My Guantanamo Diary (20 page)
Read My Guantanamo Diary Online
Authors: Mahvish Khan
They are forcefeeding me now.
I was 204 pounds when I began. . . . After 11 days, I was already down to 176 lbs. Every day they drew my blood. After 18 days, they took me to the hospital. They asked me if I wanted to eat, and I told them no. They said I needed an IV. I said I did not want it. They made me drink two bottles of water in front of them and then took me back to my cell.
On the Saturday [January 27], which was the 21st day of my strike, they took me back to the hospital. I was 168 lbs. They told me there was no sugar in my blood, and that I would die.
“I know I will die,” I replied.
They said I needed an IV. I said I would not have one. They said that water was not enough, and they would force me, so I complied. They said they would put an IV in and give me one bag [of nutrients]. The IV was in my elbow. They put one bag in. When it was done, they brought another bag. I said they had promised only one. But they gave me a second. Then, they brought a third, which they said was vitamins. I said they had lied to me, and I would rip the IV out with my teeth.
“We will put you in ‘The Chair,’” the officer said. [This refers to the chair used to strap the prisoners down for forced feeding. The prisoners call it the “Torture Chair.” Advertisements for the chair available on the Internet say it as “like a padded cell on wheels.”] It was the time for prayer, so I asked the officer
for five minutes. I asked them to remove the IV while I prayed. They refused. I missed two prayer times there. They cared more about their IV than for my prayer.
When I had missed 70 meals, the doctor said that my condition was very bad. It was more than 500 hours since I had last eaten food. He said they would force-feed me or I could die within hours. I said I did not wish to eat. I told him that I knew my rights under the Tokyo Declaration—they could not force-feed me consistent with their ethics, because they knew I was competent, and they knew I made the decision voluntarily.
“I wish to go back to my cell please,” I told them. There was a nurse, who let me pray.
On Monday [January 29] they told me that they would not let me die. They brought in a 12 mm tube. It was yellow. They pushed it into my left nostril, all the way down until it reached my stomach. They force-fed me by machine, 250 ml of Ensure. I was there for 14 hours with the tube in my nose. It was 1:30 AM. I wanted to sleep and asked them to take it out, but they refused. I said I would begin to scream unless they took it out. They finally did.
On Tuesday [January 30] at 8 AM, they forced the tube in again. This time it was 900 ml of Ensure. The whole time they had an IV in me. The first day they had forced it in at 20 ml per hour, but the second day it was 100 ml an hour. It took almost ten hours in total. It did not finish until about 6 PM.
I slept.
On Wednesday [January 30] a doctor came in and asked how I was.
“Please take me out of here,” I said. “I want to go back to my cell.” He ordered them to give me 600 ml of Ensure and a bottle of water through the tube, along with something else. I was very tired. Nothing comes out any more when I go to the toilet.
By the time anyone is allowed to read my words, I will have had my birthday on February 15. I will celebrate it in the Torture Chair this year, I think.
It is sad to be on this strike. I have no desire to die. I am suffering, hungry. The nights are very long, and I cannot sleep. But I will continue the struggle until we get our rights. The strike is the only way that I can protest. The military administration treats us all so very badly.
I saw my lawyer Clive in a dream. He was in Sudan, and I had invited him. He came to my home for dinner. We spoke. I said, do you remember those days in Guantánamo? It seemed so far away, such a long time ago.
Many dreams here become reality. One day I dream of playing with my son Mohammed. Meanwhile, to my wife and son I say, “Don’t worry, what will happen will happen.” One day the sun will shine again, and we will be free. Facts are facts, and at last we will prevail.
The following entry was recorded by Clive Stafford Smith during his March 1, 2007, visit with al-Haj:
Food is not enough for life. If there is no air, could you live on food alone? Freedom is just as important as food or air. Give me freedom, and I’ll eat. Every day they ask me, when will I eat. Every day, I say, “Tomorrow.” Every day. It’s what Scarlett O’Hara says at the end of
Gone with the Wind
: “Tomorrow is another day.” I am being force-fed at 10 AM and 3 PM each day. . . . They take notes all the time, so I know they have a long record of what they are doing to me.
They slam the prisoners into the chair. They tighten the straps so they cut into us. They have new padded shackles for moving the prisoners now, which are much better, but for the hunger strikers they use the old ones that cut in.
They begin with the feet first, then the waist. Then, they do one wrist at a time. There is one band around each shin. One on each wrist. One on each elbow. One strap that comes down over each shoulder. Three on the top of the head, so that the head can’t move. The ankles are shackled to an eye on the chair. They pull hard on the wrists in particular.
They pull a mask over your mouth, apparently to stop people from spitting.
In the morning they use my left nostril, in the afternoon, my right. The pain of putting the tube up my nose depends on the shift. As it goes in, at first you are gagging on it. As it goes down, they blow air into it to hear where it is. They put a stethoscope near my heart to listen—I am not sure why. I prayed to Allah when they first did that!
