock had a different 
appraisal of the situation, telling reporters 
that soldiers began using the chairs “after 
finding that some were deliberately vomiting or 
siphoning out the liquid they had been fed.” “It 
was causing problems because some of these 
hard-core guys were getting worse,” he said. “The 
way around that is you have to make sure that 
purging doesn't happen. Pretty soon it wasn't 
convenient, and they decided it wasn't worth it.”

As a result of the introduction of the restraint 
chairs, the number of hunger strikers fell from a 
total of 41, on December 15, to just five, with 
three of the five -- including Ahmed Zuhair -- being force-fed.

A year later, Zuhair and the other two long-term 
hunger strikers -- Abdul Rahman Shalabi, a Saudi, 
and Tarek Baada, a Yemeni -- were still refusing 
to eat, and were still being subjected to the 
twice-daily insertion of the tubes into their 
stomachs, according to a report by imprisoned 
al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj (released in May 
2008), who had embarked on a hunger strike 
himself. Al-Haj also explained that, “at the end 
of January [2007] there were at least 42 people on hunger strike.”


Ahmed Zuhair’s legal challenges

Like most long-running stories, the men’s ordeal 
then slipped off the media’s radar, only 
resurfacing last October, when Zuhair’s lawyers 
submitted documents to a federal court in 
Washington D.C., which, they said, established 
that their client was subjected to “cruel, 
inhuman and degrading treatment.” In a struggle 
with the authorities that had been going on for 
over three years, Zuhair repeatedly tried to 
resist being force-fed, which led to regular 
“forced cell extractions” by teams of armored 
guards, which were justified, according to Army 
Col. Bruce Vargo, the commander of the guard 
force at Guantánamo, on the basis that Zuhair had 
“a very long history of disciplinary violations 
and noncompliant, resistant and combative behavior.”

In a subsequent report, on November 28, after his 
lawyers sought to have him subjected to an 
independent medical examination, one of his 
lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, explained that, although 
the military alleged that Zuhair weighed 137 
pounds and was “in no immediate danger,” he 
estimated, after a recent visit, that he weighed 
no more than 100 pounds, and “also appeared to be 
ill, vomiting repeatedly during meetings” at the 
prison. “Mr. Zuhair lifted his orange shirt and 
showed me his chest,” Kassem explained. “It was 
skeletal.“ He added, “Mr. Zuhair's legs looked 
like bones with skin wrapped tight around them.”

The latest twist in Zuhair’s case came on March 
18, with a widespread hunger strike raging at 
Guantánamo once more (involving up to 50 
prisoners), when the Obama administration 
rejected a proposal whereby Zuhair would end his 
hunger strike if he was moved from the chronic 
isolation of Camp 6, where prisoners are held in 
solid-walled, windowless cells for an average of 
22 hours a day, to the communal facilities in 
Camp 4, where prisoners spend most of their time outdoors.

Responding in the government’s court filing, Col. 
Vargo claimed that Zuhair's “history of 
disciplinary infractions” -- 80 in the last four 
months, apparently -- made him “ineligible” for 
Camp 4, and added, as the Associated Press 
described it, that “agreeing to transfer him 
would create a ‘very real risk’ that other 
prisoners will seek similar deals.” “The 
potential impact on Guantánamo's security and the 
threats to the safety of Guantánamo's staff and 
camp population cannot be overstated,” Col. Vargo concluded.


No one mentioned that he’d been cleared for release

However, the most extraordinary aspect of Ahmed 
Zuhair’s plight, which was not mentioned in press 
reports on Wednesday, is that he was actually 
cleared for release from Guantánamo, after the 
latest round of annual reviews -- known as the 
Administrative Review Boards -- on December 23, 
although he was not informed until February 10, 
and his lawyers were not told until February 16.

This rather makes a mockery of the Guantánamo 
authorities’ complaints about the “threat” he 
poses, and the allegations, still cited in news 
reports, that “US authorities allege that he 
trained with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in 
Afghanistan and was a member of an Islamic 
fighting group in Bosnia in the mid-1990s,” but 
above all it confirms -- as if any confirmation 
were required -- that, in the isolated world of 
Guantánamo, what counts against the majority of 
the prisoners is not the supposed rationale for 
their detention in the first place, which is 
often nothing more than a distant memory, but 
their behavior in detention. This might make 
sense in a conventional prison, where prisoners 
have been convicted of crimes, and the 
authorities have a responsibility to maintain 
order, but in Guantánamo, where few of the 
current prisoners have even been charged with a 
crime, and only one man -- Ali Hamza al-Bahlul -- 
has been convicted (after a one-sided show trial 
last November), it is both cruel and unjustifiable.

