90-Pound Guantánamo Hunger Striker Appeals in Court for Assistance from Pakistani Government | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)

On April 14, lawyers for Ahmad Rabbani (aka Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani), one of the last few Pakistani prisoners in Guantánamo, “filed an emergency application with the Islamabad High Court, demanding that the Pakistani government intervene immediately in his case,” as the legal action charity Reprieve (which represents Mr. Rabbani) explained in a press release.

The filing notes that Mr. Rabbani “has been unlawfully captured and later on illegally detained, without a charge or notification of any pending or contemplated charges against him since 2001,” and that he “has been repeatedly tortured and subjected to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment as a result of gross and flagrant violation of national and international law.” The lawyers added that his “unfortunate torture … still continues.”

In addition, the lawyers stated that Mr. Rabbani’s case “involves a matter of urgency, as the fundamental rights, life, health, liberty and dignity of a man, who has been unlawfully detained, admittedly on mistaken identity, without a due process of law or fair trial guarantees, is at stake.” They added, “The ongoing torture, humiliation and deterioration of health of a Pakistani citizen, who has a right over the state institutions to protection of his life, dignity and liberty requires this case to be heard on an urgent basis.”

As Reprieve explained in their press release, Ahmad Rabbani “has been on hunger strike for more than two years in protest at his detention without charge or trial in Guantánamo” for eleven years.

As I explained last year, when Mr. Rabbani submitted a motion to the District Court in Washington D.C. asking a judge to order videotapes of his force-feeding to be preserved, the father-of-three “was held in CIA ‘black sites’ (aka torture prisons) prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, with nine other men held in secret prisons, in September 2004.”

When Mr. Rabbani began his hunger strike, during a prison-wide hunger strike in 2013, he said that he had lost 60 pounds since the hunger strike began, and weighed just 107 pounds. “I vomit and cough blood,” he said, adding, “I have often thought of smashing my head against the wall and cracking it because of [severe pain].”

Now, however, Mr. Rabbani weighs even less. An affidavit submitted to the Pakistani court by Reprieve, whose lawyers recently visited Mr. Rabbani, “describes the damaging effect on his health of his brutal treatment at the prison –including daily force-feedings and ‘forced cell extractions’ (FCEs),” as Repreive’s press release explains. Moreover, the lawyers described him as looking “emaciated” during their latest visit.

Reprieve also explained that, according to Mr. Rabbani, “his weight has dropped to approximately 40kg” (90 pounds, or six stone and six pounds), and that he “regularly vomits and experiences numbness in his limbs, dizziness and fainting.” He also “described how his thigh has wasted away to the width of his calf.”

As with all my reports on prisoners wasting away as a result of hunger strikes, I lament as ever that no photos are available to show the world how some of the long-term hunger strikers in Guantánamo look like the survivors of the Nazis’ death camps in World War II, as I’m sure that a single released photograph would precipitate global outrage and calls for the prison’s swift closure.

Importantly, Mr. Rabbani’s lawyers submitted to the court a copy of the executive summary of the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s recent report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, which reveals, as Reprieve put it, that “his 2002 arrest was a case of mistaken identity.” The report also “confirms that Mr. Rabbani was initially detained for 540 days in secret CIA jails before his transfer to Guantánamo, and was subjected to a number of violent interrogation methods that have been condemned as torture.”

Despite this, Mr. Rabbani has not been approved for release from Guantánamo, where 122 men are still held, 57 of whom have been approved for release. Disturbingly, he was recommended for prosecution by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, although in April 2013 the Defense Department determined that he was eligible for a Periodic Review Board, a process established in 2013 to review the cases of 71 men — 46 who had been designated for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by the task force, and 25 others who had been recommended for prosecution.

However, just 13 reviews have taken place to date, and although nine men have been recommended for release, there is no sign of when the majority of the men — including Mr. Rabbani — who were deemed to be eligible for PRBs will have their cases reviewed. The appeal to the Pakistani court is, therefore, entirely appropriate given Mr. Rabbani’s serious health issues as a result of his hunger strike and the brutal treatment to which he has been subjected over the last 13 years.

Commenting on Mr. Rabbani’s case, Alka Pradhan, his lawyer at Reprieve’s US branch, said, “The US Senate report confirmed that Ahmed Rabbani was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time 13 years ago — and that he was horribly tortured in US secret prisons. But he remains in Guantánamo — and after years of abuse, he is now dangerously ill. Ahmad’s hunger strike is a last desperate cry for help from the Pakistani government. They must now intervene in his case and bring him home.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — 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).

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