Planning for Life

Few people are as powerless as Mohammed el Gharani – except, perhaps, the many kids in Guantanamo Bay who do not even have lawyers.  The question, of course, is what you are going to do about it.

I have spent many years working for those on death row.  There is little dispute that the prisoners need help.  When I first visited Georgia’s death row in 1980, I was surprised to learn that, in the richest nation in the world, a person sitting on death row had no right to a court-appointed lawyer to help with decades of complicated appeals.  We challenged this in Mississippi years later, and a group of volunteers (some from Britain) administered psychological tests to the 80 prisoners on death row there.  Over thirty percent fell within the range of the mentally disabled. We gave the prisoners the LSAT’s (Law Schools Admissions Test) on the principle that if they could not get into law school, they should not have to represent themselves.  Nobody passed;  a third managed to score less than zero.

Death Row presents a distillation of society’s hatred.  Citizens are taught to hate the condemned so much that they want the prisoner ceremonially killed.  Nothing illustrates this better a meeting I had with my client Joel Durham, a teenager facing capital charges just outside New Orleans for a shooting at a local McDonald’s.  When I arrived, he was clearly upset. I asked what was wrong, and he told me about the local shock jock’s new idea for his call-in show:  Listeners were told to suggest which of Joel’s body parts should be ripped from his body that day “for what he did.” 

So much for the presumption of innocence.  Yet the broader lesson was the level of hatred that politicians and the media sought to inspire for human beings who they assumed to be evil, and never bothered to meet.   The assumption is generall wrong, no more obviously so than with prisoners who are patently innocent.  Shareef Cousin cried when I first saw him on death row in Louisiana.  He had been convicted at the age of sixteen for being the ringleader of a group of hoodlums who shot a tourist while marauding through New Orleans’ French Quarter.  Shareef could not understand how it happened.  There was a videotape of him playing basketball at the time – paradoxically taking part in a city programme to keep kids off the streets at night.  It took us three years to exonerate him. 

Death Row is bad enough.  Of late, I have been working for the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, since their plight strikes me as even more perilous.  President George W. Bush has labeled them all the “worse of the worst” terrorists in the world, even though we can prove that, at the time he was allegedly training in a terrorist camp, British resident Ahmed Errachidi was cooking eggs at the Westbury Hotel in London. 

For over 30 months the military resisted the law suit we filed in early 2002 seeking access to help them.  Even today, more than four years after most were seized, the majority have never seen a lawyer. 

Everything about the place is designed to crush the human spirit. The prisoners are held thousands of miles from their families.  They are only allowed heavily censored postcards via the Red Cross – what kind of threat do the words of a six year old child pose that they need to be blacked out?

The military boast that Camp V and Camp VI, the new permanent prisons there, are “state of the art maximum security” institutions.  That is true.  But these prisons are for people who have never been tried for any crime.  “Giving each man his own cell” means that he is held in isolation for most of ever 24-hour day.  Ahmed Errachidi has been held in solitary confinement, with no access to any other prison, for over two years.  The savagery with which many prisoners have been abused is matched by the consistency with which the military denies mistreatment.

Again, like Shareef Cousin, there are kids in Guantanamo.  Surely not?  After all, the military has assured us that there are no juveniles on the base.  On January 29, 2004, BBC Radio 4 journalist Jon Monel interviewed Lieutenant commander Barbara Burfeind at the Department of Defense in Washington:

BURFEIND: "We don't plan on er detaining em juveniles at Guantanamo further. Er I can't say in terms of the future of anywhere else".

JON MANEL: "Why not at Guantanamo anymore?"

 BURFEIND: "Em, they just, I've just been told that they are not planning on having juveniles at Guantanamo."

This was false when Burfeind made the statement, and it remains false today.

I have know this was false for months, since I represent two of the kids, fourteen and fifteen at the time they were seized.  I did not appreciate the full scope of the lie until the Department of Defense was recently forced to release a complete list of all the prisoners ever held in Guantanamo, along with their dates of birth. 

I spent a weekend going through the evidence.  Based on the birthdates, using the DOD’s own data, there were 27 confirmed juveniles who had been confined in Guantanamo at one stage or another.  Of these, 19 confirmed juveniles remain in custody today.  There are an additional 37 people who seem likely to have been juveniles, but where there is not sufficient data.  In other worst, over 60 (or almost ten percent) of the “worst of the worst” terrorists in the world were kids!

At the other end of the scale, the oldest acknowledge prisoner was an Afghani, Mohamed Sadiq, who was born in 1913, and who must now be 93 years old.  Thankfully, he has now been released.  Perhaps equally extraordinary, after more than four years of intensive “intelligence” gathering, the military cannot even figure out the birthdays of 20 prisoners.

One of the kids is my client, Mohammed El Gharani, who was only 14 when he was picked up in Pakistan.  This is his first trip outside his home country.  It has not quite gone as planned.

