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Under Obama, Boumediene was forced-fed and kept in solitary confinement without being allowed to shower, pray or change his clothes. |
CAIRO — While then newly-appointed President Barack Obama was vowing to end the US torture reign, Lakhdar Boumediene was suffering abuse at the hands of his American jailers in notorious Guantanamo.
"He was force fed using violent methods that were intended to and did injure him, and there was no medical treatment," Robert Kirsch, lawyer of Boumediene who was freed last month, told the San Francisco Sentinel on Wednesday, July 22.
The Algerian man, 43, was detained shortly after the 9/11 attacks and spent nearly 8 years in Guantanamo without trial or even charges, just like most other detainees.
In June 2008, he made history when the US Supreme Court ruled in his favor in a case he filed against Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush.
In November, the month Obama was elected, a US federal court acquitted Boumediene. But it was not at all the end of his nightmare.
He remained struggling to be released as the new Obama administration ordered a review in the files of each detainee.
Obama ordered Guantanamo closure last January together with a case-by-case review of the 245 detainees still held there to determine if they should be released, transferred or prosecuted.
When a desperate Boumediene went on hunger strike, he was force-fed in painful procedures that involved inserting a pencil-thick tube into his nose and snaking feeding tubes down into his stomach.
When Kirsch finally met Boumediene, the detainee showed him bruises covering his body from the violent methods the guards and even the medical care team uses to force-feed him.
The chief doctor in Guantanamo testified in 2006 that detainees on hunger strike were tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages.
Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which US doctors are legally bound to observe, states that doctors must not undertake force-feeding under any circumstances.
Bush had determined that "minimum standards for humane treatment" stipulated in the Geneva Conventions "did not apply" to the hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo.
Shocked
In early February, months after he went on hunger strike, a Pentagon delegation arrived to inspect detention conditions, and Boumediene was placed in a so-called "Oscar Block".
"They put him in a terribly cold cell with 50 degrees Fahrenheit," asserts Kirsch, his lawyer.
"For the first days he had no running water, and he had to sleep on a pad less than one-centimeter thick visibly stained and smelling of food, vomit and feces."
Boumediene was "kept isolated" in his solitary confinement for 10 days during which he was "not permitted to shower, pray or change his clothes."
Kirsch said the military still would not deliver to his client hundreds of letters his wife, daughters and other family members had written to him over the years.
He only got a few of the letters on May 15, the day of his release.
Insisting that the treatment melted to Boumediene violates the Geneva Conventions, Kirsch filed a complaint with the Pentagon.
The ex-detainee insists that the same treatment he got during his last months in Guantanamo was suffered by many others.
He says abuse and humiliation of detainees continues and they are still being harassed and tortured regularly.
Mohammed el-Gharani, who was released and returned to his native Chad in April, also said that until his last day at Guantanamo, soldiers beat him with sticks and used pepper spray on him whenever he refused to leave his cell.
Michael Ratner, the head of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which coordinates the legal defense of Guantanamo detainees, is shocked.
"We never imagined that detainee abuse would continue after Jan. 20," he said referring to Obama's inauguration day.
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