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Inmate's writings raise questions of identification, treatment at Guantanamo

BY LETTA TAYLER | STAFF CORRESPONDENT; Staff correspondent Jim Rupert contributed to this story from Kabul, Afghanistan

October 3, 2005

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.

His writings, which his lawyer declassified in a painstaking procedure, open a rare window into life inside the top-security prison and the reasons its inmates, all foreign Muslim men, say they're on hunger strike.

"Disrespect to all religious rituals," the Libyan-born Deghayes wrote in English, his second language. "And this is the fourth year in prison without any charges ... No medicine ... No facilities to wash. Nor the sun."

"Degraded and abused," Deghayes, who says Guantanamo guards beat him so badly they blinded him in one eye, wrote of prisoners in another entry.

The Pentagon downplays the protest's significance, saying the number of strikers has dropped to 27, 20 of whom are being force-fed in a hospital. It said that is down from 131 in mid-September.

It also denies any abuse. "Our detention mission is conducted in a humane manner that protects the security of both detainees and [military] personnel," said Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, Guantanamo's commander, in recent court papers.

But military officials won't say what prompted the strike or explain why their numbers dropped. Nor will they allow relatives, independent medical teams and most defense lawyers to visit or telephone striking prisoners, saying national security concerns preclude such access.

The few defense attorneys who have recently visited the base maintain the number of strikers peaked at 200 and remains far higher than the military admits. Last week, a half-dozen of them filed motions in federal court seeking immediate visitation rights to fasting inmates and court oversight of the strike, saying they don't trust the Pentagon to tell them the truth. Those motions are still pending.

Amid the information blackout, Deghayes' writings are among the few firsthand accounts of both the strike and life in general inside the prison, which the Pentagon calls a key outpost in the war on terror and Amnesty International slams as a "gulag."

"Many are falling, and sounds of illness," Deghayes wrote of the strike in late July. "... If the authorities here don't do something fast to improve things I think ... [the number of hunger strikers who risk dying] will go out of control."

A few days later, Deghayes described hope rippling through the cellblocks because authorities promised better food and conditions, temporarily ending the fasting. "They gave me a comb. I brushed my hair and beard for the first time" since he arrived in Guantanamo three years ago, he exulted.

Then word spread of inmates being abused or sexually humiliated. One inmate said his Quran was mishandled. In one of his last declassified entries in early August, Deghayes accurately predicted: "The strike will start again."

The hunger strike presents an unusual catch-22 for the Pentagon. Already accused by human rights groups of flouting international conventions governing prisoners of war, the Pentagon is now being blamed for violating inmates' rights by keeping them alive.

The group Physicians for Human Rights is urging an independent medical assessment of the fast, noting that the American Medical Association ethical code bans force-feeding prisoners who are on hunger strike. The Pentagon counters that it must intervene because the hunger strike amounts to a suicide attempt they are ethically bound to thwart.

Clive Stafford Smith, a prominent British civil rights attorney who represents Deghayes, is convinced his client is among the remaining group of strikers. "He's as headstrong as can be," Stafford Smith said.

In some ways, Deghayes' cosmopolitan background sets him apart from many Guantanamo inmates. Two courses shy of a British law degree, he comes from a prominent Libyan family that fled to exile in Britain after his father, a union activist, was tortured to death in 1980 by the regime of Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

Though he lived in Afghanistan for nearly two years under the Taliban, his heroes include Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.