Stuck in Guantanamo

July 27, 2008

Remember growing up and hearing your mother say, “You are blessed! You could be starving like the poor children in Africa!! Stop feeling sorry for yourself!”
Well, there’s a 46-year-old guy in Guantanamo by the name of Abdul al-Ghizzawi. He is the poster child of misery, although a recent Supreme Court ruling has given him hope. Compared to his story, you’ll never complain again. Yeah, right.
Candace Gorman, an Interlochen summer resident and civil rights attorney out of Chicago, has just returned from her 13th visit (all on her own dime) to meet with al-Ghizzawi. She spoke of his plight at the Friend’s House in Traverse City last week, her visit sponsored by several local peace and civil rights groups.
Northern Express has been following Gorman over the years as she has wrangled with the federal government for a federal trial and better medical treatment (al-Ghizzawi is afflicted with tuberculosis and hepatitis C).
Gorman is one of a handful of female attorneys who are among the 200 volunteer lawyers trying to help Guantanamo prisoners. She returned from her last visit deeply troubled by al-Ghizzawi’s depression. In addition to his chronic pain and hopelessness over seeing his family again, he has been living in isolation for 19 months in a “super max” camp.
“There was no rhyme or reason of why he was put in maximum security,” she said. “Abdul had never been a discipline problem. It’s very difficult for him. As a manifestation of his depression, he washes his clothes over and over again in his toilet bowl, the only source of water in the cell. And he has breathing problems, possibly due to his liver swelling up and hitting his diaphragm.”

SHACKLED IN HIS CELL
Al-Ghizzawi spends all his time shackled inside a small room. He gets a two-hour break in an outdoor cage, but it “might be 8 a.m., it might be midnight, it might be 2 a.m.,” Gorman said.
Two weeks ago, al-Ghizzawi became frustrated and squeezed his anti-itching cream into his water bottle. He threatened to drink it unless he got some medical attention for his stabbing liver pain, breathing problems, severe headaches, pain in his gums, frequent nosebleeds, and back pain. He vomits several times a day. To help his breathing, he asked for the small window in his door to be opened, but the military commander refused.
Gorman said the military has also refused further treatment, contending that her client doesn’t want help. Yet Gorman and al-Ghizzawi have signed affidavits saying he absolutely wants and needs medical attention. After his recent threat, the guard took al-Ghizzawi to talk to a psychologist. He was asked if he truly wanted to commit suicide.
“He said, no, he just wanted some medical attention, so they decided to punish him. They put him in an orange uniform, and took away all his extras,” Gorman said.
“He had a mattress on a metal frame, and they took it away. Now he has a pad. He had a pillow. They took away his pillow. And his blanket—which is really a plastic cover—they didn’t take it away completely, but he can only have it for something like four hours a night.”
Before arriving in Guantanamo in the spring of 2002, al-Ghizzawi was living with his Afghan wife and six-month old daughter in Jalalabad. He originally came from Libya where he worked as a meteorologist. Seeking to avoid another year of military service (he didn’t get credit for his first year), he moved to Pakistan, and then to Afghanistan.
Gorman believes that her client might have been the victim of a well-intended round-up of terrorists in Afghanistan shortly after the Taliban was defeated in 2001. Americans had dropped leaflets across the country offering huge bounties for turning in “murderers and terrorists.”
The leaflet offers “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.” When al-Ghizzawi was taken to the local jail, two men had the flyer in hand and were arguing about how to divvy up the reward money.
After his capture by the Northern Alliance, he was sold to U.S. forces and taken to the U.S. detention center in Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo.
Al-Ghizzawi was accused of meeting with al-Qaeda members in Pakistan and serving as a security leader for Osama bin Laden during his trip to a guest house in Jalalabad.
Gorman has argued that if the govern-ment is unable to produce any evidence against him, he should be set free.

RELEASED PRISONERS
A total of 800 people were originally imprisoned in Guantanamo. The government has released all but 270 of them, usually taking them off the island during the dead of night. Meanwhile, President Bush and his legal counsel have maintained that prisoners of war do not merit a trial, nor do they have a right to see the evidence against them. That right is called habeus corpus. Bush set up new procedures for war-crime tribunals with new procedures. It allows convictions based on evidence that the prisoner has never seen nor heard, and might be the result of torture.
In November of 2004, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal determined that al-Ghizzawi was not an enemy combatant, based on the “paucity and weakness of the information provided.” But a second panel convened two months later, unbeknownst to al-Ghizzawi or Gorman. It concluded that he was an enemy combatant. Gorman said no evidence or witnesses were ever produced at the trial, based on the available transcripts on the Department of Defense website.
The historic ruling by the Supreme Court last month means al-Ghizzawi could finally get his day in court.
The 5-4 court ruling said the president overstepped his power, and did not have the power to set up a special court with its own special rules without the authority of Congress. It’s the third such Supreme Court ruling that rebukes the Bush administration, but each time Congress has subverted the court’s intention with a new law that robs the detainees of habeus corpus, Gorman said.
And it may happen again. Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist plans to propose a new bill that would authorize the president to create the very same military commissions that the Supreme Court just struck down. Some oppose the idea, saying we should rely on our court martial system, which has worked fine for decades.

BIRD WATCHING?
Gorman is hoping that her client can stay alive long enough for his trial. She is also representing another prisoner by the name of Razak Ali, an Algerian man who was picked up in Pakistan. He told Gorman that he was there for three months for a community service project. He wants to go free and return to Algeria.
It took months for Gorman to even organize a meeting with Ali, because the military mistakenly banned the meeting the first time she flew into Guantanamo to talk with him. When she filed a legal motion, the military filed arguments with a federal judge that Gorman was really interested in bird watching.
“They said I came to the island to go bird watching and never intended to meet with him. I think they initially made an honest mistake, and then they tried to cover their tracks with these ridiculous statements they pulled out of thin air. Fortunately, the judge gave their arguments no weight.”
Gorman doesn’t believe terrorists should go free, and she has no plans to represent Ali or al-Ghizzawi in a criminal trial because she is not a criminal attorney. Her fight is with getting a fair trial for the men.
Meanwhile, the Internal Inspector General of the Department of Defense is determining whether the treatment of prisoners amounts to malfeasance and neglect.
Gorman said that most people are shocked when they hear what’s going on in Guantanamo. She suggests they start holding their elected officials accountable.
“If you want to do something, vote out Representative Dave Camp. He is in lock step with Bush. We now have a Supreme Court decision that grants habeus corpus, and Camp is in the middle of asking Congress to step in and help the court set up new rules for habeus corpus rulings. Our courts have been doing this for 200 years. They don’t need new rules set up.”