March 14, 2008
One grows weary, so weary, of
plowing through filth, day after day – the unspeakable, blood-soaked,
stinking filth of torture, murder, lies and degradation that pours in a
relentless, unending stream from the belching pits of the Bush Regime.
And let's be clear: we speak here of deliberate evil – not good works
gone wrong, not mere "incompetence," not misguided policies or
ignorance or even ideological blindness– but fully concious acts of
evil which the perpetrators themselves know are evil.
One
such act is in the concentration camp in Guanatanamo Bay: the slow,
deliberate murder of an innocent man, who is being killed with the
collusion of oath-breaking physicians. In an important piece at Salon.com,
Candace Gorman tells the story of Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi, who was
forced to flee from his home by American bombing raids in the early
days of the attack on Afghanistan, and was then sold to American forces
by local bounty hunters in December 2001. He has never been charged
with any crime; indeed, one of Bush's own military panels declared that
Al-Ghizzawi was not an "enemy combatant." One of the officers on the
panel testified, under oath, that the evidence against the purchased
prisoner was "garbage." But Al-Ghizzawi has been left to rot in
Guantanamo, where he is now dying of liver disease, a condition that
was allowed to deteriorate while medical officials helped hide his true
condition from American courts. Gorman, who is acting as his attorney,
takes up the story:
Military
officials claim he has been given proper healthcare. But Al-Ghizzawi
appears to have acute liver disease, among other ailments, and the
military is allowing his condition to deteriorate without proper
diagnosis or treatment, according to a doctor with the International
Committee of the Red Cross who has observed Al-Ghizzawi and his medical
records at the prison. A leading medical expert who has reviewed
Al-Ghizzawi's case agrees with that conclusion, as do I, based on my
observations of my client during repeated visits to Guantánamo.
Military and government officials have refused to grant me access to my
client's medical records.
Al-Ghizzawi,
now 45, is a Libyan-born man who had been living quietly in Afghanistan
with his Afghan wife. They had a small shop selling honey and spices
that they later expanded to a bakery. They have a young daughter, now 6
years old, whom Al-Ghizzawi last saw when she was just a few months
old. When the American bombs started to fall in late 2001 on Jalalabad,
the city where Al-Ghizzawi lived with his family, he did what most
people would do: He fled. He took his wife and infant daughter to his
wife's parents' home away from the city. Unfortunately, Al-Ghizzawi was
not well known in his in-laws' village. Bounty hunters turned
Al-Ghizzawi over to the Northern Alliance in December 2001, who then
handed him over to the United States. (Our government offered millions
of dollars for captured "murderers and terrorists," and few questions
were asked when Arab men were turned over for those bounties.) By March
2002, Al-Ghizzawi was sent to Guantánamo, where he was never charged
with a crime or given the opportunity to prove his innocence....
The
duration and isolation of his indefinite confinement are appalling
enough, but now Al-Ghizzawi appears to be dying of liver disease.
Eighteen months ago, in August 2006, I filed an emergency motion with
the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to try to get copies of
Al-Ghizzawi's medical records, which the government refused to turn
over. Bush administration lawyers submitted an affidavit in response
from the then medical director at Guantánamo, Dr. Ronald Sollock, who
acknowledged that Al-Ghizzawi had a "history of hepatitis B," and
stated that the military had run "routine" tests on Al-Ghizzawi. The
results, he said, came back "normal." Sollock also noted in his
affidavit that Al-Ghizzawi became infected with tuberculosis while at
Guantánamo. This was the first that Al-Ghizzawi had learned of his
having a "history of hepatitis B" and of being infected with
tuberculosis. But U.S. District Judge Bates denied my motion to gain
access to the medical records.
I
brought Al-Ghizzawi's ill health to the attention of the International
Committee for the Red Cross. Representatives of the ICRC who are
granted access to Guantánamo and its population have watched the
medical deterioration of some prisoners there, but they are apparently
helpless to do anything to stop it. One ICRC doctor, expressing anger
and frustration, told me that he had sought healthcare for Al-Ghizzawi
after looking at his test results from the military, but said that
military officials had ignored him. He also told me he believed that
Sollock's affidavit appeared to have been written to conceal or
downplay Al-Ghizzawi's test results, rather than adequately explain
them to the court.
