Behind Barbed Wire in Guantanamo-"We Are Dying a Slow Death in Here"

[buzzsaw_23]

Behind barbed wire in Guantanamo

By Letta Tayler
Newsday Staff Correspondent

10/03/05 "Newsday" -- -- By the third week of the hunger strike, the fasting inmate wrote, the cellblocks echoed with groans. Emaciated prisoners were vomiting blood or dropping unconscious to the floor. The military hospital overflowed with strikers being force-fed through their noses.

"We are dying a slow death in here," wrote the inmate, British resident Omar Deghayes. "We have not been charged with any crime. I do not understand what America is doing."

Deghayes, 35, was chronicling a six-week hunger strike in June and July among scores of inmates protesting conditions at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The strike resumed in early August and today entered its ninth week, posing the latest challenge to the Pentagon's already controversial handling of suspects in its war on terror.

Like many of the 500 inmates at Guantanamo, all but four of whom are being held indefinitely without charges, Deghayes insists he is innocent. Though the Pentagon calls him an Islamic militant who honed his skills in Afghanistan, his lawyer has dug up evidence that suggests he may have been seized in a case of mistaken identity.

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