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"Why Me?" Asks Guantanamo Prisoner

Havana, Jan 5, 2006. (AIN) "My life in punishment began at the Bagram jail; I was allowed to go the toilet only twice a day - at daybreak and at sunset, only when it was my turn in the line."

That was part of a testimony of one of the hundreds of people that Washington holds as prisoners at the US naval base in Guantanamo, a portion of Cuban territory illegally occupied by the United States.

The testimony, which was published by Granma daily newspaper, is contained in a letter sent by prisoner Sami Muhydin Al Hajj, a former cameraman with Qatar's Al Jazeera TV network. In it he tells his British lawyer Cive Stafford, "I can't stop asking myself why they are punishing me. It is an obsessive question which is always on my mind."

In his letter Muhydin Al Hajj recalls that on one occasion, as he hurried to the toilet, he whispered to an inmate ahead of him in line to let him cut in. For this Muhydin Al Hajj was punished by one of the guards who "tied my hands with a wire and left me there for the whole day; standing in the cold until I could not keep from urinating on myself."

While in the Kandahar jail, a group that included Al Hajj stood under the searing sun and standing on burning ground, one of the soldiers shouted "Why are you talking? Kneel down with your hands over your heads." Muhydin Al Hajj recalled that "We obeyed and they left us in that position out in the heat kneeling on burning pebbles - one of the men among us fainted and we helped him."

Al Hajj said he was severely punished a week after he arrived in Guantanamo for having refused to take a vaccine which he had already been given before leaving Doha. "According to the doctor, there was simply no need to take such vaccines again."

But worse things happened to Al Hajj, as he recounted in his letter.Prisoners are not allowed to cover their hands or their heads with blankets while sleeping. He asks himself, "Why am I here? Was my four week trip to Afghanistan with an Al Jazeera's camera documenting the aggression against the Afghani people a crime? Is this why I have been in jail for four years accused of being a terrorist?"

"My mind is full of questions!" he concludes. "These are questions that torture my spirit as they crash against the strident of slogans of those who proclaim themselves promoters of freedom, defenders of democracy and protectors of peace on the earth."

 

 

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