THE HANDSTAND

 SEPTEMBER2010

At Guantánamo during Ramadan, the guards strap hunger striker detainees into the force-feeding chair at night.

Guantanamo @CarolRosenberg

BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com

Military medical staff are force-feeding a secret number of prisoners on hunger strike between dusk and dawn during the Muslim fasting holiday of Ramadan.The prison camps spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Bradley Fagan, says it is U.S. Southern Command policy to no longer reveal the exact number of detainees being shackled by guards into restraint chairs for twice daily feedings. Instead, he said, ``less than 10'' captives among the 176 held for years at Guantánamo were last week counted as hunger strikers.

``Detainees who are fasting get their meals before dawn,'' he said Wednesday, disclosing only the hours of that day's feeding ``in observance of the Ramadan schedule'' -- before 5:26 a.m. and after 7:28 p.m.``Please note,'' he added, ``that not all hunger strikers are enteral feeders.''

As prison camps spokesman, Fagan has clamped a new level of secrecy on the Pentagon's practice of pumping protein shakes into the stomachs of captives who refuse to eat meals catered to the prison camps by Defense Department contractors. A fact sheet dated June 28 on the Guantánamo website disclosed some other figures: ``Each detainee receives 5,500-6,000 calories per day and has six menus to choose from. Feast meals are served two times per week.'' It put the price of meeting the captives ``cultural and dietary needs'' at approximately $3 million a year.

Fagan's predecessors had scrupulously referred to a complex matrix that calculated the number of skipped meals and weight loss to disclose the numbers of hunger strikers versus those being shackled to a chair and fed twice a day by tube. On Feb. 11, 2009, for example, the prison camps reported that 41 of the 245 captives held at Guantánamo at the start of the Obama administration were classified as hunger strikers. That day, 35 were getting twice-a-day, one-hour feedings. Guantánamo detainees have turned to hunger strikes across the years as a method of both protest and challenging authority in the remote prison camps in southeast Cuba. The military has responded with a range of methods to try to disrupt the strikes -- introduction of the feeding chair, segregation and isolation of those who take part, banishment from the most communal of camps where captives can pray and eat together.

Prison camps commanders have argued the procedure was painless and two admirals said they had personally had Navy medical staff nourish them through ``enteral feedings'' to check it out. Fagan did say that the prison camps is adhereing to past practice of using military medical staff for feedings.

Navy prison camp hospital workers some years back created a display of different flavored supplements and let visiting reporters handle a sample yellow rubber feeding tube. By last summer, staff were pointing to Butter Pecan flavored Ensure as popular with the chair-shackled captives. Flavor made no difference going down, one nurse explained, but a captive could taste it if he burped later.



EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT gUANTANAMO

By Carol Rosenberg | Miami Herald

An emotionally ill detainee still being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was first recommended for release by the Pentagon in 2004, according to a federal judge whose ruling ordering that the man be freed was made public this week.

Despite the Pentagon's recommendation, it wasn't until 2007 that the Bush administration adopted the military assessment and put Adnan Abdul Latif, now about 34, on an approved transfer list. By then, however, the issue of transferring prisoners to Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland, was mired in a diplomatic standoff over whether the Arabian Peninsula nation could provide security assurances and rehabilitate suspected radicalized Guantanamo detainees.

U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy disclosed the timeline in a heavily censored 28-page ruling made public on Monday night that ordered Latif set free. Latif is the 38th Guantanamo captive to be found by a federal judge to be illegally detained at the remote U.S. Navy base.

Kennedy first ordered the Obama administration to arrange for Latif's release "forthwith'' on July 21. But a Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said government lawyers were still deciding Tuesday night whether to appeal to a higher court. "Why they continue to defend holding him is unfathomable," said David Remes, Latif's free-of-charge attorney. "Adnan's case reflects the Obama administration's complete failure to bring the Guantanamo litigation under control."

Latif, held at Guantanamo since Jan. 18, 2002, has said for years that he had suffered a head injury in his teens and was in Pakistan and Afghanistan seeking Islamic charity medical care before his capture. The U.S. Justice Department countered that Latif was seen at an al Qaida guest house and trained with the terror movement. But in the portion of the judge's ruling made public Kennedy noted that the Pentagon's own military intelligence analysis found no eyewitness to back up the claim, only war-on-terror captives who had seen him in U.S. prison camps.