When I visited
Al-Ghizzawi last October, he told me that a military doctor had finally
conceded that he had a severe liver infection. According to
Al-Ghizzawi, the doctor asked to do a liver biopsy, but also told
Al-Ghizzawi that the procedure was dangerous and could damage his
organs. (The military has denied that anyone spoke to Al-Ghizzawi of
such a risk.) Al-Ghizzawi declined the biopsy, and the medical staff
has apparently failed to treat his liver infection. But according to
Dr. Juerg Reichen, a leading expert on liver disease who has reviewed
Al-Ghizzawi's case, a biopsy would not have been necessary to diagnose
and treat him properly.
I filed
another emergency motion on my client's behalf in February. Judge Bates
then ordered the government to update him on Al-Ghizzawi's health, and
in mid-February the government submitted an affidavit from the new
medical director at Guantánamo, Dr. Bruce Meneley, a dermatologist by
specialty. In that Feb. 15 affidavit, Meneley admitted that tests were
performed on Al-Ghizzawi as far back as November 2006 -- shortly after
the judge had denied my initial request for medical records -- showing
that Al-Ghizzawi's liver was not "normal" as Sollock had testified in
October 2006.
So why did military
doctors, after learning of Al-Ghizzawi's liver problems in fall 2006,
fail to start treating him properly, and instead move this ill man to
the isolation of Camp 6? The answers to these questions remain unknown.
But Reichen, the expert on liver disease, said in an affidavit
submitted to the court on Feb. 19, "It is evident that [military
doctors at Guantánamo] withhold information without any military value,
misinterpret it and try to withhold treatment from Mr. Al-Ghizzawi."
I
continue to visit with Al-Ghizzawi every other month for two days at a
time, and monitor his dying. In our meetings we talk about his legal
case and his family, but mostly we discuss his deteriorating health.
Al-Ghizzawi has become weaker and weaker and at times he is barely able
to talk...With his own death looming, Al-Ghizzawi has given me his last
will and testament and instructions for the disposition of his remains.
I don't have the heart to tell him that one simple request will almost
certainly never be granted by our military: to have his remains tested
to see exactly what killed him, so that if such testing does confirm a
history of hepatitis B, his wife and daughter can be tested to ensure
their health is not compromised by this same disease. Why
was Al-Ghizzawi not freed long ago, when it was first determined that
he was not an "enemy combatant," and therefore, even under the
ludicrous legal theories of the Bush gulag, should not have been
subject to indefinite detention without charge or trial? Perhaps a clue
can be found in the words of one of the minions most directly
responsible for imposing Bush's perverse lust for torture: William J.
Haynes II, the general counsel of the Defense Department. At Harper's, Scott Horton references the accounts
given by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief military prosecutor in
Guantánamo, of his conversations with Haynes. As noted in the Nation:
"[Haynes]
said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis,
referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of
procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis
said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals,
something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.
"I
said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in
our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At
which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we
can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long,
how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals,
we’ve got to have convictions.’" "If
we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting
them get off?" This has been the crux of the matter for a long time
concerning the many prisoners in Guantanamo who are innocent of any
wrong-doing. (And it should be noted that all of the prisoners at
Guantanamo are being held under an illegal and unjust system, backed up
by force and torture -- a system that is a complete repudiation of the
"civilized values" that the Terror War purports to defend.) What indeed
can the Bush Regime -- and its willing executioners in Congress,
including the Democratic "opposition," who have done nothing to shut
down this shameful enterprise -- do with all these innocent people
they've held captive for so long? It would be too embarrassing to admit
that their incarceration was a mistake -- much less the crime that it
undoubtedly is. And while some prisoners have been released from time
to time -- usually under a cloud, often rendered into custody elsewhere
-- it is clear that the Bush Regime's Gitmo endgame strategy is simple:
put some of the captives on trial in the kangaroo court of rigged
"military tribunals, and leave others, like Al-Ghizzawi, to rot and die
in darkness, in silence, forgotten by the world.
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