Captured, tortured, and left to rot at Gitmo: Sanad al-Kazimi hoped for justice. Twelve years later he's still waiting.

AuthorRayner, Martha
PositionGuantanamo Bay Naval Base

Within days of his first inauguration, Barack Obama signed a presidential order directing his administration to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (GTMO) within one year, following up with astonishing alacrity on his campaign promises, despite many competing policy priorities. While I did not expect an immediate parade of planes ferrying my clients and other GTMO prisoners to their home countries, all indicators were that GTMO, and the indefinite imprisonment without trial that it stood for, would soon end.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A week later, I was sweating in one of the squalid shack-like structures of Camp Echo, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where attorney-client meetings take place, visiting one of my clients, Sanad al-Kazimi, a husband and father of four from Aden, Yemen. He had been abducted by some arm of some government in the United Arab Emirates in January 2003 and subjected to brutal torture, including confinement in a dark cell the size of a grave, prolonged shackling, nudity with cold air blasting, beatings, and sexual abuse. Men tied his hands and legs together and hooked him up to a mechanical lift device that hoisted him in the air and dropped him into a pool of freezing water.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

His imprisonment had no legal contours. He was not formally arrested, and he was not charged with a crime or provided an opportunity to be heard. He was not captured by soldiers on a batdefield and registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross, an independent organization that monitors treatment of war detainees. He was disappeared.

I knew none of this when I first met him in the summer of 2006, two years after he arrived at GTMO. I did know that just a month before I met my client, three prisoners, including another man from Yemen, died at GTMO on the same day. The military immediately deemed the deaths suicides, though a Marine sergeant would later come forward with information that cast doubt on this claim. In the ensuing years, four men did commit suicide, each a human being who gave up on life in indefinite imprisonment.

My client mentioned the "suicides" during that first meeting, but I did not fully appreciate how this news must have impacted him since, at the time, I was unaware of his history.

After my client's disappearance, he was relocated multiple times--trussed like an animal, diapered, blindfolded with blackout goggles, made deaf with earmuffs, wrapped in tape, and strapped to a stretcher. Each transfer was accompanied by the uncertainty and dread of not knowing what was to come. One of the stops was at a CIA-run site in Afghanistan dubbed the "Dark Prison" by detainees who emerged to describe the complete darkness they had been held in, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While there, Mr. al-Kazimi tried to kill himself on three separate occasions by hitting his head against the wall of his cell. Each time, his U.S. captors intervened and injected him with drugs that put him out.

Following his time at the Dark Prison, Mr. al-Kazimi was transferred to the United States' Bagram Airfield Military Base in Afghanistan. This move was designed to transform what was unquestionably illegal detention by the CIA into military imprisonment that had a veneer of lawfulness. The U.S. military then colluded in torture by attempting to erase what the CIA had done.

A "clean team" was tasked with obtaining inculpatory statements in a manner designed to avoid admissibility objections in a court of law. This Department of Defense-invented entity, officially called the Criminal Investigation Task Force and composed of armed services interrogators, sought to create a cordial atmosphere by offering food and drink and projecting ease and comfort. These efforts were designed to permit investigators to later testify in court (as they did) that the statements obtained were voluntarily given and not coerced.These "fresh" statements were meant, like a miracle stain remover, to clean up the filth, dirt, and toxic taint of torture.

After almost two years of secret captivity, torture, movement from one prison to another, manipulation by a procession of shadowy interrogators, and ceaseless uncertainty, my client was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, but his emotional distress was ignored by military medical personnel.

After he was moved to GTMO in September 2004, Mr. al-Kazimi got word to another prisoner who was about to be released that he needed help. That message was conveyed to the detainee's lawyer...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT