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Return from Guantánamo
Mubin S Khan unravels the story behind Bangladeshi man Mubarak Hossain bin Abul Hashem’s return from the world’s most infamous torture camp, revealing the inhuman abuse that the inmates of Guantanamo Bay are subjected to
Photo by focusbangla
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On Sunday, December 17, a special flight of the US Air Force (flight 0194) arrived at the Zia International Airport at 11:30am carrying Mubarak Hossain bin Abul Hashem, one of the two Bangladeshi citizens who has been languishing at the now infamous Guantánamo Bay torture camp on the US Naval Base in Cuba.
The Bangladesh chapter of the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) — the only organisation in the world which has access to Guantánamo Bay prisoners — was immediately notified as were his family members, including his father, Abul Hashem, imam of the Graphics Art College Mosque in Dhaka’s Mohammedpur.
The airport police detained Mubarak and produced him in court the next day. The Metropolitan Magistrate judge Jagannath Das Khokon has granted the police a three-day remand on Mubarak. A joined task force interrogation team is currently questioning him at the Airport Police Station. Today [Friday], the police are slated to take him to court again asking to extend his remand.
Till date, not much is known about Mubarak. The eldest of Abul Hashem’s eight children — two sons and six daughters—his family is based in Brahmanbaria, though Mubarak mostly lived in Dhaka and studied at the Jamia Rahmania Arabia Madrassah in Lalmatia, from where he graduated in 1998. ‘I have not seen my son since,’ says Hashem.
In 1999, Mubarak and his uncle, Gias Uddin, went to Pakistan for higher studies, at the Jajia Anwarul Qur’an Madrassah from which he received his Mufti degree in 2001. Both of them joined separate mosques as imams on completion of the degree.
Gias Uddin returned to Bangladesh in 2001. Since then, according to Hashem, the family has lost complete touch with Mubarak. According to the police, Mubarak claims he had met a certain Rafiq at the mosque he was working and went to visit his house in Kabul with him. On his way back to Peshawar from Kabul, he was arrested by the Peshawar police. He was detained and handed over to the US forces as an Al-Qaeda suspect. The US forces interrogated him for two weeks in Peshawar and Karachi before he was finally sent to the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay.
‘We first came to know about him in September 2002 when two letters on ICRC forms arrived in Dhaka,’ says Monowara Sarker, deputy director of Tracing Unit, ICRC, Bangladesh. Red Cross officials who have access to the detention camp prisoners, determine the nationality and background of prisoners and all prisoners have access to forms in which they can write to their family members. ‘The work of ICRC only involves establishing contact with family members. The ICRC ensures for US authorities that none of these are leaked to the press nor does any letter contain anything besides personal messages,’ says Monowara, pointing to ‘blacked out’ parts in the copies of letters sent by Mubarak to his family.
Mubarak initially sent two letters one addressed to Abul Hashem and another to a distant grandfather, Moulana Abdur Rouf of the Jamia Islamia Lalmatia Madrassah. Abdur Rouf, who has expired since, admitted knowing him and provided Mubarak’s family name and address, but did not respond to his correspondence.
Meanwhile, when his family was initially contacted in Brahmanbaria, they refused to acknowledge Mubarak, also refusing to accept the letters. ‘For three years from 2002 to 2005, Mubarak sent regular correspondence which his family refused to receive,’ says Monowara.
Then in 2005, the ICRC became impatient and the deputy director herself contacted Hashem. ‘After much coaxing, Hashem finally relented and agreed to open correspondence once it was explained to him that establishing a family contact might help Mubarak’s release from the camp,’ says Monowara. ‘Until the family makes contact, the ICRC cannot do much.’
Hashem, meanwhile, says they did not initially believe the authenticity of the letters. ‘We could not believe that Mubarak could be related to the Al-Qaeda,’ he says.
Mubarak and Hashem began regular correspondence from November 2005. ‘Last Eid, Mubarak sent an Eid card to his family which was provided to him by the ICRC,’ says Monowara. The letters meanwhile contained personal messages, informing his family members of his well-being, though some portions have been regularly blacked out. Many of the letters were written in Urdu.
On April 20, 2006, the Times Online published a list of all detainees and citizenships of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp who passed through the Combatant Status Review Tribunal Process in 2004 and 2005. Mubarak was listed at 101. Also, on the list was another Bangladeshi citizen, Jamal Uddin, who still languishes at the camp till this day.
‘Jamal Uddin was the first one to get in touch with us in March 2002,’ says Monowara. ‘Intially, we traced his family members and both sides kept correspondence for a while. The trail has however grown cold since both sides do not keep in touch anymore,’ she says.
On June 15 this year, Hashem formally applied with the ICRC requesting to bring his son back. The ICRC informed the US Forces and Hashem also sent in formal requests to the ministries of home, and foreign affairs. ‘We had only informed the US Forces of his father’s request. How, why, when, he was sent back was completely dependent on the US Forces,’ Monowara informs.
‘The last time ICRC officials met Mubarak at Guantánamo Bay was on December 11,’ informs Monowara. ‘What happens to him from now on is completely upon the Bangladesh government and its law.’
News of the infamous Guantánamo Bay detention camps first surfaced in 2002 when the US Forces were reportedly flying in prisoners from the war in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world and keeping them in military prisons and interrogation cells for their alleged involvement with Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces.
