Sami El Haj, Al Jazeera Journalist, Tells His Story

By Silvia Cattori via Information Clearing House

Standing straight and tall, an impressive and deeply introspective man, Sami El Haj walks with a limp and the help of a walking stick. Neither laughter nor smiles light up the refined face of this man, old before his time. A deep sadness pervades him. He was 32 years old when, in December 2001, his life, like that of tens of thousands of other Muslims, became a horrific nightmare. He endured horrendous suffering. Weakened by a hunger strike which lasted 438 days, set free on the 1st May 2008, he greets you attentively and with a gentle manner. He calmly tells you of a world whose paralyzing, suffocating horror is beyond your comprehension.

He is the first of the released detainees from the camps built by the Bush administration at the Guantánamo Bay naval base to be authorised to travel.

“I came to Geneva, the city of the United Nations and freedom, [1] to ask for the law to be respected, to demand the closure of the Guantánamo camp and secret prisons, and to demand that this illegal situation be brought to an end”, he says calmly. The word has been uttered. Everything is “illegal”; everything is false, manipulated, absurd and Kafka-esque in this war waged essentially against those of the Muslim faith.

We now know many things; most notably that many of the terrorist attacks since 1996 which have been attributed to Muslims were financed and manipulated by secret agents of MI6, the CIA and Mossad. It was brave witnesses like the former German minister, Andreas Von Bülow [2] in particular, who discovered and denounced this kind of criminal activity, practiced by the superpowers. Apart from the new media, which journalist has ever spoken of the revelations made by this great man, Andreas Von Bülow?

In Guantánamo, spurred on by his passion for justice and his conviction that every journalist’s mission is to bear witness to what he sees, Sami El Haj had the psychological strength to carry on, resisting the worse abuses and putting his own suffering to one side. His experiences were extremely painful but he was able, even in the worst moments, to cling to the hope that he would get out alive. And knowing that he had to observe everything in order to be able to tell the world helped him to bear the unbearable.

Moreover, it was through viewing this horrific place which could have been his tomb, created by President Bush, with the objective eye of the journalist that Sami El Haj was able to survive and remain sane. Others, who were not as lucky as he was, died or became insane, and so were unable to recount their experience.

With neither pencil nor paper, Sami El Haj forced himself to memorise everything in order, even in a cage, to carry on his work as “an Al Jazeera journalist covering a story”, as he put it.

Today he is driven by the idea of bringing to the world’s attention these tens of thousands of prisoners who are still suffering inhuman treatment in the prisons of Guantánamo, Bagram and Kandahar. He replies tirelessly and with good humour to all the journalists who interview him, hoping that his words will allow those who no longer have a voice to be heard.

His account is crucial. Like the other detainees, also wrongly labelled as “terrorists”, Sami El Haj was never tried and was never informed of the charges against him. Which demonstrates that President Bush, and the journalists who supported his theories, must have invented the “Islamic terrorists”. Human beings like Sami El Haj could never have been arrested or remained hostages of this barbarism, for the simple reason that they are Muslims, without the complicity of European governments and those Islamophobic propagandists under the orders of Tel Aviv and Washington who, for decades, have been misinforming public opinion and influencing the powers that be with their lies.

Silvia Cattori : How do you feel, just a few short weeks after your liberation?

Sami El Haj : I feel fine, thank you. When I see people committing themselves to saving human beings and fighting to defend their rights, it gives me great comfort. Of course, when I left Guantánamo, two months ago, I was in a very bad way. But now I feel better, discovering that people outside are fighting and not losing sight of the main goal – achieving peace and freedom for everyone.

Silvia Cattori : After those painful years spent in the camps, what are your strongest feelings and greatest hopes?

Sami El Haj : Of course, I am happy to be free again. I have been reunited with my family, my wife and my son. For six and a half years he did not see me, and had to go to school without me. He waited for me and said,“ Dad, I have missed you for so long! I was so unhappy, especially when I saw my school friends, with their fathers, and they asked me where my father was. I had no answer to give them. That’s why I asked my mum to take me to school in the car, because I didn’t want them to keep asking me that question”.

I said to my son, “Now, I could take you to school, but you must understand that I have a message to give, a just cause to defend. I want to fight for the cause of human rights, for those who have been deprived of their freedom. I do not want to fight alone. There are thousands of people who are standing up and fighting wherever human dignity is attacked. Do not forget that we are fighting for peace, to defend rights whenever they are denied, for a better future for you. Perhaps one day we will achieve this, and then I will be able to stay with you and take you to school”.

I do not know if he understood, because he is still very young, but he smiled at me. My wife did not want me to leave again either. But when I reminded her of the horrific situation those imprisoned in Guantánamo find themselves, and that they also have a family, sons, daughters, a wife whom they miss terribly, and that if I do not fight these people will remain imprisoned even longer, she understood that I must carry on travelling, adding my voice to all the other voices, so that the detainees can return home as soon as possible. She gave me her full support. On the way to the airport she said to me, “I will pray for you”.

Silvia Cattori : So, by going to Afghanistan to film the massacres of civilians, victims of President Bush’s war, you yourself became one of his victims? Are you not afraid of what could happen to you again?

Sami El Haj : For me, there is no question - I will continue my work as a journalist. I must continue carrying a message of peace, no matter what. For my part, I have spent six years and six months in prison, far from my family, but for others it was so much worse. I lost a very dear friend, a journalist with Al Jazeera: he died in Baghdad, killed when the hotel where he was staying was bombed. I also lost a colleague who was working with me at Al Jazeera, whom I consider a sister: she too died in Baghdad.

Many people have lost their lives because of this war. You must know that the Bush administration wanted to prevent coverage by the free media, like Al Jazeera, in the Middle East. The Al Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed.

In 2001, when I left my son and my wife to film the war initiated by the USA against Afghanistan, I had to expect finding death during a bombing raid. I went there fully aware of the risks. Every journalist knows that he is carrying out a mission and must be ready to sacrifice himself in order to bear witness to what is happening, through his films and writing. And to help people understand that war brings nothing but the death of the innocent, destruction and suffering. It is on the basis of this conviction that my colleagues and I went to countries at war.

Now, after all these years in captivity, I can once again do something to help bring about peace. I am going to commit myself to this goal, until it is achieved. I am sure that one day, even if I do not personally reap the fruits, we will succeed in achieving peace and the respect of human rights, as well as the protection of journalists throughout the world. I am sure that we will see the day when journalists are no longer tortured or injured doing their job, defending people’s rights to information and highlighting human rights abuses.

