Guantanamo Bay detainee asks Nawaz to help him

LONDON: A Pakistani national detained without charge or trial at the dreaded Guantanamo Bay prison has appealed to the government of Pakistan to pay attention to his plight and help end his ordeal which has been going on for 10 long years.
Pakistani national Ahmed Rabbani has been regularly going on hunger strikes and his lawyers fear that his health has sharply deteriorated in the last couple of months. Rabbani has been regularly writing to human rights activist and lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who visited the Pakistani national this week in prison. Speaking exclusively to The News, Clive Stafford Smith said that Rabbani, like hundreds of other detainees, has been subjected to inhuman and unacceptable conditions. He told: “I am prohibited from telling you what he said until the censors allow it. But I can tell you that as of February 6th, Rabbani was one year into a peaceful protest where all he asks for is a fair trial or his freedom. Even though he is being force fed in a torturous manner, he is wasting away, and he is probably only a little over 100 pounds now.”
Speaking about the demands made by Rabbani to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government, the human rights lawyer said: “There is no reason not to back Rabbani’s claims with the full authority of the Pakistani government. After all, President Obama essentially agrees with Rabbani, so it is not a huge leap to ask the Pakistan government to call for justice.”
He added: “Mr Rabbani is no more a terrorist than I am. He was a taxi driver, who was sold to the US for a $5,000 bounty, like so many others. President Musharraf boasted about selling prisoners to the US in his book, In the Line of Fire. Rabbani’s wife and his children have been left without him for 12 years for no purpose at all. It is long past time that he be set free.”
In the letters seen by The News, Muhammad Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani has described in detail the prison conditions and how no regard is being paid to the detainees who are being denied the basic justice by the US government.
According to the US Department of Defence, Ahmad Rabbani, trained in combat in 1994 in a militant camp in Khost for seven months and then to the Khaldan Training camp for two months. It says that Rabbani was imprisoned in Pakistan for two years - 1995-96 — or that in 1997, he met Osama bin Laden and became a travel facilitator for al-Qaeda. It alleged that he worked for al-Qaeda operational planner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. Rabbani denies it and says that he was only a taxi driver who spoke Arabic fluently and drove Arabs around in Pakistani cities.
“Mr Rabbani’s claims are true,” concurred his lawyer. “I have looked into his case and it is built on informants who were being threatened and bribed to tell lies. The proof of the pudding is in the eating — if the US had any case against him they have been free to present it for the past 12 years.”
Rabbani was originally detained twelve years ago in Pakistan, and turned over to the United States.Rabbani has been held in the dreaded Camp V Echo block. Those who defy the military authorities by going on strike are sent to this block for the worst possible treatment. “It is a peaceful protest that merely asks that each person should get a fair trial, or be set free. That does not sound too much to ask. Indeed, President Obama says that Guantánamo Bay should be closed altogether, so he takes a stronger position than this. But that cannot be a reason for Colonel John Bogdan not to respect our right to peaceful protest,” he writes in his letter with reference to the camp in charge who dispenses justice as he wills.
He continues: “My cell in the dreadful Camp V Echo is constructed in a strange manner. It is designed to torture the person who is held there. All the surfaces made of steel. The bed is steel. The walls are steel. The floor is steel. The ceiling is steel. There is no toilet, but the hole in the ground is made of steel. I sent a letter to my lawyer with a graphic design of the cell, but this was apparently censored because somehow it would be a threat to national security for anyone to know where I am in Guantánamo — as if they could break me out of here with thousands of heavily armed American troops all around!”
Rabbani’s doctors prescribed that he should have two isomatts but the Pakistani national is made to sleep on a steel slab for the last 3 months and Colonel John Bogdan overrules doctors when it comes to medical matters.
The heart breaking narrative of the letter goes on: “It is also very cold. I can only sleep by putting a blanket below me. The guards wear a thick uniform, and so they put the temperature down to make themselves comfortable. It is sometimes as low as 63 or 64 degrees, which is good for them, but very, very cold for us. It is all very hard on me, but particularly on my back. I have severe back pain creating a serious problem with using the toilet. The pain I am having is very strange. I like to exercise and play different sports. I have never had this pain. It has come on because of the cold, because of the steel bed, and because of the very strange toilet facilities in Camp V Echo.”
After Rabbani decided to go on hunger strike, he is being punished to use a toilet, which is only a hole in the ground in his cell. “Back in Pakistan, which is considered a Third World country by the United States, I had a modern toilet before I was locked up by the Americans.
Now, because I am on hunger strike, I am being forced to use a hole in the ground. Even that is not one that a normal person can use. It is built in so close to the wall that there is no space to put one foot on one side of the hole. Therefore I have to find some other way to do this. It is truly terrible, but the method I had to use to relieve myself was to use the food container. I can place that underneath me so I can put both feet either side. I have to use the food container!”