They were detained without trial, denying them the status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention, and according to reports that surfaced, subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Soon, it became one of the controversial places in the world with questionable methods and techniques used during interrogation of prisoners including sexual degradation, forced drugging and religious persecution being committed by U.S. forces.
The initial press photographs published out of Guantánamo showed prisoners hooded and shackled and left languishing out in the open.
Some of the detainees are still held in maximum security blocks, sometimes for up to 24 hours a day and with very little out-of-cell exercise time. The detainees have also been subjected to repeated interrogations sometimes for hours at a time and without the presence of a lawyer, raising fears that statements may have been extracted under coercion.
Prisoners have been reportedly kept in prolonged periods of isolation, in solitary confinement, in cells measuring three metres by two metres, seriously debilitating their physical and mental health by reducing their sensory perception.
During interrogation, they are threatened with sodomy and rape of their family members in front of them.
According to media reports certain prisoners were subject to special torture methods which was directly authorised by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, including ‘standing for prolonged periods, isolation for as long as 30 days, removal of clothing, forced shaving of facial hair’ and hanging ‘pictures of scantily clad women around the neck.’
The interrogation techniques included refusing prisoners a bathroom break and forcing them to urinate in their pants.
Prisoners have been reportedly awoken at midnight by dripping water or by Christina Aguilera music if they dozed off.
‘The first two weeks I spent in Camp X-ray,’ says Martin Mubanga, a prisoner held without charge at Guantánamo for 33 months, on the Amnesty International website. ‘That was basically an outdoor cage which let in the elements as well as the local inhabitants, creatures, insects, spiders, that sort of thing.’
‘I was kept in isolation and practically stripped naked apart from a pair of shorts. In isolation the air-conditioning was left on so it was particularly cold at night. I wasn’t able to sleep and had to do exercises throughout the night periodically, I kept waking up because of the cold. And also on top of that I was threatened with punishment for exercising in a particular way to try to keep warm.’
‘(In Guantánamo ) I was subjected to severe torture,’ says former Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz, released on August 24, 2006 after five years of captivity. For three months, I stayed in these cold-hot shock rooms. When you go into the room they pump very hot air inside. After that, they pump extremely cold air. It is a horrifying kind of torture. There were various sorts of torture methods including electrical shocks, drowning in water tanks, depriving of food and water, chaining and hanging to the ceiling.’
‘I witnessed people dying.’
‘They brought a tub full of water. They dipped our heads and held them in water. There I witnessed many people die. They stripped us of our clothes, chaining and hanging us to the wall. I was kept hung to the wall for 4-5 days. Then doctor used to come and check if we could stand more or not. We were not given any food for 20 days. They only gave us one piece of toast, one carrot or one apple per day,’ recalls Kurnaz in a dossier released later.
Released prisoners like Mubanga and Kurnaz have complained of sharp and debilitating tingling pains in their leg, vision problems, including seeing flickering lights and white spots, constant headaches, back pain, dizziness, uncontrollable tremors and ringing in their ears.
They have also experienced a number of symptoms that demonstrate severe damage to their mental and emotional well-being, including hypersensitivity to external stimuli, manic behaviour, difficulty concentrating and thinking, obsessive behaviour, difficulty with impulse control, difficulty sleeping, difficultly keeping track of time and agitation.
Meanwhile, the US government has continued with the camp, initially denying the media reports, despite widespread media criticism and public condemnation.
The US president George W. Bush, vice president Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Rumsfeld have on regular occasions gone on record and defended the detention camp. ‘Remember, these are – the ones in Guantánamo Bay are killers. They don’t share the same values we share,’ president Bush said on 20 March 2002.
Meanwhile, the torture continues. The US forces have used experimental and innovative techniques, debilitating the mental and physical capacities of human beings. Three prisoners have so far died, reportedly of suicide. Prisoners have also gone on prolonged periods of hunger strike and were force-fed by US Forces to keep them alive.
On April 23, 2003, the U.S. military reported that three of the Afghan war prisoners held at Camp Delta had been identified as juveniles, separated from the adult prisoners, and moved to markedly better conditions at Camp Iguana.
Civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith wrote an article where he cited reports of a further dozen minors detained in the adult portion of the prison. Smith asserted that there were twenty or more minors detained in Guantánamo .
When the US Department of Defense released what it called its final list of all the detainees who had been held in military custody at Guantánamo there were dozens of detainees had been minors when captured and housed in the adult portion of the prison, in violation of international law.
On May 25, 2005, Amnesty International released its annual report calling the facility the ‘gulag of our times’, even using the expression ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ to compare the Guantánamo Bay detention camp to the Soviet Gulag forced labour camps in which 20 million Soviet citizens labored under harsh conditions, and in which an estimated one million people died.
The detainees held by the United States were classified as ‘enemy combatants’.
The US administration had claimed that they were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against this interpretation on June 19, this year. Following this, on July 7, the US Department of Defense stated that prisoners will in the future be entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions.
Most of the detainees still at Guantánamo are not scheduled for trial. As of November 2006, according to MSNBC.com, approximately 340 out of the 775 detainees who have been brought to Guantánamo have been released, leaving 435 detainees. Of those 435, 110 have been labeled as ready for release. Mubarak, was possibly amongst these 110.
Of the other 325, only ‘more than 70’ will face trial, the Pentagon says. That leaves about 250 who may be held indefinitely.
The bay is located in the Guantánamo Province at the south-eastern end of Cuba and houses a naval base. The detention camps were originally used to detain Cuban and Haitian refugees intercepted at sea.
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