Silvia Cattori : You said at the beginning that you are feeling fine. But after such a terrible experience, and given that you were released with no apology whatsoever from your torturers, how are you able to talk about all this without resentment or bitterness?

Sami El Haj : Of course, what happened to me was very hard and my personal situation is difficult. But when I think of those who are still in Guantánamo, and their families that they miss very much and who have no news at all of them, I tell myself that my situation, as difficult as it is, is better than theirs.

I cannot forget that in Guantánamo I have left behind brothers who have been crushed, who have gone mad. I am thinking in particular of a Yemeni doctor who now lives naked in his cell because he has lost his mind.

Silvia Cattori : What kind of torture did they subject you to?

Sami El Haj : All kinds of physical and psychological torture. As all the detainees were Muslim, the camp administration subjected them to many forms of harassment and humiliation linked to religion. With my own eyes I saw soldiers tearing up the Qur’an and throwing it in the toilet. I saw them, during interrogation sessions, sitting on the Qur’an until their questions were answered. They insulted our families and our religion. They made fun of us by pretending to ring our God, asking him to come and save us. The only Imam at the camp was accused of complicity with the detainees and was sent away, in 2005, for refusing to tell visitors that the camp respected religious freedom.

They beat us up. They taunted us with racist insults. They locked us in cold rooms, below zero, with one cold meal a day. They hung us up by our hands. They deprived us of sleep, and when we started to fall asleep, they beat us on the head. They showed us films of the most horrendous torture sessions. They showed us photographs of torture victims – dead, swollen, covered in blood. They kept us under constant threat of being moved elsewhere to be tortured even more. They doused us with cold water. They forced us to do the military salute to the American national anthem. They forced us to wear women’s clothes. They forced us to look at pornographic images. They threatened us with rape. They would strip us naked and make us walk like donkeys, ordering us around. They made us sit down and stand up five hundred times in a row. They humiliated the detainees by wrapping them up in the Israeli and American flags, which was their way of telling us that we were imprisoned because of a religious war.

When a detainee, filthy and riddled with fleas, is taken out of his cell to be submitted to more torture sessions in an attempt to make him collaborate, he ends up not knowing what he is saying or even who he is any more.

I was interrogated and tortured more than two hundred times. 95% of the questions were about Al Jazeera. They wanted me to work as a spy within Al Jazeera. In exchange, they offered American citizenship for myself and my family, and payment based on results. I refused. I told them repeatedly that my job is a journalist, not a spy, and that it was my duty to make the truth known and to work for the respect of human rights.

Silvia Cattori : Today, can you find it within yourself to pardon your torturers?

Sami El Haj : Of course I will pardon them if they close Guantánamo. But if they continue to cause suffering, I will go to the courts and take action against them.

Although I know that the Bush administration has done so much harm, I still think that it’s not too late for these people to make up for their mistakes.

A distinction must be made between the administration and the people. The Guantánamo detainees know that they have friends in America, like the lawyer who came to Guantánamo and fought for my case.

Silvia Cattori : Am I right in thinking that they were not able to break you?

Sami El Haj : Because I am not alone, and there are people supporting me, this feeling gives me strength. In prison, I drew my strength from the belief that no free man can accept being in this position of inferiority and dehumanization. You feel pain and sorrow but you are determined to keep alive the hope that there will be an end to it; and the idea that even in prison, it is possible to carry on your work as journalist, makes suffering easier to bear.

Silvia Cattori : When you were in Guantánamo, did you know that outside there where people who were fighting for you to be released?

Sami El Haj : In fact I didn’t know about them, because in prison it is very difficult to receive news, even if you have a lawyer, because he is not allowed to tell you anything. Now I do know those who work for human rights, and those who do not agree with the Bush administration. I think that every day their voice becomes stronger.

Silvia Cattori : Your brother, when he saw you again, said that you looked like an old man. Is that how you feel?

Sami El Haj : Personally, it is my heart that counts, and not my face or my body. I feel that my heart is as young as ever, and stronger than before.

Silvia Cattori : So it was a very painful experience, but in fact you have emerged from it with unforeseen benefits?

Sami El Haj : That’s right. I have been able to reap some benefits from my time spent in Guantánamo. Before going there, I only had a small family. Now I have a large family as I have gained hundreds of friends from around the world. This is very positive: I may have lost six and a half years but now, I have more friends.

Silvia Cattori : Are you still considered an “enemy combatant” [3]?

Sami El Haj : I don’t know, but when they released me, they said: ”Now you are no longer a danger to America”.

Silvia Cattori : And your name is not on the “terrorist list” any more?

Sami El Haj : I don’t know. I think that for them, all the people they labeled as “terrorists” will remain so. And that now they are afraid of us because they made us suffer for no reason.

Silvia Cattori : Do you think CIA agents will still spy on you?

Sami El Haj : Yes. The truth is that I have nothing against the country and its people. If the Bush administration makes amends for its errors, I will have nothing to complain about.

Silvia Cattori : Were you surprised when, as you were leaving, an officer from the Pentagon who saw you with a walking stick accused you of being manipulative?

Sami El Haj : The Pentagon officials claim that the Guantánamo detainees were criminals, but in fact five hundred of them have now returned home. How could they have been allowed to leave if they really were criminals? They are still lying.

Silvia Cattori : Two other Sudanese men were released at the same time as you – Amir Yacoub Mohamed al Amin and Walid Mohamed. How are they now?

Sami El Haj : The Sudanese government has treated them very well. They greeted all three of us personally at the airport. Despite the fact that the Americans had taken my passport, I was given a new one within two hours, and they did not prevent me from travelling outside Sudan.

Silvia Cattori : In Guantánamo, did the soldiers call you by your name or by your detainee number, “number 345”?

Sami El Haj : They never called me by my name, just “three, four, five”, my prison number. Towards the end they called me “Al Jazeera”. Only the Red Cross officials called me by my name.

Silvia Cattori : Did these officials visit you often?

Sami El Haj : When they were authorized to visit us, every two or three months. I talked to them and they brought me letters from my family.

Silvia Cattori : The Bush administration and the officers who had the job of torturing you knew that you were a good man, a journalist merely trying to expose the brutality with which they were treating the Afghan people, not a “terrorist”. Do you know why they treated you so badly?

Sami El Haj : Most of the soldiers there were following orders from their superiors. They carried out torture with no conscience. But to be true to what happened I must say that some of them were good men. Some soldiers did use their brains.

