2 Reposts & Held Hostage For Six Years In Guantanamo Sami El Haj, Al Jazeera Journalist, Tells His Story-
Sami El Haj, Al Jazeera Journalist, Tells His Story
By Silvia Cattori
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.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20409.htm
See also this very good article from Democracy Now posted below the article on Al-Hajj's Cartoons being banned, which was previously posted here on this site
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
U.S. War on Journalists--Amy Goodman
and also this excellent article previously published here:
US Army Bans Al-Hajj's Guantanamo Cartoons
"My picture reflects my nightmares of what I must look like, with my head double-strapped down, a tube in my nose, a black mask over my mouth, with no eyes and only giant cheekbones, my teeth jutting out – my bones showing in every detail, every rib, every joint. "He explained he felt compelled to express the nightmare that he and the rest of the hunger strikers in Guantánamo have been suffering. Sami's sketches spoke volumes about what he goes through every time they strap him into that chair for forcefeeding," Crider said.
Reprieve reproduced Scream for Freedom from a description provided by al-Hajj
The US army has banned the publication of four cartoons drawn by Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman held in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to his lawyer.
The pieces, called Sketches of My Nightmare, include a drawing depicting al-Hajj, who has been on hunger strike for eight months, as a skeleton being force fed by US guards.
The drawings were submitted to the military censor but they would not permit their release.
However, detailed descriptions of the sketches were allowed through the censorship process and Lewis Peake, a political cartoonist, was able to recreate one entitled Scream for Freedom.
Al Hajj described the way he sees himself being force fed in the so-called "Torture Chair" - the restraint chair into which they are strapped twice a day to have a 110cm tube forcibly inserted into one nostril so that liquid food can be administered.
The tube is pulled out after each feeding and the prisoner is left in the chair for up to two hours so he can be force fed again if he vomits.
'Torture chair'
"The first sketch is just a "The tube goes up to a bag at the top of the drawing. On the right there is another skeleton sitting shackled to another chair.
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Reprieve reproduced Scream for Freedom from a description provided by al-Hajj
The US army has banned the publication of four cartoons drawn by Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman held in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to his lawyer.
The pieces, called Sketches of My Nightmare, include a drawing depicting al-Hajj, who has been on hunger strike for eight months, as a skeleton being force fed by US guards.
The drawings were submitted to the military censor but they would not permit their release.
However, detailed descriptions of the sketches were allowed through the censorship process and Lewis Peake, a political cartoonist, was able to recreate one entitled Scream for Freedom.
Al Hajj described the way he sees himself being force fed in the so-called "Torture Chair" - the restraint chair into which they are strapped twice a day to have a 110cm tube forcibly inserted into one nostril so that liquid food can be administered.
The tube is pulled out after each feeding and the prisoner is left in the chair for up to two hours so he can be force fed again if he vomits.
'Torture chair'
"The first sketch is just a skeleton in the torture chair," he explained.
"The tube goes up to a bag at the top of the drawing. On the right there is another skeleton sitting shackled to another chair. Sami al-Hajj was seized as covered
the Afghan war for Al Jazeera
"They are sitting like we do in interrogations, with hands shackled, feet shackled to the floor, just waiting. In between I draw the flag of Guantanamo – JTF-GTMO – but instead of the normal insignia, there is a skull and crossbones, the real symbol of what is happening here," he said.
Cori Crider, one of the Al Jazeera cameraman's lawyers, said that he first showed her the "very gruesome and incredibly detailed sketches" when she visited him on February 1.
Free speech
The cartoonist is also reproducing the other three sketches which show other aspects of the prisoners' treatment in US custody, Reprieve, a British charity which provides legal representation to Guantanamo detainees, said.
"You have to question, I have to question as an American, why the US government thinks that free speech in the form of this picture is a somehow a threat to US national security," Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, said.
He suggested that the US military was censoring the images to keep details of the treatment of Guantanamo detainees out of the media.
"I have seen plenty of evidence that is extremely embarrassing to the American government, and that's because this sort of picture gives you a visual image of what poor Sami goes through twice a day.
"I think a picture sometimes paints a thousand words, and I think that is what the US government is afraid of," he told Al Jazeera.
Al-Hajj was seized by the US military while he was covering the war in Afghanistan for Al Jazeera's Arabic channel and has been held as an "enemy combatant" without trial or charge since 2001.
the Afghan war for Al Jazeera
"They are sitting like we do in interrogations, with hands shackled, feet shackled to the floor, just waiting. In between I draw the flag of Guantanamo – JTF-GTMO – but instead of the normal insignia, there is a skull and crossbones, the real symbol of what is happening here," he said.
