Published on Sunday, February 26, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
Guantanamo: American Gulag
by Thomas Wilner

The American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeast corner
of Cuba, a sliver of land the United States has occupied since 1903.
Long ago, it was irrigated from lakes on the other side of the island,
but Cuban President Fidel Castro cut off the water supply years ago. So
today, Guantanamo produces its own water from a 30-year-old
desalination plant. The water has a distinct yellow tint. All Americans
drink bottled water imported by the planeload. Until recently,
prisoners drank the yellow water.

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 Guantanamo. It took me 2 1/2
years to gain access to my clients, but now I have visited the prison
camp 11 times in the last 14 months. What I have witnessed is a cruel
and eerie netherworld of concrete and barbed wire that has become a
daily nightmare for the nearly 500 people swept up after 9/11 who have
been imprisoned without charges or trial for more than four years. It
is truly our American gulag.

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 Camp Echo, one of several camps where
prisoners are interrogated. We entered a room about 13 feet square and
divided in half by a wall of thick steel mesh. On one side was a table
where the prisoner would sit for our interviews, his feet shackled to a
steel eyelet cemented to the floor. On the other side were a shower and
a cell just like the ones in which prisoners are ordinarily confined.
In their cells, prisoners sleep on a metal shelf against the wall,
which is flanked by a toilet and sink. They are allowed a thin foam
mattress and a gray cotton blanket.

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 U.S. The prisoners claim that they were taken
into custody by Pakistani and Afghan warlords and turned over to the
U.S. for bounties ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 - a claim confirmed
by American news reports. We have obtained copies of bounty leaflets
distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. forces promising
rewards - "enough to feed your family for life" - for any "Arab
terrorist" handed over.

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 U.S. military chaplain, a Muslim, at Guantanamo.

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 Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27,
said his ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt
the indentation in his ribs. "Beat me all you want, just give me a
hearing," he said he told his interrogators.

Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25, is a teacher who left Kuwait City
in 2001 to work in Afghan, then Pakistani, schools. After 9/11, he and
four other Kuwaitis were invited to dinner by a Pakistani tribal leader
and then sold by him into captivity, according to their accounts, later
confirmed by Newsweek and ABC News.

On Aug. 8, 2005, Fawzi, in desperation, went on a hunger strike to
assert his innocence and to protest being imprisoned for four years
without charges. He said he wanted to defend himself against any
accusations, or die. He told me that he had heard U.S. congressmen had
returned from tours of Guantanamo saying that it was a Caribbean resort
with great food. "If I eat, I condone these lies," Fawzi said.

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 140 pounds to 98 pounds. Specialists in
enteral feeding advised us that the continued drop in his weight and
other signs indicated that the feeding was being conducted
incompetently. We asked that Fawzi be transferred to a hospital. Again,
the government refused.

When we saw Fawzi in December, his weight had stabilized at about 110
pounds. The formulas had been changed, and he was being force-fed by
medical personnel rather than by guards.

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 Guantanamo he could
control; forcing him to end the hunger strike stripped him of his last
means of protesting his unjust imprisonment. Now, he said, he feels
"hopeless."

The government continues to deny that there is any injustice at
Guantanamo. But I know the truth.

Thomas Wilner is a partner at Shearman & Sterling, which has been
representing Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantanamo since early 2002.

2006 Los Angeles Times