Silvia Cattori : The CIA agents wrote a report on the torture in Guantánamo. When they were torturing you, did you feel that they were observing you, carrying out experiments on you?

Sami El Haj : We were under the constant supervision of military psychologists. They were not there to treat us, but to take part in the interrogations, observing the tortured prisoners so that no detail of their behaviour would escape them. The interrogations were the responsibility of Colonel Morgan, a specialist psychiatric doctor. This colonel was stationed in Guantánamo from March 2002. He had served at the Afghan prison in Bagram from November 2001. He gave instructions to the officers who were torturing us, studied our reactions, then noted every detail in order to be able to adapt the torture techniques to each detainee, which had profound psychological consequences.

I spoke to them. I told them that the mission of a doctor is an honourable one, to help people, not torture them. They replied, “We are military personnel and we must follow the rules. When an officer gives me an order, it is my duty to carry it out; otherwise I will be imprisoned just like you. When I signed a contract with the army, I realised at the time that I must obey all orders”.

Silvia Cattori : Amongst the torture techniques used at Guantánamo, I see similarities with those used in Israel on Palestinian political prisoners. Sleep deprivation, for example, is their speciality.

Sami El Haj : I think that most of the world’s intelligence services came to Guantánamo. I saw British and Canadians. They came to find out about the interrogation techniques, and also to supply the CIA and FBI with advice on how to torture and interrogate from what they had learned.

Silvia Cattori : Are you able to sleep easily?

Sami El Haj : Not like before Guantánamo. I only sleep 3 to 4 hours now. Today, when I met people from the Red Cross, I asked them to help me to overcome my problems and recommend a doctor who could help me. Seven years is not a short period of time.

Silvia Cattori : Wasn’t going on hunger stick a kind of self-inflicted torture? Why did you do it for such long periods, while your jailers took advantage of it to inflict even more suffering and humiliation on you?

Sami El Haj : Because we felt we couldn’t stay silent – we had to do something. That is the only way we had of making our voices heard. Going on hunger strike is of course a very painful way of taking action and is difficult to endure. But when your freedom is taken away you have to fight to restore it. It was our last resort for telling the Bush administration that a detainee has dignity that he cannot live on bread alone and that freedom is more important.

Silvia Cattori : What was it like when they force-fed you?

Sami El Haj : When there were more than forty detainees on hunger strike, the administration of the camp tried to break our resistance by subjecting us to more torture. We were locked in cold rooms, stripped naked, and prevented from sleeping for long periods. Twice a day the soldiers tied us to a special chair. They put a mask over our faces and inserted a large tube into our noses, not into the stomach. The normal ration was two cans but they punished us by injecting twenty four cans and six bottles of water. Having shrunk through long hunger strikes, the stomach cannot hold such quantities. They added products which induce diarrhoea. The detainee, now sitting on that chair for more than three hours, would vomit continuously. They left us in the vomit and excrement. When the session was over they would rip the tube out violently, and when they saw the blood flowing they laughed at us. As they use infected tubes which are never cleaned, the detainees suffer from untreated illnesses.

Silvia Cattori : Is it thanks to that long hunger strike that you were released?

Sami El Haj : Not only because of that, but it was one of the factors that led the administration to release me.

Silvia Cattori : What should one make of Khaled Sheik Mohamed’s confessions [4], where he admits to organising more than thirty terrorist attacks in seventeen countries?

Sami El Haj : It is possible that they tortured him to the point where he was no longer himself. I never met him because they put him in a special camp. An officer told me that he was very badly injured. I’m sure you can imagine – they subjected him to horrific torture.

Silvia Cattori : When America says that he is the “number 3 Al Qaida terrorist”, does that bear any resemblance to the truth?

Sami El Haj : Quite honestly I believe nothing that comes from the Bush administration. Because I was also accused of being a “terrorist”. And I know better than anyone what the truth is. Those people lie too much. I never believe a single word coming from that government. I know a prisoner who was tortured so much that in the end he said, “I am Osama Bin Laden”. He said what they wanted to hear so that the torture would end.

Silvia Cattori : So, is Al Qaida a creation of the western intelligence agencies?

Sami El Haj : As far as I’m concerned, I have never in my life met anyone who has said to me, “I belong to Al Qaida”.

In Guantánamo, I met most of the detainees because the policy of the guards was not to allow the prisoners to live together for a long time in the same cell. They transferred us every week. So we got to know other people. The men I met there are all peaceful people.

Since I left, I have spoken to over a hundred of them. Those who were married have picked up their lives again and the others have got married.

Silvia Cattori : Do those who draw strength from prayer have a better chance of escaping madness?

Sami El Haj : Of course! If you feel that someone is there with you, especially God, you will be patient and always aware that God is more powerful than human beings. I must pray to God and thank him. I must also thank all those who supported me. I think that even if I spent my whole life saying thank you, I would not manage to thank them all. Now, through my work concentrating on human rights, perhaps I will be able to contribute to making other people’s lives happier.

Silvia Cattori : I feel that the media and the NGO’s in this country have not given the importance that was due to defending the rights of these Muslim prisoners [5]. For a long time denouncing the abuses committed against them was seen as a sign of sympathy for the “terrorists”. Did you know that the leaders of “Reporters without borders”, for example, whose mission is to protect journalists, were criticised for waiting five years before talking about your case [6]?

Sami El Haj : Unfortunately people believed whatever the Bush government told them Now they know this wasn’t true, they will put the record straight. As I have already said, if someone makes a mistake, it’s not a problem: the problem lies in pursuing the mistake.

If journalists do not feel concerned when other journalists are imprisoned carrying out their job, perhaps one day those very journalists will find themselves in prison and there will be nobody to defend them. We must work together, taking up each and every case. So if we find out that a journalist has been imprisoned it is our duty to support them, no matter what their colour or religion.

As a journalist, I want to commit myself to supporting journalists who work to defend rights and freedom. There is an enormous amount of work to do. We must stop at nothing to ensure the liberation of those who are locked away in Guantánamo and the countless secret prisons where the Bush government is depriving tens of thousands of others of their rights.

That experience in Guantánamo affected us profoundly. What I want to focus on is the need for and the importance of the defence of human rights. After all the damage that has been done, everyone now feels more concerned, I think. It is not acceptable to abandon these people who are suffering. We have an urgent responsibility to show solidarity with them.

Al Jazeera hopes to work with the free media to gather information relating to human rights and freedoms. I ask all journalists to cooperate with us in this. There were more than fifty nationalities in Guantánamo - it is a worldwide issue, and not just about individual detainees.