Cori Crider, one of the Al Jazeera cameraman's lawyers, said that he first showed her the "very gruesome and incredibly detailed sketches" when she visited him on February 1.
"He explained he felt compelled to express the nightmare that he and the rest of the hunger strikers in Guantánamo have been suffering. Sami's sketches spoke volumes about what he goes through every time they strap him into that chair for forcefeeding," Crider said.
Free speech
The cartoonist is also reproducing the other three sketches which show other aspects of the prisoners' treatment in US custody, Reprieve, a British charity which provides legal representation to Guantanamo detainees, said.
"You have to question, I have to question as an American, why the US government thinks that free speech in the form of this picture is a somehow a threat to US national security," Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, said.
He suggested that the US military was censoring the images to keep details of the treatment of Guantanamo detainees out of the media.
"I have seen plenty of evidence that is extremely embarrassing to the American government, and that's because this sort of picture gives you a visual image of what poor Sami goes through twice a day.
"I think a picture sometimes paints a thousand words, and I think that is what the US government is afraid of," he told Al Jazeera.
Al-Hajj was seized by the US military while he was covering the war in Afghanistan for Al Jazeera's Arabic channel and has been held as an "enemy combatant" without trial or charge since 2001.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
U.S. War on Journalists--Amy Goodman
May 07, 2008
"The U.S. War on Journalists"
By Amy Goodman
Sami al-Haj is a free man today, after having been imprisoned by the U.S. military for more than six years. His crime: journalism.
Targeting journalists, the Bush administration has engaged in direct assault, intimidation, imprisonment and information blackouts to limit the ability of journalists to do their jobs. The principal target these past seven years has been Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network based in Doha, Qatar.
In November 2001, despite the fact that Al-Jazeera had given the U.S. military the coordinates of its office in Kabul, U.S. warplanes bombed Al-Jazeera's bureau there, destroying it. An Al-Jazeera reporter covering the George Bush-Vladimir Putin summit in Crawford, Texas, in the same month was detained by the FBI because his credit card was "linked to Afghanistan." In spring 2003, the U.S. dropped four bombs on the Sheraton hotel in Basra, Iraq, where Al-Jazeera correspondents—the only journalists reporting from that city—were the lone guests. Another Al-Jazeera staffer showed his ID to a U.S. Marine at a Baghdad checkpoint, only to have his car fired upon by the Marines. He was unhurt. That can't be said for Tareq Ayyoub, an Al-Jazeera correspondent who was on the roof of the network's bureau in Baghdad on April 8, 2003, when a U.S. warplane strafed it. He was killed. His widow, Dima Tahboub, told me: "Hate breeds hate. The United States said they were doing this to rout out terrorism. Who is engaged in terrorism now?"
Then there is the story of Sami al-Haj. A cameraman for Al-Jazeera, he was reporting on the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. On Dec. 15, 2001, while in a Pakistani town near the Afghanistan border, Haj was arrested, then imprisoned in Afghanistan. Six months later, shackled and gagged, he was flown to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Haj was held there for close to six years, repeatedly interrogated and never charged with any crime, never tried in a court. He engaged in a hunger strike for more than a year, but was force-fed by his jailers with a feeding tube sent into his stomach through his nose. Haj was abruptly released this week. The U.S. government announced that he was being transferred to the custody of Sudan, his home nation, but the government of Sudan took no action against him. He was rushed to an emergency room, and soon was seen on his old network, Al-Jazeera:
"I'm very happy to be in Sudan, but I'm very sad because of the situation of our brothers who remain in Guantanamo. Conditions in Guantanamo are very, very bad, and they get worse by the day. Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantanamo, you have animals that are called iguanas, rats that are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than 50 countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give them the rights that they give to animals." He described the desecration of the Quran as part of the effort to break him: "They hold the Quran in contempt, destroyed it several times and put their dirty feet on it. They also sat on the Quran while trying to get us angry. They repeatedly committed violations against our dignity and our sexual organs." At least one official in the Defense Department has denied the charges.
Asim al-Haj, Sami's brother, told me in an interview last January about the 130 interrogations: "During these times, the interrogations were all about Al-Jazeera and alleged relations between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaida. They tried to induce him to spy on his colleagues at Al-Jazeera."
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 10 journalists have been held for extended periods by the U.S. military and then released without charge. Just weeks ago in Iraq, the U.S. military released Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein after holding him without charge for two years. The military had once accused Hussein of being a "terrorist media operative who infiltrated the AP."
The committee reports that 127 journalists and an additional 50 media workers have been killed in Iraq since 2003, well more than twice the number killed in World War II. We need to remind the Bush administration: Don't shoot the messenger.
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America. Her third book, "Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times," was published in April.
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