American gulag
Torture,
force-feeding and darkness at
By Thomas
Wilner,
( Thomas Wilner is a partner at Shearman & Sterling, which
has been representing Kuwaiti prisoners in
THE AMERICAN PRISON CAMP at
The prison overlooks the sea, but the ocean cannot be seen by prisoners. Guard
towers and stadium lights loom along the perimeter. On my last visit, we were
escorted by young, solemn military guards whose nameplates on their shirts were
taped over so that prisoners could not identify them.
Very few outsiders are
allowed to see the prisoners. The government has orchestrated some carefully
controlled tours for the media and members of Congress, but has repeatedly refused to
allow these visitors, representatives of the United Nations, human rights
groups or nonmilitary doctors and psychiatrists to meet or speak with
prisoners. So
far, the only outsiders who have done so are representatives of the
International Committee of the Red Cross — who are prohibited by their own
rules from disclosing what they find — and lawyers for the prisoners.
I am one of those lawyers. I represent six Kuwaiti prisoners, each of whom has
now spent nearly four years at
On my most recent trip three weeks ago, after signing a log sheet and
submitting our bags to a search, my colleagues and I were taken through two
tall, steel-mesh gates into the interior of the prison camp.
We interviewed our clients in
The Pentagon's files on the six Kuwaiti prisoners we represent reveal that none
was captured on a battlefield or accused of engaging in hostilities against the
The files include only the flimsiest accusations or hearsay that would never
stand up in court. The file on one prisoner indicated that he had been seen
talking to two suspected Al Qaeda members on the same day — at places thousands
of miles apart. The
primary "evidence" against another was that he was captured wearing a
particular Casio watch, "which many terrorists wear." Oddly, the same
watch was being worn by the
When I first met my clients, they had not seen or spoken with their families
for more than three years, and they had been questioned hundreds of times.
Several were suspicious of us; they told me that they had been interrogated by
people who claimed to be their lawyers but who turned out not to be. So we had DVDs made, on which
members of their families told them who we were and that we could be trusted. Several cried on seeing their
families for the first time in years. One had become a father since he was
detained and had never before seen his child. One noticed his father was not on
the DVD, and we had to tell him that his father had died.
Most prisoners are kept apart, although some can communicate through the steel
mesh or concrete walls that separate their cells. They exercise alone, some only at night. They had not
seen sunlight for months — an especially cruel tactic in a tropical climate. One prisoner told
me, "I have spent almost every moment of the last three years, and eaten
every meal, here in this small cell which is my bathroom." Other than the
Koran, prisoners had nothing to read. As a result of our protests, some have
been given books.
Every prisoner I've interviewed claims to have been badly beaten and subjected
to treatment that only could be called torture, by Americans, from the first day
of U.S. captivity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by
their wrists and beaten, hung by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and
paraded before female guards, and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten
again upon arrival in
Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25, is a teacher who left
On
At the end of August, after Fawzi fainted in his cell, guards began to
force-feed him through tubes pushed up his nose into his stomach. At first, the
tubes were inserted for each feeding and then removed afterward. Fawzi told me
that this was very painful. When he tried to pull out the tubes, he was
strapped onto a stretcher with his head held by many guards, which was even
more painful.
By
mid-September, the force-feeding had been made more humane. Feeding tubes were
left in and the formula pumped in. Still, when I saw Fawzi, a tube was
protruding from his nose. Drops of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it
with a napkin.
We asked for Fawzi's medical records so we could monitor his weight and his
health. Denied. The only way we could learn how Fawzi
was doing was to visit him each month, which we did. When we visited him in
November, his weight had dropped from
When we saw Fawzi in December, his weight had stabilized at about
When I met with Fawzi three weeks ago, the tubes were out of his nose. I told him I was thankful that
after five months he had ended his hunger strike. He looked at me sadly and
said, "They tortured us to make us stop." At first, he said, they punished
him by taking away his "comfort items" one by one: his blanket, his
towel, his long pants, his shoes. They then put him in isolation. When this failed to persuade him to end the hunger strike, he said,
an officer came to him Jan. 9 to announce that any detainee who refused to eat
would be forced onto "the chair." The officer warned that
recalcitrant prisoners would be strapped into a steel device that pulled their
heads back, and that the tubes would be forced in and wrenched out for each
feeding. "We're going to break this hunger strike," the officer told
him.
Fawzi said he heard the prisoner next door screaming and warning him to give up
the strike. He decided that he wasn't "on strike to be tortured." He
said those who continued on the hunger strike not only were strapped in
"the chair" but were left there for hours; he believes that guards
fed them not only nutrients but also diuretics and laxatives to force them to
defecate and urinate on themselves in the chair.
After less than two weeks of this treatment, the strike was over. Of the more
than 80 strikers at the end of December, Fawzi said only three or four were
holding out. As a result of the strike, however, prisoners are now getting a
meager ration of bottled water.
Fawzi said eating was the only aspect of life at
The government
continues to deny that there is any injustice at