It is shameful that in our society, innocent people who have been sold find themselves locked in cages, and that this violation of basic rights should be the doing of a country which claims to be the guarantor of rights and freedoms.

I feel no hatred. We respect the citizens of the USA. It is their present government which should take responsibility for the consequences of these actions.

Human rights and security are inseparable – there can be no security without the respect of fundamental rights.

Silvia Cattori : You are right to call on decent people and journalists not to accept the violation of international laws and the cruel and degrading treatment of human beings. But this policy could not have lasted if it had not had the tacit support of the superpower governments – it was with their consent that those labelled “enemy combatants” were tortured [7]. The “Patriot Act”, for example, passed after the 11th September in the US, was supported by all the European countries. It was within the framework of these secret agreements that CIA and FBI agents were able to kidnap and torture thousands of innocent men like you in Europe.

Sami El Haj : I want to say this to you: I do not believe in the actions of governments. Because any government, in any country, prefers to govern without confronting the people’s real problems. It may, at times, speak out in support of a certain cause, but in reality it does not support it. It is only for opportunistic political reasons that governments speak out. And they may even, through political expediency; claim to support something in which they do not believe. Forget governments, because they have their own agenda. Yes, we must keep working hard to defend the rights and freedoms of everyone.

Silvia Cattori : Is it fair to conclude that the “terrorists” as presented to us by the Bush administration and the media do not exist?

Sami El Haj : I can assure you that the Guantánamo detainees that I met are not “terrorists”. I had the opportunity to talk to them and get to know them – they are pacifists.

Silvia Cattori : So you were arrested then, because it had to be proven to the other European countries that the Muslim “terrorists” really existed?

Sami El Haj : We were arrested after the attacks of the 11th September, for which no one has yet been able to find those responsible. President Bush did not want to say: “I have made mistakes; I was not able to maintain national security”. He said: “We are going to start a war against terror”. The outcome is that he has brought security to no one.

He bombed Afghanistan, sent soldiers to wage war against whole nations, but did not arrest the people that he set out to arrest. He paid the Pakistanis in return for starting to arrest people and hand them over to his administration.

89% of the prisoners in Guantánamo were bought, for hard currency, from the Pakistani authorities. Where did they find them? They found them in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

Silvia Cattori : These prisoners were then tortured with the promise that it would end if they accepted becoming spies for the CIA!? What a terrifying system!

Sami El Haj : Yes. Let’s wait for President Bush to leave power. When he has left his seat, I am sure that many people will have something to say about his wrongdoing.

Silvia Cattori : Your testimony is very important. Your youth has been destroyed. And yet you have the magnanimity to transform this disaster into something constructive. You refuse to see yourself as a victim. You are truly amazing! So many prisoners must be hoping for help from people like you.

Sami El Haj : We must work hard, so that all those who continue to support the Bush administration feel ashamed of their actions. At that point, no one will help them. And when no one helps them, they will stop.

The whole Guantánamo episode is a huge black stain. The Bush administration tried to deceive the public by saying we were terrorists. But the great majority of those men, who were imprisoned, are innocent, like me.

Silvia Cattori : Thank you for giving us this interview.


Translation from French for Cageprisoners by Sue Bingham:
http://www.cageprisoners.com/articles.php?id=25632

Original in French: http://www.silviacattori.net/article469.html
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[1] Sami El Haj was invited to Geneva by the “Alkarama for Human Rights” Foundation. See “Sami El Haj achève une intense visite à Genève” (“Sami El Hajj successfully ends his visit to Geneva”), Alkarama for Human Rights, 1 July 2008.

[2] See “Andreas von Bülow: “Our priority should be the fight against manipulation” ”, Red Voltaire, 15 January 2006.

[3] According to Dick Marty, rapporteur of the Commission for Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Council of Europe charged with investigating the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe, a “secret agreement, drawn up in October 2001 between the US and their NATO allies, set up the framework which allowed the CIA to incarcerate high profile detainees in Europe. It is this agreement which authorises grave violations of rights, including torture”.

[4] Khalid Cheikh Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan in 2003. Accused of being number 3 in Al Qaida, he was detained in various secret sites before being placed in isolation and brutally tortured from 2006 in Guantánamo. His farcical trial before a military tribunal, along with 14 other Al Qaida members, took place in June 2008.

[5] The “Arab Commission for Human Rights ” fought from the start for the closure of Guantánamo. See http://www.achr.nu/

[6] See “Reporters without Borders remembers (lately) Sami Al Haj” Red Voltaire, 2 March 2006.

[7] The status of “enemy combatant” and “illegal combatant”, allowing the US government to detain detainees categorised as such indefinitely and without civilian jurisdiction emanates from the “Patriot Act”, a law of exception designed to “unite and strengthen America by supplying the tools necessary to seek out and oppose terrorism” voted by US Congress and signed by George W. Bush, on 26 October 2001.

[8] The daily newspaper “24 Heures” wrote on 27 June 2008, “Sami El Haj is in Geneva to denounce the senseless blunder of the huge American antiterrorist machine”.

[9] See “Why did they treat me like that?”, by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 6 July 2008.

See also “Full account of Muhammed Omer’s hair-raising encounter with the Shin Beth”, by Khalid Amayreh, 1 July 2008.

[10] On his internet site, Youssef Nada reveals the role played by some journalists in his destruction based on lies. See: http://www.youssefnada.ch/

Al-Jazeera man 'close to death' at Guantanamo Bay

By Robert Verkaik

An al-Jazeera journalist captured in Afghanistan six years ago and sent to Guantanamo Bay is close to becoming the fifth detainee at the US naval base to take his own life, according to a medical report written by a team of British and American psychiatrists

Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese national, is 250 days into a hunger strike which he began in protest over his detention without charge or trial in January 2002. But British and American doctors, who have been given exclusive access to his interview notes, say there is very strong evidence that he has given up his fight for life, experiencing what doctors recognise as "passive suicide", a condition suffered by female victims of Darfur.

Dr Dan Creson, a US psychiatrist who has worked with the United Nations in Darfur, said Mr Haj was suffering from severe depression and may be deteriorating to the point of imminent death.

He said the detainee's condition was similar to that of Darfuri women in Sudan whose mind suddenly experiences an irreversible decline after enduring months of starvation and abuse. He said: "In the midst of rape, slow starvation, and abject humiliation, they did whatever they could to survive and save their children; then, suddenly, something happened in their psyche, and, without warning, they would just sit down with their small children beneath the first small area of available shade and with no apparent emotion wait for death."