Kennedy quoted from a 2004 Defense Department report that recommended he be sent home and said Latif "is not known to have participated in combatant/terrorist training." The government had "not proven by a preponderance of the evidence that Latif was in Afghanistan to train and fight with'' either the Taliban or Al Qaida, Kennedy wrote.Latif's lawyer said the Yemeni has spent long periods of his captivity in the Guantanamo psychiatric ward after repeated suicide attempts and reacted with despair to the judge's ruling. "He sees death as his only way out," Remes said.

Pentagon records show Latif was measured at 5-feet-4-inches and weighed 114 pounds on his arrival at the prison camps on Jan. 18, 2002. Remes said by last week he had been weighed at 93. Latif has covered himself in excrement, thrown blood at the lawyer, swallowed shards of metal and tried to eat glass in dozens of self-harm episodes, Remes said. Latif was brought to meet his lawyer last week in a padded green garment held together by Velcro called a "suicide smock," according to Remes, who said he had been stripped of his underwear. Prison camp guards have put the smocks on display for reporters during camp tours and said in the past they also had acquired suicide-proof underwear.

More than half of the 176 captives currently at Guantanamo are Yemeni citizens, a portion of whom an Obama Task Force has approved for transfer home. But the White House has frozen most Yemeni transfers following the aborted Christmas Day bombing attempt on a Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian man who said he was trained in Yemen.


Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/08/17/99314/us-still-holds-detainee-pentagon.html#ixzz0xC1R6hxD

If you’ve never seen the Michael Winterbottom film, Road to Guantanamo, rent it now.

Based on the true story of the Tipton three, the story follows 3 British Muslims who were captured in Britain and sent to Cuba. They were held 2 years with no formal charges against them, and had no rights. After 2 years of inhumane treatment, the men were finally released and sent back to Britain but the trauma of their torture will remain in their spirit for a lifetime See trailer here.

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE STORIES OF ARAB INDIVIDUALS WHO HAVE BEEN CUT OFF OR HAVE LOST THEIR TRIBAL CONNECTIONS

Jihadi's journey: 'Seeking the defeat of the enemies of God'

After fighting for 20 years in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Bosnia and Somalia – Yemen is the country the mujahideen now call home

guardian.co.uk,

The city of Sana'a in Yemen. Photograph: Tibor Bogn R/ Tibor Bogn r/CORBIS

Hamza answered the call of jihad 20 years ago, when he was 16. He left his family home in Jeddah and headed to Afghanistan to join the long line of jihadis fighting the "apostate" Soviet-backed government.

Two years later when he returned to Saudi Arabia, the communist regime had fallen in Kabul, the Afghan mujahideen had started fighting each other in a civil war that would last a decade and the conflict had already begun between the Arabs in Afghanistan – including Osama bin Laden and his followers – and the Saudis and other Arab governments. Euphoric from their Afghan victories, the jihadis were intent on deposing what they saw as corrupt regimes back home. The regimes hit back hard.

Instead of being welcomed in Saudi, Hamza was ostracised for his close links with the jihadi leaders. He was stripped of his Saudi nationality and deported to his ancestral land in Yemen. There he found a more accommodating regime intent on using every asset it had in its own internal conflicts, including jihadis.

For Hamza, it marked the start of a quixotic life as an international jihadi, in his words, "seeking the defeat of the enemies of God, the propagation of the sharia and martyrdom".

His life story resembles a tour diary of the jihadi battlefields of the past two decades: Bosnia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan (for the second time), Kosovo and Somalia. Hamza found funding for his sojourns through a network of businessmen and charities in Yemen and Saudi.

"We would call a rich person – a merchant or a charity – and tell them that we want to go fight somewhere and they would send us the money," Hamza says, slouched on the floor of a small flat in one of the concrete, half-finished ugly buildings dotting the ever-expanding outskirts of Sana'a. Short, with strong arms, he has a thin, long beard and restless eyes. "We didn't need much. Five thousand dollars was more than enough to buy you plane tickets and support you for a few months. Things were much easier in airports then." His jihadi escapades often met with defeats and humiliations, but that did not affect his appetite for the journey.

