James Meek (Gaurdian Utd): People the law forgot

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Wednesday December 3

People the law forgot
It is almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened. Its purpose is to hold people seized in the 'war on terror' and defined by the Bush administration as enemy combatants - though many appear to have been bystanders to the conflict. Images of Camp Delta's orange-jumpsuited, manacled detainees have provoked international outrage. But the real horror they face isn't physical hardship, it is the threat of infinite confinement, without trial or access to legal representation. Our correspondent has spent the past month talking to former inmates and some of those involved in operating the Pentagon's Kafkaesque justice system. He has built an unprecedented picture of life on the base, which we present in this special issue.
By James Meek

One summer's day in Cuba in 2002, a 31-year-old Pakistani teacher of English named Abdul Razaq noticed something unusual in the familiar patterns of movement among the orange-suited figures in the mesh cages on either side of him. Two or three cages along from his own, a fellow Pakistani prisoner, Shah Mohammed, was silently going about trying to hang himself from a sheet lashed to the mesh. He had the cloth around his throat and he was choking.
Other prisoners in neighbouring cells had noticed and, as they usually did when a detainee in the United States prison camp in Guantanamo Bay tried to kill himself, they raised a hue and cry in their many languages.
"First we shouted at Shah Mohammed to stop, but when he didn't, we called the guards," says Razaq, who was released from Guantanamo in July, and returned to his home town in October after three months' detention by the Pakistani authorities. "The guards came in and saved him. It was the first time he attempted this in my block, then he was taken to another place. He appeared to be unconscious."
It was one of four suicide attempts by Mohammed while he was in Guantanamo. He was released in May and lives in the Swat Valley, on the far side of the Malakand Hills from Peshawar, a few dozen miles from Razaq's home. It is a district of God-fearing, conservative, cricket-loving yeomen, who are passionate about their land and liberty, and protective of their right to bear arms; the fields of sugar cane and tobacco are well tended, and prices in the gun shops are more reasonable than their counterparts in America. In the mornings, a crocodile of small boys in black berets, walking to school, stretches for miles.
Mohammed, who is 23 and a baker by trade, is 5ft 3in and light on his feet. He has been having nightmares ever since he came back. His face peers out from behind a lustrous black beard and long hair like a child hiding between the winter coats in a wardrobe. In Kandahar and Guantanamo, he was interrogated 10 times.

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[T_i_B]

1. Exceedingly long article

That takes up the vast majority of the gruaniand supplement. Worth a good butchers.