In June this year a Saudi man became the fourth prisoner to take his own life at Guantanamo Bay. Guards found him dead in his cell. Two Saudis and a Yemeni prisoner were found hanged in an apparent suicide at Guantanamo in June last year. A senior US officer caused outrage at the time by describing the suicides of three men as an act of asymmetric warfare and a good PR move on the part of terrorist suspects.

Mr Haj, 38, was sent on assignment by al-Jazeera television station to cover the war in Afghanistan in October 2001. The following month, after the fall of Kabul, Mr Haj left Afghanistan for Pakistan with the rest of his crew.

In early December, the crew were given visas to return to Afghanistan. But when Mr Haj tried to re-enter Afghanistan with his colleagues, he was arrested by the Pakistani authorities – apparently at the request of the US military.

He was imprisoned, handed over to the US authorities in January 2002, taken to the US military compound in Bagram, Afghanisatan, then Kandahar, and finally to Guantanamo in June 2002.

His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, of the human rights charity Reprieve, said his client had endured months of brutal force-feeding and lost nearly a fifth of his body weight during the hunger strike.

Mr Stafford Smith said: "The US military is rightly afraid of a fifth prisoner dying in their custody. But they wrongly respond by treating prisoners worse. Blankets and clothes are removed in case they are used to commit suicide. The harshest methods of forced feeding are deployed – Sami has suffered the feeding tube being forced down into his lungs by mistake several times."

The warning about the condition of Mr Haj coincided with the release of Guantanamo transcripts which describe the hostility between guards and their prisoners. The transcripts includes details of guards interrupting detainees at prayer, detainees flinging body waste at guards and interrogators withholding medicine.

Dr Hugh Rickards, a British psychiatrist, warned in his report that the level of Mr Haj's mental suffering "appears so acute that it is my duty as a medical practitioner to put this in writing to ensure appropriate assessment and treatment".

Dr Mamoun Mobayed, a British psychiatrist based in Northern Ireland, and a third member of the team who has also been given access to written notes of recent interviews with the prisoner, said there was also concern about the mental health of Mr Haj's wife and seven-year-old son, who was just one when his father went on assignment to Afghanistan.

(For more information on this case, please click here VS)

Prisoner 345 - What happened to Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj

By Rachel Morris

On December 15, 2001, early in the morning on the last day of Ramadan, a reporter and a cameraman from Al Jazeera arrived at the Pakistani town of Charman on the Afghanistan border, on their way to cover the American military operation. The reporter, Abdelhaq Sadah, was replacing a colleague, but the cameraman, a Sudanese national named Sami al-Haj, had been on such an assignment before, and had crossed the border without incident. This time, however, an immigration official stopped him. He seemed angry. The official told Sadah that he could go, but "your friend is a wanted man and will stay here."

In Sadah’s recollection, the official produced a letter from Pakistani intelligence—written, curiously, in English. It said that al-Haj had Al Qaeda ties and should be apprehended. Al-Haj noticed that the passport number in the letter didn’t correspond to the one in his current passport, but instead to an old passport he had lost several years ago in Sudan and had reported missing. Despite his protests, the official insisted on detaining him overnight. The next morning, Sadah returned to the border post just in time to see a Pakistani military officer lead al-Haj to a car and drive him away.

Al-Haj is a tall, slender man whose round face and glasses give him a boyish demeanor. In photographs, he looks much younger than his thirty-eight years. People who have met him invariably describe him as polite; in conversation he is said to smile almost constantly.

After Sadah informed Al Jazeera management what had happened, the network made contact with the Pakistani authorities and was told that al-Haj’s background was being investigated. On January 4, al-Haj called his wife, Asma, who was then living in Azerbaijan. He sounded confident, almost cheerful, saying that he expected to be back in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera’s headquarters, in two or three days.
Instead, al-Haj was taken to an underground prison in Kabul. There, he was transferred to American custody. On January 7, he was brought by helicopter to Bagram Air Base. Al-Haj later described his disorienting arrival to his lawyer. After a fifteen-minute flight, he said, he was pitched from the helicopter into the icy night, hitting the tarmac so hard that he briefly lost consciousness. He claimed that he was then kicked and beaten by military police, who removed the black bag from his head and cut off his clothes. After performing what al-Haj called an "intimate body search," they dressed him in a blue uniform, and said, "You record videos of Osama bin Laden for Al Jazeera."

For the next six months, al-Haj was held in Afghanistan. In early June 2002, he was put on a military plane. In another letter to his lawyer, he explains that his hands were gloved and cuffed and linked to his leg shackles; his mouth was gagged. Every so often, American soldiers removed the gag to feed him peanut butter crackers. The plane landed many hours later. On June 14, al-Haj was given an orange jumpsuit and the ID number 345. He was in Cuba. For the past five years, al-Haj has been the only journalist known to be held in Guantánamo Bay.

Many questions surround Sami al-Haj. After talking with his colleagues, friends, family members, and lawyer, I could piece together only a partial picture of his life. He grew up in the Sudan, where an uncle, who was better off than al-Haj’s family, helped him attend college in India, where he studied computers and English. In the late 1990s, he took a job as an administrative assistant for a company called Union Beverages, and later worked in a similar role for an import-export company in the United Arab Emirates. In 1997, a former university classmate introduced him to Asma, and they married the following year. Asma told me that her husband was "a very kind-hearted person, [but] we didn’t have deep conversations about our future or experiences." She added that he liked to sleep a lot, to watch television (usually Al Jazeera and Egyptian movies), and to read "every newspaper he could find." In 2000, the couple had a son, Mohammed. Soon after, al-Haj answered a newspaper advertisement for a trainee position at Al Jazeera, and the family moved to Qatar. He started work on a trial basis in April 2000.

At Al Jazeera al-Haj trained as a cameraman. His colleagues remember him as quiet and eager. As it happened, he didn’t have to wait long. After September 11, the network needed journalists willing to work in a war zone, and novices like al-Haj and Abdelhaq Sadah were eager to go. On October 7, al-Haj signed a contract, and three days later the network sent him to Afghanistan with a correspondent named Youssef al-Shouly. "We tried to dissuade him from going because we thought it was too dangerous," his brother, Asim, later told The Associated Press. "But in the end he said this was an opportunity to join the Al Jazeera team and prove himself."

