Living With Guantanamo Scars

Mishal (R) can't walk, get himself a glass of water or go to the bathroom by himself. (Courtesy The Washington Post)

"He was just like the rest of his brothers before he left," Hamida Owayid, his mother, said bitterly.

"What did the Americans do to him?"

Mishal, who went to Afghanistan by 2001 to join the fight against the US, was detained and later shipped to the infamous detention center by 2002.

Three years later when he was released, the young Saudi was permanently paralyzed and restricted to a wheelchair for life.

Washington has been holding hundreds of detainees at the top security detention facility, mostly arrested in Afghanistan after the toppling of Taliban following the 9/11 attacks. Only ten of them have been indicted for charges.

Guantanamo's buildings hide behind multiple rows of 12-foot chain-link fences covered in green tarpaulins and topped with tight spirals of barbed wire.

Old wooden and newer steel watchtowers dot the perimeter.

Amnesty International insists Guantanamo has become a "symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards."

The international rights watchdog once likened it to gulag prisons, the Soviet detention centers notorious for torturing political prisoners and suspects.

Brutality

The US report on Guantanamo detainees claim Mishal tried to commit suicide in January 2003, which resulted in significant brain injury due to oxygen loss.

"He will need to be in some assisted-living situation," read the 2006 report.

But his family dismisses the suicide theory.

"With the strength of his faith, which took him all the way to Afghanistan, it's impossible that he tried to kill himself," insisted Mishal's elder brother Fahd.

The family is not only seeking financial compensation but also concrete admission from the US government that Mishal was brutalized by his Guantanamo jailers.

With his speech slurred and his body gripped with jerks and shakes, the former detainee hardly remembers the full details of his ordeal, recalling only glimpses of guards' cruelty.

"He was carrying a shield. He pushed me with it. I don't remember anything else," he said with a heavy tongue, referring to one of his jailers.

But other detainees who were released from Guantanamo speak of a heartbreaking, horrifying experience Mishal had.

"Word of the Qur’an's desecration quickly spread around the camp, and the brothers were all very agitated," said Saad al-Azmi, a Kuwaiti.

After prisoners staged a hunger strike to protest disrespect of their holy book, Mishal and some others were transferred to an isolation block, said Hammad Ali, a Sudanese who was in the same isolation block at the time.

One night, guards rushed into the almost-dark blocks and started beating prisoners in their individual cells.

Detainees recall that soon after, Mishal was carried out of his cell and guards said he had tried to hang himself with a blanket.

After months of being hospitalized unconscious, Mishal was released into Saudi custody in July 2005 and nine months later he was sent home.

"All the men who were released from Guantanamo, they are now leading a normal life," Fahd told The Post.

"But Mishal can't walk, get himself a glass of water or go to the bathroom by himself.

"I just want him to go back the way he was before Guantanamo."