Judge Orders US Government to Stop Force-Feeding Syrian Prisoner and to Preserve Video Evidence | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)

In a hugely important ruling in the US District Court in Washington D.C., relating to the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Judge Gladys Kessler has ordered the government to suspend the force-feeding of a hunger-striking prisoner, and to preserve video evidence of his force-feeding.

The prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a father of four, is a Syrian national, who is confined to a wheelchair as a result of his deteriorating health during his 12 years in US custody. Significantly, he was cleared for release by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009, but is still held, along with 74 other men cleared for release by the task force. The majority of these men are Yemenis, who have not been freed because of US concerns about the security situation in Yemen, but in Dhiab’s case, he is still held because of the civil war in his home country, and the need for a third country to be found to take him in.

The fact that he is on a hunger strike, in despair at his abandonment in Guantánamo, and is being force-fed in response ought to be a source of profound shame for the administration, although it is worth noting that he is not the only prisoner cleared for release who was involved in the prison-wide hunger strike last year, and is still on a hunger strike now.

In her order, issued on Friday, Judge Kessler also stated that the government must preserve all videotaped evidence of Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s force-feedings and “forcible cell extractions,” in which, as his lawyers at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve explained, “a team of guards in riot gear storms a prisoner’s cell to move him by force to feedings if he refuses to go.”

The existence of the videotapes was unknown until last week, when Jon B. Eisenberg, Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s US-based attorney, found out about their existence in an email exchange with a lawyer in the Justice Department. In response, as Jason Leopold explained for Al-Jazeera, Dhiab’s attorneys “filed an emergency motion asking that Kessler order the government to preserve the videos,” a motion that was opposed by the government.

Judge Kessler also ordered the government to stop the “forcible cell extractions,” at least until Wednesday, when she scheduled another hearing at which the government “should be prepared to say when it can turn over Mr. [Dhiab’s] medical records and the videotapes,” as the New York Times described it.

As I explained in an article last July, after Abu Wa’el Dhiab and three other men — Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner, and two Algerians, who were subsequently released — had asked a judge to order the government to stop their force-feeding and forced medication, he had “run a food import business with his family in Kabul before the 9/11 attacks,” and “is one of the numerous prisoners in Guantánamo, past and present, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the US went fishing for Muslim prisoners.”

I added, “Having escaped to Pakistan with his family, he was seized in Lahore, in one of the opportunistic raids that showed the Americans that Pakistan was on their side in the ‘war on terror,’ and that also secured millions of dollars for the Pakistani government, as former President Pervez Musharraf boasted in his autobiography in 2006.”

Last summer, Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s motion asking a judge to order the government to stop his force-feeding was turned down by Judge Kessler, but only because of a prior case from 2009 establishing that “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant.”

However, Judge Kessler made a point of stating that it was “perfectly clear” that “force-feeding is a painful, humiliating and degrading process.”

She also stated that Abu Wa’el Dhiab had “set out in great detail in his papers what appears to be a consensus that force-feeding of prisoners violates Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment,” and added that, although she was “obligated to dismiss the Application for lack of jurisdiction, and therefore lacks any authority to rule on Petitioner’s request,” there was one individual “who does have the authority to address the issue”; namely, President Obama.

In February, the court of appeals overturned Judge Kessler’s ruling — and another similar ruling from last summer — ruling that hunger-striking prisoners can challenge their force-feeding in a federal court, and, more generally, that judges have “the power to oversee complaints” by prisoners “about the conditions of their confinement,” as the New York Times described it. The TImes added that the appeals court judges specifically noted that the courts “may oversee conditions at the prison as part of a habeas corpus lawsuit.”

In response to Friday’s news, Katherine O’Shea of Reprieve US explained to me in an email that Judge Kessler “clearly thinks our client needs temporary relief; it’s the first time a judge has enjoined abuse of a detainee in connection with the hunger strike.” She added, “In and of itself it’s quite an indictment of Gitmo.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director, who has been Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s attorney for many years, said, “This is a major crack in Guantánamo’s years-long effort to oppress prisoners and to exercise total control over information about the prison. Dhiab is cleared for release and should have been returned to his family years ago. He is on hunger strike because he feels he has no other option left. I am glad Judge Kessler has taken this seriously, and we look forward to our full day in court to expose the appalling way Dhiab and others have been treated.”

Jon Eisenberg added, “We are very grateful to Judge Kessler for recognizing the urgent need for judicial relief. The force feeding that has been happening at Guantánamo Bay is a stain on our country and must end.”

It is to be hoped that, in response to this development, President Obama will take steps to hasten Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s release. Although he cannot return home, he is one of six prisoners that President José Mujica of Uruguay stated his willingness to accept in March. Just days before the court ruling, President Mujica met President Obama in Washington D.C. and, in an interview with the Washington Post, stated that his country was still willing to take six men who cannot be safely repatriated, but added that the Obama administration needs to take action soon. “It can’t be too long,” President Mujica said. “I only have a few months of government left.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.