Al-Haj and al-Shouly arrived in Kandahar at a moment when the city was becoming increasingly dangerous. CNN—the only remaining U.S. network there—was already preparing to leave. So CNN struck a deal with Al Jazeera: the Arabic network could occupy the brick house that served as CNN’s bureau and transmit images over its satellite dish, which CNN could then use in its own reports. For nearly two weeks, journalists from both Al Jazeera and CNN shared the house. They often covered similar stories, and the CNN crew trained the Al Jazeera team to use its equipment. Because it was too risky for journalists to operate in Kandahar independently, most of the time they could film only with Taliban permission. In fact, Taliban commanders frequently stopped by the house with story ideas; once they brought the landing gear of an American helicopter. They were such a regular presence that the CNN staff began to worry that an unmanned drone might target the house—although the crew had given its coordinates to the Pentagon—and stretched a large tarpaulin bearing the network’s name over the nearby ground.

Al-Shouly was clearly in charge of the Al Jazeera team. He had all the sources, and he told al-Haj what to shoot. They usually produced one or two stories a day with only a few hours of sleep, and al-Haj would regularly ask al-Shouly how to improve his work. The two had little time for personal conversations, but al-Haj would talk about "his kid, his family in Sudan, that his sister and brothers wanted to go to university but they were not wealthy and he wanted to send money," al-Shouly told me. CNN’s fixer at the time, Kamal Hyder (now the Islamabad correspondent for Al Jazeera English), remembers that al-Haj "was very particular about his prayers; he was very particular about his work."

At night, the journalists sometimes gathered in the courtyard and ate around a small fire. Occasionally, the CNN journalists borrowed a copy of al-Haj’s Koran to discuss Taliban interpretations of Islamic law. Al-Haj liked to greet Alfredo DeLara, the CNN cameraman at the time, with a high five, and was quick to adopt American jokes and phrases. "He was very excited to be there. You could see it on his face. He said he wanted to be like me," DeLara said. DeLara and the CNN correspondent, Nic Robertson, were suspicious of everybody they met, but they saw no cause to be alarmed about al-Haj. "He just seemed like a young kid trying to get his big break," said DeLara.

Al-Haj was detained at a moment when distrust of Al Jazeera was accumulating rapidly at the highest levels of the American government. Before 9/11, Al Jazeera was hailed as a rare independent voice in the Middle East. But after the attacks, while Middle East specialists in the government continued to advocate that the U.S. engage with the network, others in the administration developed an intense hostility toward it. According to numerous former senior administration officials, the major hubs of animosity were the Office of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense, particularly the offices run by Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, and Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

After the Iraq war began, that suspicion intensified. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said: "There was just this visceral, 'I-don’t-like-them, they’re-our-enemies' response. And they would spread stories like Al Jazeera setting ambushes and IEDs"—in Iraq—"so they could film the insurgents’ attacks. These were the kinds of stories that were told inside the Oval Office . . . . I heard conversations of that nature almost every month during later 2003 and 2004."

On close examination, however, claims of links between Al Jazeera and terrorist organizations prove murky. I spoke to a number of military officers and commanders who had served in Iraq. Several told me that they suspected Al Jazeera stringers of communicating with insurgents, but had no concrete evidence. "This was reported by every commander throughout Iraq—the Al Jazeera journalists always seemed to be at the right place at the right time," said Col. William Darley, who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as the chief Public Affairs Officer for Combined Joint Task Force-7. "Most of the senior commanders loathed Al Jazeera. There was a very uneasy relationship of suspicion and distrust between Bremer and the cpa staff and Al Jazeera." (L. Paul Bremer was head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.) Darley added that the Army made "probably at least a dozen" efforts to catch Al Jazeera reporters in such activities, but never succeeded. A former senior U.S. intelligence official told me that if there were any serious evidence pointing to links between Al Jazeera and Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, he would have known about it. "It wasn’t a major theme of any consequence in the intelligence community," he said.

Asma al-haj didn’t know what had happened to her husband until late 2002, when she received a letter from him explaining that he was in Guantánamo. Around the same time, Al Jazeera issued a press release announcing that an employee was being held at the camp. The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld requesting information, but received no reply. For the next three years, little was known about the circumstances of al-Haj’s detention, until early 2005 when he obtained the services of Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer based in Britain.

The unorthodox legal processes governing detainees at Guantánamo are ill-suited to the familiar legal terminology of a trial. For the first two years that Guantánamo operated, the administration was able to prevent inmates from having access to any kind of legal forum at all, including Article 5 hearings under the Geneva Conventions (historically used by the military to determine whether a detainee is a legitimate prisoner of war) or habeas corpus review in a U.S. court. When the Supreme Court pronounced this state of affairs unconstitutional in June 2004, the administration devised special panels for detainees: a Combat Status Review Tribunal, or CSRT, to review whether a detainee’s "enemy combatant" status was justified; followed by an Administrative Review Board, or ARB, an annual assessment of whether the detainee still belonged at Guantánamo. But those forums bear little resemblance to trials. They begin with the assumption that the detainee’s enemy combatant label is correct. Instead of charging a detainee with violations of international or national law, military officers present an "Unclassified Summary of Evidence," which is assumed to be accurate. The detainee and his lawyer (if he has one) are rarely permitted to see the evidence itself, if at all. Nor can the lawyer attend the hearing (the detainee is instead provided with a military representative, who is obliged to tell the panel of any useful information he learns about the detainee in the process of helping him prepare). So far the written summaries in al-Haj’s CSRTs and ARBs are the only formal information Stafford Smith has about why his client is being detained in Guantánamo.

The accusation that al-Haj had filmed Osama bin Laden did not resurface in the unclassified evidence described to al-Haj in the three hearings he has had. Instead, the allegations against him have evolved over time. In his status review, held in late 2004, military officials said al-Haj had gone to Afghanistan to buy Stinger missiles to fight in Chechnya, a charge that has since been dropped. Then, he was alleged to have sought the missiles in 1996, although Stafford Smith says he can prove that al-Haj was in the United Arab Emirates every day of that year.