I worry that these people are not nurses at all. Ab-durrahman said that the IV was put in him by a guard, not a nurse. Some days they put the tube in okay, so it does not hurt too much. But some days I suffer until the tears stream down my cheeks. They have had two trainees who have practiced on me. One was a white woman, fat, short, something over thirty years old.
The other was a captain nurse, a white man, over forty years old, blond, with a moustache, average build, about five foot nine, with green eyes. You saw the eyes when he was putting the tube in. He came three days in a row, and after the first experience, I prayed to Allah that it would not be him each time. He said, “Are you ready?” I said, “So, what if I am not? You will force me anyway.” Three times they have inserted the tube the wrong way, so it has gone into my lungs. They put water into it, and it made me choke. Water started coming out of my nose. One time the nurse wiped my nose. Another time, they did not seem to care.
They use the same pipe (I can see it is the same number) for about two weeks at a time. It makes me nauseous to see the same one going in each time. Sometimes the guards come by and knock the pipe when it is in my nose. It is very painful.
Most say nothing at all to me. Never once has one of them said “I’m sorry” when they have hurt me, or said, “I hope this doesn’t hurt.” Even when they put it in my lung.
They force me to accept two cans of Ensure liquid nutrient, each of 236 ml, and 250 ml of water each time, for a total of 722 ml that they force through my nose. There is no taste of anything. It has been a long time since I knew the flavor of food.
They hold you for an hour in the chair after being fed, to make sure you don’t throw up. If I do throw up on myself, which happens frequently, I am given no clean clothes, and I cannot even clean myself, since they keep the water turned off when we get back to our cells.
My stomach is causing me all kinds of problems. Now I am experiencing constipation and diarrhea alternately— for roughly three days each at a time. I feel dizzy and in danger of collapse when I stand up. . . .
As of today, I have been held as a prisoner without trial for One Thousand Nine Hundred and Two days. Sometimes I wonder what a human being would have to be given to go through this voluntarily. When I was sent on assignment to Afghanistan, Al-Jazeera was paying $600 a day for dangerous work abroad. At that rate, it would be $1,141,200 for the time I have been away from my wife and son. Would I accept the suffering I have been through if I had been promised more than a million dollars? Never. Not at all.
According to al-Haj, hunger strikers suffered the worst abuse in “India Block.” There, the air-conditioning was cranked up
high, and prisoners were pepper-sprayed without warning, then doused with cold water so that they could never relax. They were forced to shower naked in full view of the guards, denied shorts or even towels.
Systematic forced nudity was used to demean and dehumanize the prisoners, said lawyer Zachary Katznelson. That sort of prolonged degradation couldn’t be justified under the guise of a security threat. It brought to my mind images of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The only reason U.S. soldiers were charged in connection with the abuse that went on there was because someone made the mistake of taking photographs.
But forced nudity wasn’t the only means of demoralizing prisoners like al-Haj. According to Katznelson, a number of prisoners reported that they were humiliated by soldiers repeatedly inserting their fingers into their anuses. One even claimed that a stick had been shoved into his rectum.
Al-Haj was held for more than five years on the basis of secret evidence, never charged with any crime. Until the Associated Press sued the Pentagon in 2005, the military wouldn’t even acknowledge that it was holding him. His family had no idea what had happened to him and was unaware that he had been taken to Guantánamo until six months after his arrest, when his wife, Asma, received a letter through the Red Cross.
Contact after that was strained. Al-Haj’s letters took several months to reach the family. It was even worse on his end. He went an entire year once without hearing from his wife. Another time he was given a letter from his brother—dated two
years earlier. On average, Katznelson said, it took seven to nine months for his client to receive a letter—and then it was often heavily censored.
In his military hearings, al-Haj was accused, among other things, of running a terrorist Web site, of entering Afghanistan illegally, of interviewing Osama bin Laden, and of supplying arms and funds to Chechen fighters. Attorney Clive Stafford Smith, who was not allowed to attend these military proceedings, called all the allegations “nonsense” and the hearings process itself “un-American.”
“Al-Haj is no more a terrorist than my grandmother,” Stafford Smith said. “There is absolutely zero evidence that he has any history of terrorism at all.”
During his more than six years at Guantánamo, the allegations against al-Haj changed repeatedly. The military found that he never interviewed Osama bin Laden, so that allegation disappeared. There was no jihadist or terrorist Web site, so that allegation too vanished, as did the charge of funneling arms to the Chechens.
Again and again, the allegations proved false. “There is no evidence that he is guilty of anything,” insisted Stafford Smith. “And the U.S. has clearly shown that by the fact that they never even interrogated him about his alleged guilt—until he begged them to.”
Strangely, the military showed scant interest in al-Haj’s alleged terrorist connections. Instead, most of his more than two hundred interrogations focused on pumping him for information about his former employer, which confused al- Haj. Eventually, he pleaded with interrogators to ask him about the alleged crimes he was being detained for, but their
focus remained on Al-Jazeera. He was asked about the news staff, who paid its salaries, who paid for travel, where the money came from, and whether the network was really a front for al-Qaeda.