In the former Yugoslavia, where Bosnian Muslim comrades drank as much as their Serb enemies, Hamza and his fellow Arabs had to issue an edict that no drunks were allowed on battle missions. Soon after the war they were kicked out by the more tolerant Bosnian Muslims, who feared a Wahhabist takeover. In Tajikistan, they were betrayed by local Muslims who again feared the Wahhabist creed. "We Arabs can't learn from our mistakes," he told me. "Never trust central Asian Muslims. They are Sufis."

In Afghanistan, he initially mistrusted the emergence of the Taliban. "When they were sweeping through towns and villages we thought they must be supported by the Americans," he said. In Kosovo, their leader was a Filipino who, not knowing the ground he was fighting on, led his men into an ambush in a valley. Most of Hamza's fellow fighters were killed and he was seriously injured. But again, there were the charities to help.

Yemen – with its long, poorly guarded borders, extensive coastline and government perpetually making deals with Islamists – was always the safe haven to which Hamza and his travelling jihadis returned. After his injury he broke off from his armed struggle to recover, marry and have children. When he thought about returning to jihad, he found the world had changed.

Gone were the days when he would just hop on a plane and show up in Pakistan or Tajikistan. "Before, we could just take a flight and land in Karachi. Now if I go to the airport I will be arrested."

That's when he found an opportunity closer to home. Across the Gulf of Aden a new prospect of travel and jihad had opened, in the chaos of Somalia's decade-long civil war where jihadis had created a home for themselves since the mid-1990s.

But things had taken a twist when, in 2006, Islamist fighters – under the name of the Islamic courts – defeated the warlords who had perpetuated death and destruction in Somalia for almost 20 years. An Ethiopian invasion to crush the Islamist radicals provided another warring cry for the jihadi groups. Volunteers incensed by the invasion flocked to Somalia. The Ethiopians withdrew, leaving behind a far more lethal and radical heir to the courts movement, the Harakat al-Shabab al-mujahideen.

Thus, a new route was established that would occasionally ferrying fighters back and forth to Yemen.

The cross-sea traffic has been made all the more possible thanks to three new factors: the establishment of a local franchise of al-Qaida in Yemen – al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) – led by a disciplined and well-organised commander, Nasser al-Wahishi; the collapse of authority and security in the south of Yemen; and the pressure on traditional safe havens in the tribal region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Jihadi commanders on both sides of the sea, Somalia and Yemen, told me in the past few months how new recruits – Arabs, Africans (some with western passports) and a few European and American converts – are flocking to Mogadishu and other parts of southern Somalia to get training and first-hand exposure to streetfighting and combat. A select few then go to the tribal area in Yemen for advanced training.

The commanders say it is especially easy for westerners eager to join the jihad to slip undetected into Yemen by boat via Tanzania or Kenya, to avoid the increasing scrutiny of foreigners by the Yemeni authorities.

After engaging with the Yemeni government in one of its many dialogue rounds, Hamza decided himself to try the route across the Gulf of Aden.

"I was fed up with the government. They promised us jobs and they promised to help the brothers, but nothing came – so I decided to leave and go fight.

"Abu Talha, one of our brothers, was already there in Somalia since 1998 and he had a camp. I called him and we agreed to go there. I went to the south and one of the brothers arranged a boat for us. The journey took 24 hours and cost us $3,000.

"The boat captain was a smuggler but a good man. He tried to keep us calm, but the sea was horrible. We left Yemen at night and by dawn, when we saw the cost of Somalia, my legs were shaking."

Hamza spent a year in Somalia fighting with the Islamic courts.

"When we arrived, the Ethiopians were already invading. We retreated from Mogadishu a few days after we entered it and withdrew to Kismayo in the deep south and then moved with a few of our mujahideen brothers to the Kenyan border. We were lost for weeks and spent five days without food and water."

A few weeks later the Islamists regrouped and Hamza and few of his surviving comrades retreated to Yemen.

"When I came back two brothers came with me one British – a real British, a convert, not an Arab or an Asian – and one Swedish Arab. They both stayed with me in the tribal area and then, God blessing, they flew back home and they called me and said they had no problems with the authorities."

For Hamza, his days of travel are far from over. Having finished recounting his tale of global jihad, he has one persistant question: "What's the best way to reach Baghdad now?"