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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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May 26th,
2009 - Ex-Detainee Describes Struggle for Exoneration News article from Washington Post |
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Ex-Detainee Describes
Struggle for Exoneration In France, Algerian Savors Normal Life By Edward Cody Washington Post May 26, 2009 Paris, May 25 - When the
nightmare finally ended - seven years at Guantanamo Bay, two years of
force-feeding through a tube in his right nostril, the long struggle to
proclaim his innocence before a judge, and finally 10 days of hospitalization
- Lakhdar Boumediene celebrated with pizza for lunch in a little Paris dive. "When we were at the
restaurant," Boumediene said Monday, shortly after the meal that marked
his release from doctors' care and reentry into normal society, "I told
my wife that for the first time I felt like a man again, tasting things,
picking things up in my fingers, eating lunch with my wife and my two
daughters." Boumediene, 43, had been in
a French military clinic under physical and psychological observation since
his arrival in Paris on May 15 aboard a U.S. government aircraft that carried
him - in shackles - away from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In what he describes as an
ugly mistake by U.S. authorities, Boumediene, an Algerian citizen, had spent
seven years there as terrorism suspect No. 10005. Later he became the
plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush, that in June
2008 gave Guantanamo detainees the right to seek judicial review of their
imprisonment. Boumediene, in a lengthy
interview in a Paris suburb, said he joined the case to represent the scores
of prisoners held at Guantanamo charged with being "enemy combatants"
and having no power to challenge the accusation in court. Later ordered released by a
U.S. district judge in Washington, he represents something new: dozens of
prisoners whom the U.S. government has decided to release but cannot, because
no other country will take them in and most Americans do not want them on
U.S. soil. At the request of the Obama
administration, France agreed to take in Boumediene but appears reluctant to
accept any more detainees. Britain accepted one released Guantanamo prisoner
in February and has promised to take in a second. In all, human rights
activists say, Washington is looking for homes for about 60 such prisoners,
swept up without trial in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon and now judged fit for release. Boumediene's version of
events is impossible to verify independently. But he described himself as
collateral damage in those sweeps, an aid worker in Bosnia wrenched from his
life and, he said, interrogated endlessly about something about which he had
no knowledge. Boumediene, who at the time
was an aid worker with the Red Crescent, was arrested in Bosnia in October
2001 along with five other Algerians accused of plotting to blow up the U.S.
and British embassies in Sarajevo, charges that were later withdrawn. In
January 2002, the six were turned over to U.S. officials and flown to
Guantanamo, despite rulings by several Bosnian courts that there was no
reason to deport them. U.S. interest was high
because one of the six Algerians, Belkacem Bensayah, was accused by U.S.
investigators of being an al-Qaeda operative in Bosnia. Moreover, Bosnian
police had discovered a piece of paper in Bensayah's home with a handwritten
number and a name that corresponded to that of a senior al-Qaeda leader in
Afghanistan. Boumediene, in the
interview, said he did not know Bensayah well but that, as a fellow Algerian,
Bensayah had come to Boumediene's Red Crescent office seeking help for his
family. In addition, he said, Bensayah's wife sought assistance after her
husband's arrest, and Boumediene provided money for a lawyer. Boumediene said
U.S. officials concluded that those connections linked him to al-Qaeda's
activities in Bosnia. In addition, Boumediene
said, a stint in Pakistan in the early 1990s aroused the suspicions of U.S.
investigators and may have landed his name on a watch list shared by Algerian
security services with their U.S. counterparts. Boumediene said his time in
Pakistan had nothing to do with that country's madrassas, or religious
schools where future fighters were being educated in an extreme version of
Islam. Instead, he said, he was a proctor at a Kuwaiti-financed school for
Afghan orphans. But during his stay, he had
his passport renewed at the Algerian Embassy in Islamabad. Because many
Islamist Arab fighters were gathered in Pakistan, including Algerians, the
passport renewal in Islamabad marked him for Algerian security services as a
possible extremist. As a result, when he
traveled to Algeria in December 1999 to visit family, Boumediene recalled, he
was stopped at the airport and told he was on a list of people wanted for
questioning. Boumediene denied any connection to Algeria's Islamist
extremists, but Algerian investigators were intrigued by his time in Pakistan
and confiscated his passport. As he sought to get the
suspicions lifted and retrieve his passport, Boumediene said, he was told by
an official in the prosecutor's office that he could avoid further trouble
with Algerian authorities if he registered for an amnesty being offered to
Islamist activists by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Reluctantly, and still
denying any association with the Algerian extremists, he accepted the
government's amnesty and got his passport back. That solved his problem in
Algeria. But a document listing him as a beneficiary of the amnesty was found
in his home after his arrest in Bosnia and, Boumediene speculated, served to
reinforce U.S. suspicions about his ties to al-Qaeda. Boumediene said he was
interrogated more than 120 times during his stay in Guantanamo's Camp Delta,
mostly about Arabs and other foreign Muslims in Bosnia. "At first I
thought they were honest, and when I explained they would see I was innocent
and would release me," he recalled. "But after the first two years
or so, I realized they were not straight. So I stopped cooperating." During one 16-day period in
February 2003, he said, the interrogations went on day and night, sometimes
with tactics such as lifting him roughly from the chair where he was
strapped, so the shackles dug into his flesh. The interrogators, some dressed
in military uniforms and others in civilian clothes, were assisted by Arabic
interpreters who seemed mostly to be from Egypt and Lebanon, he recalled, and
later included a few Moroccans and Iraqis. "They were dogs,"
Boumediene said of the foreign interpreters, in his only show of anger.
"They were dogs. They often started doing the interrogations themselves.
They would tell the interrogators they could get more information." On Christmas in 2006,
Boumediene recalled, he started a hunger strike in an effort to get someone
to listen to his pleas of innocence. Twice a day, about 6 a.m. and 1 p.m., he
was strapped to an iron chair and force-fed through a tube in his nose that
reached into his stomach. Until a meal with his
lawyers as he was about to leave Guantanamo, Boumediene said, he broke his
fast only twice, once when he learned of President Obama's election and again
when the judge ordered his release. "I have no idea why
this happened to me," he said. "I'm a Muslim like any other. I pray
and I observe Ramadan. But I don't have any hatred against anybody." Grateful to be settling in
France with government help, his first goal is to draw close to his family
again, Boumediene said. But down the road, he added, he wants to sue the U.S.
government or its senior officials to hold them accountable. "I don't know whether
it will be possible," he said. "But even if it takes 100 years, I
am determined to bring suit." External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/25/AR2009052502263.html |