An administrative review the following year offered a rather confusing string of contentions. There’s a claim that between 1997 and 1999, al-Haj delivered several hundred thousand dollars from the United Beverage Company to the Azerbaijan branch of Al Haramayn, an Islamic charity sometimes described as the "United Way of Saudi Arabia." Several branches of Al Haramayn (although not the one in Azerbaijan) were designated by the U.S. Treasury after 9/11 as providing financial support to Al Qaeda. Stafford Smith said al-Haj simply delivered the money on his employer’s instructions and declared it to customs, unaware that part of the sum later made its way to an organization that supported the Chechens in 1999. Al-Haj is also said to have “met” a senior Al Qaeda lieutenant, Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim, while working at the Union Beverage Company, according to an Associated Press report. (The AP reported that al-Haj once picked Salim and his family up from the airport on behalf of his boss.) There’s also a reference to documents from al-Haj’s personal business, called Samico Services, being found “during a raid of locations occupied by suspected extremists affiliated with . . . an Egyptian extremist” in an unspecified country. “Neither I nor Sami have any idea what this is about,” Stafford Smith told me. He said that one of the allegations—that al-Haj lied on a business form establishing Samico Services, saying he was also the co-owner of another business—is “true but totally irrelevant.”

It’s impossible to assess the veracity—or the relevance—of the government’s claims. The Department of Defense did not answer a list of detailed questions about al-Haj’s case, and instead provided me with a written response which read, in part: "There is a significant amount of evidence, both unclassified and classified, which supports continued detention of Sami Al-Hajj by U.S. forces." But current and former intelligence and military sources I spoke with doubted that al-Haj was of any significance to U.S. interests, even if he did commit the alleged offenses. The former senior intelligence official told me that if al-Haj was truly a significant detainee, he would have been briefed on his case.

For his part, Stafford Smith believes that al-Haj "is clearly in Guantánamo for one reason only, and that’s because he’s an employee of Al Jazeera." According to Stafford Smith, al-Haj has been interrogated approximately 130 times. Roughly 125 of those sessions, he said, dealt not with the allegations but with Al Jazeera’s operations. Stafford Smith told me that military interrogators have repeatedly asked al-Haj to confirm that prominent Al Jazeera journalists are members of terrorist organizations or that Al Jazeera is funded by Al Qaeda. In addition, said Stafford Smith, interrogators offered to release al-Haj if he would spy on the network. Several military and intelligence sources with knowledge of Guantánamo told me that those contentions seem plausible, but they are impossible to confirm.

There is one public record of an interrogation of al-Haj. In 2005, Eric Saar, a former Army linguist at Guantánamo, published Inside the Wire, a critical account of his experiences. Saar describes an interrogation of an Al Jazeera cameraman, to whom, like all the prisoners in the book, Saar grants a pseudonym—in this case "Adib." (Saar is prohibited by the Pentagon from commenting on the book.) The interrogation is conducted by an employee of an unnamed government agency. She asks for "Adib’s" restraints to be removed, offers him a Coke, and questions him about the financing of particular Islamic charities. Saar does not mention any questions about Al Jazeera, although at the end of a cordial conversation, the interrogator asks "Adib" whether he would do a story on Guantánamo. He replies: "I can’t wait to do the story . . . . I’m going to tell exactly what I’ve seen here—that the American authorities have no respect for Islam, and they are holding innocent men without charging them with anything."

It’s worth noting that in the public allegations, at least, al-Haj has not been accused of committing any aggressive acts against the U.S. According to a review of the first 517 combatant status reviews by the Seton Hall University School of Law in 2006, this places him in the same category as 55 percent of Guantánamo’s inmates. (Only 8 percent were accused of fighting for Al Qaeda.) The thousands of pages of status and administrative review transcripts often make for curious reading. Sometimes, a detainee is presented with a serious accusation, such as attending an Al Qaeda training camp. But in other cases, the assertions are based on circumstantial connections with suspected terrorists or organizations that support them. What is especially striking about the reviews is that rather than being a process to assess the fairness of the allegations, they instead appear to provide an additional forum to gather information about the detainee.

On August 12, 2005, at his first administrative review, al-Haj appeared in front of the three-man panel in the white uniform worn by detainees deemed to be well-behaved, with his right foot swathed in a blue bandage or cast. A person identified as the Designated Military Officer summarized the evidence against him. In addition to the claims mentioned above, there were some related to his journalistic work, such as a statement that al-Haj had interviewed several Taliban officials in Kandahar, as well as a member of Al Qaeda. The officer noted that al-Haj had told interrogators that "he would exercise caution in future assignments with Al Jazeera." "Before, I worked for Al Jazeera as a cameraman but I am not sure I can ever go back to journalism,” al-Haj responded. “It is too dangerous, and I want to be with my family."

By now, about 395 detainees have been released or transferred from Guantánamo, and a number have described their experiences in interviews and books. Many of them offer an eerily similar picture of a place where the strangeness of the surroundings produces a distinct culture and vocabulary. For instance, many detainees can casually reel off the jargon associated with the ARBs or CSRTs, or talk in matter-of-fact tones of being “IRF-ed”—forcibly removed from their cells by a five- or six-man Immediate Reaction Force.

One of al-Haj’s closest friends in Guantánamo was Jamal Abdullah Kiyemba, a Ugandan citizen who had lived in Britain since he was a teenager. Kiyemba, a soft-spoken pharmaceutical and cosmetic science student, was seized in Pakistan, where he said he had gone to study Arabic and the Koran, by local military forces. (His status review "summary of evidence" said he had traveled to Pakistan to fight in the jihad in Afghanistan.) He was released in February 2006 and deported to Uganda, where he spoke to me by phone.

Kiyemba remembers his first meeting with al-Haj quite clearly. One day, he told me, a tall detainee wearing the standard orange uniform was brought into the next cell. His beard and hair had recently been shaved; he had a black eye and a swollen face. Kiyemba greeted him according to the detainees’ informal social code. "You give the Islamic greeting of peace, and then you start asking, Who are you? How did you get here? What happened to you? Then I asked him why his face was so swollen, and he told me he was IRF-ed."

At that time, the two were living in Camp Two (they would later share a room in Camp Four, the medium-security block, where multiple detainees occupy each room). Camp Two, Kiyemba said, comprises cell blocks "like cargo containers from a ship," each housing two rows of twenty-four, six-by-eight-foot steel cells, some painted a soothing shade of green. Every cell contained a bed, a mattress, a blanket, a prayer mat, a pair of slippers, a Koran, a sink, and a squat toilet. Guards pushed food through an aperture in the door known as the "din hole"; fluorescent lights flooded the cells twenty-four hours a day through the tightly woven mesh walls. Curiously, many Guantánamo detainees talk more about the humiliation of being constantly exposed than of being physically abused. Perhaps because of the lack of privacy, most inmates made an effort to get to know those around them; Kiyemba and al-Haj became good friends while they lived in adjoining cells.

