A letter from Guantanamo: 'Nobody can truly understand how we suffer'

[Judi Lynn]

A letter from Guantanamo: 'Nobody can truly understand how we suffer'

Al-Alwi describes the humiliating and brutal treatment he suffers at Guantanamo.
Last updated: 13 Mar 2014 12:03

Moath al-Alwi

Moath al-Alwi is a Yemeni national who has been in US custody since 2002. He was one of the very first prisoners moved to Guantanamo, where the US military assigned him the Internment Serial Number 028.


March 10, 2014 - I write this letter, as I wrote my last, between bouts of violent vomiting and sharp pains in my stomach caused by this morning's force-feeding session. Reading news articles, you would think that we have stopped striking. Perhaps you might think that our protests had even been sated by government concessions. We may be trapped behind the walls of Guantanamo, but we will not be silenced.

I write this letter to tell you that we are still striking. We will not stop until we get our dignity back in this place and are allowed to return home to our families.

With President Barack Obama's blessing, Colonel Bogdan, the warden at Guantanamo, has instituted humiliating groin searches, especially when we are taken for phone calls with our lawyers or families. He has withheld our medical treatment and confiscated our legal papers and Qurans.

The Colonel has been quoted as saying that he knows how to discipline us because he has children at home. We are not his children and this is certainly not our home. We are grown men with families who no longer know what we look like.

More:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/03/letter-from-guantanamo-nobody-c-201431385642747154.html

[The Stranger]

1. The most important thing is to keep a record of everyone who was involved there.

Keep it indefinitely. Only the grave can ensure they will not someday face prosecution.

The wheels of justice . . .

[Jefferson23]

2. Yes.

snip* The oft-repeated common wisdom that there is no time limit for indictments charging torture only if "death results" is, in other words, dead wrong. (How did this misleading description of the law take hold? It's possible that its author was former Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo himself. In footnote 41 of his March 2003 memo to Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes, he wrote: "Whether death results from the act [of torture] also affects the applicable statute of limitations. Where death does not result, the statute of limitations is eight years; if death results, there is no statute of limitations." This is a textbook example of why it's risky to paraphrase statutes in an official legal document.)

But regardless of the source of this inaccurate shorthand, we now know what the statute actually says, and can readily appreciate its import. Section 2340A prohibits both the substantive act of torture and conspiracy to commit torture. We also know that it is one of the terrorism offenses listed in section 2332(b)(g)(5)(B). Therefore, we know that - pursuant to section 3286(b) - there is no statute of limitations whatsoever on charges against anyone who: (1) committed torture; (2) aided and abetted the commission of torture; or (3) conspired to commit torture if any of those crimes either: (a) actually resulted in death; or (b) created a foreseeable risk of death; or (c) created a foreseeable risk of serious bodily injury to another person. In other words - as a result of amendments enacted in 2001 at the behest of Bush administration officials themselves - the available period for their indictment for torture could well be the rest of their lives.

For now, I'll leave it to others to apply the multitude of publicly-available facts to these legal requirements. But the test of foreseeability is a well-established one founded in common sense. In the case of charges against White House officials it would be: Would a reasonable person who had the information available to the senior officials be able to anticipate that death or serious bodily injury to another might result when they issued orders that loosed the wild dogs of torture - both literally and figuratively - against prisoners in US custody around the world? The answer is obvious, particularly as victims of torture were receiving emergency medical treatment to keep them alive for yet another round, and one death after another actually began to ensue.

http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/84000:prosecuting-torture-is-time-really-running-out

[Catherina]

3. Yes! ALL of them n/t