While this reflects badly on the prison 
authorities, I believe it also reflects badly on 
the Obama administration. After two months, the 
new President has only released one prisoner from 
Guantánamo: the British resident and torture 
victim Binyam Mohamed, whose case established 
that, if the stakes are high enough -- in other 
words, if you were subjected to extraordinary 
abuse, whose disclosure could cause enormous 
embarrassment (or even a call for criminal 
investigations) on both sides of the Atlantic -- 
you can be fast-tracked to the front of the new 
administration’s review process.


Send the Saudis home, President Obama

I don’t begrudge Binyam Mohamed his freedom, of 
course, as it was long overdue, but I’m 
disappointed that, of the 59 prisoners who have 
been cleared for release (a quarter of 
Guantánamo’s current population), not a single 
man has been freed since Barack Obama took 
office. I understand that, in many cases, this is 
because the State Department is still trying to 
find third countries to re-house men from 
countries including Algeria, China, Libya, 
Tunisia and Uzbekistan, who cannot be repatriated 
because of fears that they will be tortured, and 
that in the cases of 12 Yemenis, this is because 
the US and Yemeni governments are still 
struggling to establish a mutually acceptable 
basis for the return of prisoners. However, in 
the case of Zuhair, and five other Saudis cleared 
for release, these explanations are not applicable.

In 2006 and 2007, after the Saudi government 
established a rehabilitation program that 
satisfied the Bush administration, 108 Saudi 
prisoners were repatriated, and although there 
have, in recent months, been howls of outrage 
from right-wing commentators, after a handful of 
these men resurfaced in connection with militant 
groups in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the rate of 
recidivism has been insignificant, and is far 
outweighed by the program’s success in divesting 
ex-prisoners of the false notions of jihad 
encouraged by radical clerics, and in supporting 
them as they reestablish themselves in Saudi society.

Given the close ties between the US and Saudi 
governments, the success of the rehabilitation 
program, and recent suggestions that the Saudi 
government may take Yemenis from Guantánamo who 
have family ties to Saudi Arabia, my concluding 
questions are simple: why, after three and half 
years on an agonizing hunger strike, has Ahmed 
Zuhair not been repatriated, to end his torment 
and to reunite him with his family, and why, in 
addition, have the other five Saudis -- some of 
whom have been cleared for release for several 
years -- also not been repatriated?

Perhaps the Obama administration needs reminding 
that another reason the majority of these men 
were released so swiftly and in such large 
numbers (which was not the Bush administration’s 
normal method of operating) was in response to 
exceptional pressure exerted by the Saudi 
authorities following the deaths of three men in 
Guantánamo in June 2006 (two of whom were 
Saudis), and the death of another (also a Saudi) 
in May 2007. All these men had been long-term 
hunger strikers -- and the three who died in 2006 
had been force-fed until just before their deaths 
-- and, in addition, Mani al-Utaybi, one of those 
who died in 2006, had been cleared for release 
since November 2005, although Navy Commander 
Robert Durand admitted, with a kind of off-hand 
callousness, that he “did not know whether 
al-Utaybi had been informed about the transfer 
decision before he killed himself.”

In Ahmed Zuhair’s case, this danger period -- 
when he could have died before knowing that he 
had been cleared for release -- has now passed, 
but it remains inexplicable that he continues to 
be held in conditions that constitute a severe 
danger to his health, when there is no longer any reason to hold him.

Responding to the government’s filing on 
Wednesday, Ramzi Kassem stated, “They want to 
pressure Ahmed to break his hunger strike by 
continuing to detain him in the excessively harsh 
environment of Camp 6. Moving Ahmed to Camp 4 to 
encourage him to cease striking would rob ... 
prison authorities of the sick victory of 
breaking him.” He might also have added that 
holding Zuhair -- and other cleared prisoners -- 
in Camp 6 makes a mockery of the supposedly 
“humane” conditions at Guantánamo, which 
apparently conform to the requirements of the 
Geneva Conventions, according to a recent 
Pentagon report submitted as part of the new 
administration’s review of Guantánamo.

For these men, who have never been charged or 
tried for any crime, and have, moreover, been 
cleared for release, there is simply no 
justification for holding them in the isolation 
of a prison block modeled on a maximum security 
prison for convicted criminals on the US 
mainland, instead of transferring them to a block 
where, after seven years in an abominable 
experiment that has still not come to an end, 
they would finally have the opportunity to 
socialize, to feel the fresh air and to see the sunlight.

This is the least that President Obama should do, 
but in the case of Ahmed Zuhair and the other 
cleared Saudis he should go one step further and send them home.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the 
author of 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published 
by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk 
He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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