In Guantánamo, many detainees seem to find solace in Islamic rituals. Al-Haj and Kiyemba prayed five times a day. Kiyemba told me that al-Haj didn’t exercise much, because back when he was taken to Bagram Air Base, he had been left outside for long periods in the cold, causing his feet to swell and his knees to ache. Instead, he liked to read, especially the Koran and other religious texts. (In e letter to Clive Stafford Smith, al-Haj mentioned that he wouldn’t mind some secular reading material, but the only books available were "silly ones about TinTin or Mickey Mouse.") Occasionally, the inmates on the block would hold concerts and sing Islamic songs, and al-Haj would act as the emcee. Kiyemba also often saw al-Haj writing in his cell when he was permitted a pen and paper.

At first, his wife Asma told me, al-Haj’s letters contained a lot of poetry. He wrote one poem called “On the meaning of the Statue of Liberty” that reads, in part: "Sadly, the flame in her hand is sputtering in the storm. Will, first, the light go out on the world, and then the statue crumble?" At other times, he seems determined to act as a reporter inside Guantánamo. Once, he detailed twelve incidents of abuse or mistreatment he had heard about from other detainees. A number of these incidents are confirmed by official investigations and press accounts, such as a female interrogator’s wiping what she said was menstrual blood on a detainee, prolonged use of stress positions, the use of dogs, careless or offensive handling of the Koran by prison guards, and the wrapping of a detainee in an Israeli flag during an interrogation. On another occasion, al-Haj gathered information on a hunger strike that Stafford Smith used to encourage media coverage. "It took me a visit to work out what a gold mine Sami is," Stafford Smith said. Kiyemba remarked to me that al-Haj "had that journalist attitude."

Despite the novelty of al-Haj’s status as the only journalist inside Guantánamo, it was a long time before he attracted much media attention. At first, even Al Jazeera was reluctant to cover his story. "Up until around 2003, the air was very tense. You didn’t really want to investigate it too much," said Ahmad Ibrahim, an Al Jazeera producer who has researched al-Haj’s case. "At least to a lot of people around the world, holding people was probably justifiable due to the enormity of 9/11. And in the Arab world, the situation at Guantánamo was difficult to comprehend or believe, even—that any kind of torture would be perpetrated by the U.S. A lot of people didn’t comprehend what Guantánamo stood for, and the legal arguments that were used to justify it." In 2005, Ibrahim invited Stafford Smith to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha. "That’s when the big interest in Sami and his plight started."

Since then, al-Haj has become a cause célèbre in the Arab world. Ibrahim made a forty-five-minute documentary about him, Prisoner 345, and Al Jazeera regularly reports on his case. Al-Haj has also been featured in several stories in the British press. But despite repeated efforts by Ibrahim and Stafford Smith, there was until very recently almost no coverage of al-Haj in the U.S., apart from a New York Times column last October by Nicholas Kristof. Al Jazeera "is still perceived in a very negative way" in the U.S., said Joel Campagna of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "I think that has made people pause when looking at this case."

But while some journalists may distrust Al Jazeera, or may have believed Donald Rumsfeld’s discredited claim that the inmates represented the "worst of the worst," others may have avoided writing about detainees like al-Haj because of a more mundane bias: the simple difficulty of reporting about Guantánamo. It’s often been noted that the lopsided legal process fashioned by the Bush administration makes it virtually impossible for detainees to defend themselves. A lesser noticed consequence is that the withholding of evidence makes it impossible for journalists to write a conventionally "balanced" story about individual detainees—and hence, they are less likely to write about them at all. While researching this piece, for instance, I’ve had plenty of access to al-Haj’s lawyer and to Al Jazeera, but none to the Department of Defense or al-Haj himself. This imbalance is uncomfortable, but to be deterred by it would be to miss the point. The central question underlying the case of al-Haj and the other detainees is not their guilt or innocence, but why they have been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there.

On september 11, 2006, al-Haj had another administrative review, this one conducted in his absence. Later he was informed that he would be remaining in Guantánamo for at least another year. In November, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which, for now, has largely removed the Guantánamo detainees from the scrutiny of federal courts. The act also established a new form of military tribunal following successful court challenges to the previous system. The act requires detainees to be charged with specific offenses, and allows lawyers some access to evidence. But the Bush administration has said that it plans to prosecute only seventy or eighty detainees in the new forums; al-Haj is not one of them. More recently, the government has moved to stanch the flow of information from Guantánamo to the outside world. In April, the Pentagon sought to restrict lawyers to three visits per client. In May, it withdrew that proposal under criticism, but is still pursuing measures to monitor mail between lawyers and their clients, and to bar access by lawyers to the classified information that supports a detainee’s designation as an “enemy combatant.” Those proposals have reverberated among Guantánamo’s inhabitants. As the detainees have become increasingly despairing about the indefinite nature of their confinement, some have turned against their lawyers, while others have responded in a more drastic fashion.

At 9.30 a.m. on January 7, 2007, al-Haj began a hunger strike. (In official government Guantánamo parlance, this is known as "voluntary fasting.") He sent a letter to his interrogator and the admiral in charge of the base, demanding respect for the prisoners’ religious rights, the proper application of the Geneva Conventions to the camp, an end to the practice of total isolation, an investigation of three prisoners who died in June 2006, and a fair trial in a U.S. court. After he stopped eating, his correspondence became noticeably less lucid. A letter dated January 10 reads: "After I miss three meal they started to punished they put me on level 4 not allowed to go for RAC and they taken everything even the bottle of water and glasses and knee band and my letters and pen even my lovely son photo. They left for me only green mat."

Al-Haj’s weight has fluctuated wildly since he arrived at Guantánamo. In September 2006, it had climbed to 284.5 pounds, according to Defense Department records, only to drop by almost one hundred pounds in ten weeks. In a diary of his hunger strike that he wrote for his lawyers, al-Haj noted that he now weighed 167 pounds after twenty-one days of fasting. Once the weight of a detainee drops to 80 percent of his normal weight, he is required to be "enterally fed," that is, fed liquids through a tube. In his characteristically precise manner, al-Haj described being strapped to a custom-built chair while a doctor pushed a yellow tube down his left nostril until it reached his stomach, then filled it with 250 milliliters of a liquid called Ensure.

By early June, eighteen detainees were refusing food. Al-Haj had not yet received a reply to his letter to the admiral, but he has no intention of stopping. "I will continue the struggle until we get our rights. The strike is the only way that I can protest," he wrote. "Meanwhile, to my wife and son I say, 'Don’t worry. What will happen will happen. One day the sun will shine again, and we will be free. Facts are facts and at last we will prevail.'"