"A Kinder, Gentler Torture": My Client at Guantánamo

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/86655/


While staying at his in-law's village in Afghanistan in December 2001, Abdul Hamid Al-Ghizzawi, my client at Guantánamo, knew little of Bush and Cheney.

Later, when vigilante thugs turned him over to the Northern Alliance for an American bounty, Al-Ghizzawi knew nothing of Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, John Yoo or Matthew Waxman -- the man who would become Al-Ghizzawi's personal war criminal and who is now a professor at Columbia Law School.

So, it was understandable that when Al-Ghizzawi heard American troops were coming, he tried to get himself turned over to them. As Al-Ghizzawi later told me, he thought he would be safe with the Americans "and have rights" and be treated "with respect." Al-Ghizzawi convinced the Americans to take him when they learned he spoke English. That was all the troops knew about him. Ignorance of who he was or why he was there, however, proved no impediment to torture.

In the early years, "the Americans treated me very brutally and disrespectfully, worse than the Northern Alliance … and the Northern Alliance was very bad," Al-Ghizzawi recounted to me. "But now the torture is much different. Now the torture is my life every day in this prison, alone without my family, dying, with no rights and no charges."

His American jailers spared Al-Ghizzawi the very worst of the worst in the long list of torture techniques now in use. He was not murdered or waterboarded. He did not have a razor blade taken to his penis, nor was he hung from the ceiling by his arms. One might describe Al-Ghizzawi's torture as a kinder, gentler torture.