Mohammed’s story is very sad, like so many of those in Guantanamo. he was born in Saudi Arabia of Chadian parents, and faced terrible discrimination because of his skin colour and his foreign background. He wanted to get an education, but was unable to due to the Saudi laws regarding foreign nationals. Instead, he worked 14 hour days to help his family.

Mohammed is a smart kid, and was never going to be satisified with a lifetime selling bottled water at the street corner.  One day, a friend of his suggested that he go to Pakistan, where he could learn about computers, and study English.  Mohammed saw this as his future.  He bought a ticket, paid a little extra to the Chadian Embassy to change the date of birth on his passport, and off he went.  He had not been there a week before Pakistani soldiers surrounded the mosque where he was staying, and he was seized along with every other foreigner there.

“I was praying in the Mosque,” Mohammed told me.  “The Pakistani army arrived.  They surrounded it.  We were in Karachi.  They told us not to move and to not show any resistance.  Each one of us came out of the Mosque with their hands up.  They were talking to us in Arabic.  We went out.  They took us to prison where interrogations and torture started.”

Mohammed was hung by his wrists in a Karachi prison, so high that the tips of his toes were only just touching the ground. A bag was placed on his head.  He was naked save for his shorts.  He would have to stay in the same position for ten to 16 hours.  If he moved, he would be hit with a metal rod.  This went on for 20 days, and the beatings seemed to be random.

“One of the really humiliating things . . . they made me drink a lot and put a string around my penis so I could not pee.  They would talk in my ears (I was blindfolded).  ‘Tell the truth.’  This went on for three hours and they made me soil myself.” 

Not everyone joined the abuse.  “There was one kind guard at that time.  He was a Pakistani Sergeant who spoke Arabic. The Sergeant came one night with a camera.  He wanted my phone number.  He said, ‘These guys want to sell you to the US for $5000.’  He wanted to tell the news, put my story on the internet, and tell my family.  He took photos.  Later the U.S. tortured me trying to get me to tell them the name of this guy.”

Mohammed had never met an American.  Indeed, before leaving Saudi Arabia, he had never spoken to a white person at all.   He had watched plenty of American films, dubbed into Arabic, and he knew that the U.S. was the land of the free.  One threat made against him backfired.

“When I was told that I would be sent to the US, despite the fact it was meant to sound like a threat, I thought, ‘Great!’  I only knew about it from the TV, I’d never met an American.  I thought it was all about democracy, and they were a fair and good people.  I asked, ‘When?  I want to go.’”

He was turned over to the Americans towards the end of November 2001, by which time he was just fifteen.  He was finally able to begin learning English.  “The first word I really learned in English was ‘Nigger.’  They kept calling me that, and I didn’t know what it meant.   My brothers would not tell me.  Finally, one brother said it was an ugly word for my being black.”

For over a year, Mohammed has been held in an isolation cell in Guantanamo Bay’s Camp V. The lights are on 24 hours a day. Mohammed’s eyes hurt badly and he needs glasses.  He asks the medics for help, but the reply is always the same:  “You want to have glasses, talk to your interrogator.”  There is constant noise.  There are large fans that are used to drown out talking between cells.   He is locked down for 24 hours a day, and only gets out once a week for recreation and a shower.

Most kids are made to brush their teeth.  The military take away Mohammed’s toothbrush as a punishment, sometimes for as long as three weeks.  He has bad dental problems for someone his age.  He also has a skin condition caused by a lack of exposure to sunlight. 

Mohammed did not hear from his family for more than three years, until I finally made contact with them in Medina.  Until that point, they did not know whether he was dead or alive; he did not know whether his mother still lived.  He did not receive a card from outside the prison for more than three years.  I am writing this as I travel to Guantanamo Bay to see him.  I hope he is alright.  Twice in January 2006 Mohammed became so desperate that he tried to take his own life, and the military has refused to let me see him since that time.

The Cold War is (at least temporarily) over but we have a new enemy, and his name is Islam.  Mohammed is one of the victims in the War on Terror; we need, rather, a War on Torture.  Who could have thought, five years ago, that we would be having this debate?

Few people are as powerless as Mohammed el Gharani – except, perhaps, the many kids in Guantanamo Bay who do not even have lawyers.  The question, of course, is what you are going to do about it.  Save for the fortunate few who believe in reincarnation, most of us must approach this life as if it is the only one we have got, so we had better get it right first time.  Presumably, most of us – if lucky enough to have the opportunity -- are looking for an extraordinary life, since the ordinary is, well, so banal.

It is not difficult to choose a vocation:  You simply look around the world,  see who is being hated, and then get between them and the people doing the hating.  It is difficult to go wrong, since those consumed by hatred are doing no favours to themselves, let alone anyone else. 

There are some people who need out help, and some who do not.  It is not clear to me why talented people would spend their only available life working to supplement the enormous resources of a major corporation.  That is no condemnation of those who choose such a path, it just seems such an ordinary thing to do. 

Mohammed el Gharani, on the other hand, would truly benefit from having you in his corner.  It does not matter what your talent – any person with any talent has power that the powerless need.