[Vision2020] Detainees in Despair

[Donovan Arnold]

Nick,
  
 I am glad you are standing up for the terrorists  because I just could not bring myself to do it, because they are  terrorists. You are right terrorists do have rights too, I just think  that resources should be spend elsewhere to counter injustices against  those that did not cheer the events of 9/11, like maybe the 5,000  children a day that die due to the political and economic oppression  caused by US backed foreign governments. 
  
  Best,
  
  _DJA

nickgier at adelphia.net wrote:   
 Greetings:

While  researching my commentary on torture I came across this. The right to  appear before a judge and fule due process is a right that every person  deserves. The evidence against these men should be finalized, they  should be charged, and this disgraceful prison should be close. 

June 14, 2006, The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Detainees in Despair 
By MOURAD BENCHELLALI
Lyon, France

I  WAS released from the United States military's prison camp at  Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in July 2004. As I was about to board a plane  that would take me home to France, the last detainee I saw was a young  Yemeni. He was overwhelmed by emotion. 

"In your country,  Mourad, there are rights, human rights, and they mean something," he  said. "In mine they mean nothing, and no one cares. So when you're  free, don't forget what you've been through. Tell people that we are  here." 

I now know that this Yemeni was not among the three  prisoners who committed suicide at Guantánamo last weekend, but since  then his words have been echoing in my head. Although I'm now a free  man, the shared pain endlessly takes me back to the camp.

In the  early summer of 2001, when I was 19, I made the mistake of listening to  my older brother and going to Afghanistan on what I thought was a dream  vacation. His friends, he said, were going to look after me. They did —  channeling me to what turned out to be a Qaeda training camp. For two  months, I was there, trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my  own stupidity. 

As soon as my time was up, I headed home. I was  a few miles from the Pakistani border when I learned with horror about  the attacks of 9/11. Days later, the border was sealed off, and the  only way through to Pakistan and a plane to Europe was across the  mountains of the Hindu Kush. I was with a group of people who were all  going the same way. No one was armed; most of them, like me, had been  lured to Afghanistan by a misguided and mistimed sense of adventure,  and were simply trying to make their way home. 

I was seized by  the Pakistani Army while having tea at a mosque shortly after I managed  to cross the border. A few days later I was delivered to the United  States Army: although I didn't know it at the time, I was now labeled  an "enemy combatant." It did not matter that I was no one's enemy and  had never been on a battlefield, let alone fought or aimed a weapon at  anyone. 

After two weeks in the American military base in  Kandahar, Afghanistan, I was sent to Guantánamo, where I spent two and  a half years. I cannot describe in just a few lines the suffering and  the torture; but the worst aspect of being at the camp was the despair,  the feeling that whatever you say, it will never make a difference. 

You  repeat yourself over and over again to interrogators from the military  intelligence, the F.B.I., the C.I.A. The first time you hear "Your case  is being processed," your heart, seizing on the hopeful possibilities  in those words, skips a beat. After months of disappointment, you try  to develop an immunity to hope, but hope is an incurable disease. 

I  remember once an interrogator warming me up during several sessions for  a polygraph test I was going to take, that was, according to him,  infallible. After I took the test, I was left alone in the  interrogation room; an hour later, the interrogator returned.  "Congratulations," he said grimly. "You have passed the test." And he  gave me a box of candy. 

In the outside world, I thought, the  difference between telling the truth and lying, between committing a  crime and not committing it, is the difference between being in jail  and being free. In Guantánamo, it is a box of candy. 

I was  eventually released and I will go on trial next month in Paris to face  charges that I've never denied, that I spent two months in the Qaeda  camp. I have a court date, I'm facing a judge, and I have a lawyer,  unimaginable luxuries in Guantánamo. I didn't know the three detainees  who died, but it is easy for me to see how this daily despair and  uncertainty could lead to suicide. 

During my captivity, I saw  many acts of individual rebellion, from screaming to hunger strikes and  suicide attempts. "They are smart, they are creative, they are  committed," said Rear Adm. Harry Harris, who commands the camp. "They  have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was  not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged  against us." 

I am a quiet Muslim — I've never waged war, let  alone an asymmetrical one. I wasn't anti-American before and,  miraculously, I haven't become anti-American since. In Guantánamo, I  did see some people for whom jihad is life itself, people whose minds  are distorted by extremism and whose souls are full of hatred. But the  huge majority of the faces I remember — the ones that haunt my nights —  are of desperation, suffering, incomprehension turned into silent  madness. 

I believe that a small number of the detainees at  Guantánamo are guilty of criminal acts, but as analysis of the  military's documents on the prisoners has shown, there is no evidence  that most of the 465 or so men there have committed hostile acts  against the United States or its allies. Even so, what I heard so many  times resounding from cage to cage, what I said myself so many times in  my moments of complete despondency, was not, "Free us, we are  innocent!" but "Judge us for whatever we've done!" There is unlimited  cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and  unable to punish the guilty.

Mourad Benchellali has written a  book about his experience in a Qaeda camp andat Guantánamo Bay, with  Antoine Audouard, who assisted in the writing of this article and  translated it from the French.





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