http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/04/13/sami-al-haj-the-banned-torture-pictures-of-a-journalist-in-guantanamo/That fairly complete summary includes drawings by the victim, and quite a bit more. A few paragraphs:
As Stafford Smith listened to Sami’s story, he was appalled to discover — beyond the tales of torture in Kandahar, Bagram and Guantánamo, and disturbingly unsubstantiated claims that he had “arranged for the transport of a Stinger anti-aircraft system from Afghanistan to Chechnya” — that every one of the hundred-plus interrogations to which he had been subjected in Guantánamo had focused solely on the administration’s attempts to turn him into an informant against al-Jazeera, to “prove” a connection between the broadcaster and Osama bin Laden that did not exist. As Stafford Smith noted bluntly and accurately in his book, The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay, “Sami was a prisoner in the Bush Administration’s assault on al-Jazeera.”
Later events and disclosures only served to reveal more of the administration’s dark machinations. A reporter was killed in a US bomb attack on al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Baghdad in April 2003, and in 2006 it was reported that President Bush had, as Stafford Smith again described it in his book, “mooted the idea of bombing the al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar.” As for Sami, it transpired that the US authorities had probably seized him because they had confused him with another man who had interviewed Osama bin Laden (although as Stafford Smith also noted, “name me a journalist who would turn down a bin Laden scoop”), and that, while Sami was on assignment in Afghanistan, his calls to his wife had been monitored by the CIA. “Extrapolating from the experience of a lowly cameraman like Sami,” Stafford Smith added, “it did not seem implausible that the phone of every al-Jazeera journalist was being tapped.”
The prisoners’ testimony was an enormous step forward in the wider understanding of the torture and abuse that was endemic in the administration’s “War on Terror” prisons, when their accounts, which were all subjected to a censorship process instigated by the Pentagon, often, and bewilderingly, emerged at the other end more or less intact.
In Sami’s case, his background in journalism added another dimension to these reports. In his book, Clive Stafford Smith recalled that when he asked Sami for information, he “would assemble important facts on almost any topic in the prison relying on the incredible prisoner bush telegraph.” He added, “Sami wrote reports about his treatment, the conditions at the prison and the pattern of his interminable interrogations. Perhaps two-thirds of these eventually made it through the censors, the others being held up for reasons that seemed little related to US security.”
These first-hand reports from behind the wire included reports on the religious abuse — primarily of the Qu’ran — that led to a series of hunger strikes and suicide attempts, and an assessment of the number of prisoners who were under 18 at the time of their capture (forty-five in total) which, as Stafford Smith wrote, sounded doubtful but was, in the end, probably something of an understatement. When the Pentagon finally released a prisoner list in 2006 — following a successful lawsuit pursued by the Associated Press — an analysis by Reprieve concluded that as many as sixty-four prisoners had been under 18 at the time of their capture (although it was difficult to state this with certainty, as many knew only the year of their birth, and not the day or the month).Text
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