Father of 10 Held in Prison Without Charges and Force-Fed Through Nose
Sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? It is something that should be unheard of, especially in a civilized country such as ours.
Wrong. This is the norm at Guantanamo Bay and/or Gitmo, where people can be held indefinitely, without charges, just because the military says they’re “terrorists.” The American people have been so conditioned by the media to be okay with this because “OMG, he’s got dark skin, a beard and a turban… he’s a terrorist!!! LET’S BURN HIM!…. I mean, PUT HIM IN PRISON FOREVER! (that’s more humane).
Read on….
“Three years ago, the man known as Internment Serial Number 669 stopped eating. Ahmed Zaid Zuhair, a father of 10 children in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, had been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 without charges and decided to join a mass hunger strike in protest. The U.S. military was determined not to let him succeed.
Since then, according to court documents reviewed by The Associated Press, guards have struggled with him repeatedly, at least once using pepper spray, shackles and brute force to drag him to a restraint chair for his twice-daily dose of a liquid nutrition mix force-fed through his nose.
The documents, filed in federal court in Washington, are a rare look at the military tactics used on hunger strikers, which have sparked international condemnation but remained hidden from view, with officials refusing to even confirm the identity of the men taking part in the protest.
Zuhair’s attorney, Yale Law School lecturer Ramzi Kassem, says the tactics described in the documents amount to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” The military says the only reason it uses such tactics is that Zuhair is violent and dangerous.
“ISN 669 has a very long history of disciplinary violations and noncompliant, resistant and combative behavior,” according to Army Col. Bruce Vargo, commander of Guantanamo Bay’s guards.
Zuhair’s protest is the remnant of a mass hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay that began in the summer of 2005, with prisoners celebrating the 10 Irish Republican Army and Irish National Liberation Army militants who starved themselves to death in Britain’s Maze prison in 1981 while demanding political-prisoner status.
At its peak, there were 131 prisoners refusing meals at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. The U.S. began force-feeding prisoners, but some were regurgitating the liquid-nutrient mix. In January 2006, commanders adopted a practice borrowed from American civilian prisons of strapping detainees into a special restraint chair for the feedings, and the number of strikers quickly dropped off.
Eventually there were just two: Zuhair, 43, and another Saudi, Abdul Rahman Shalabi. The number has since fluctuated and 12 were participating on Friday.”
What pisses me off more and more is the fact that “The American Dream” has become the rest of the world’s nightmare.
I was born in Romania, a tiny country in Eastern Europe that used to be one of the U.S.S.R’s satellite nations. In kindergarten, we were told very often that if we said anything bad about Ceausescu (communist dictator “president’) or his wife, the police would take our parents to jail. People then lived in fear of their neighbors, of the police, of communist party members, etc. All you had to do is piss somebody off, who would go tell the police or the head of the party in your town about you, and you disappeared.Whatever they said did not even have to be true–you could go to jail just based on hearsay. No proof, no lawyers, no trial.
If you were lucky, they would release you in a few months. If you were less lucky, you would end up rotting in some jail. If you weren’t lucky at all, you would end up dead. If you were really, really unlucky, your wife/husband would get fired from their jobs, their land taken away, or they would be taken to jail as well. Needless to say, people learned to not trust anyone.
Our family came to the United States because my parents wanted us to have a future. I wouldn’t have been able to go to college, neither would my brother. They worked hard to start all over, to learn English, and to adjust to an entirely different country. They love this country and have no desire to go back to Romania, even if it’s just for a visit. We all even went through the process of becoming citizens. We took the civics, history, reading, and writing tests. We took an oath to renounce all other citizenships and bear arms in defense of this country.
My mom cried when she got her citizenship. She cried when she got to register to vote. She can’t wait to vote in the election. Now, most “real” Americans can’t even imagine this scenario. You have never been persecuted, you have never been occupied, and you have never lived in fear of the government.
Until now. Now, thanks to The Patriot Act, The Military Commissions Act, and Patriot Act II, all laws are in place to create something Ceausescu could only dream of.
A place where people can be taken to jail, held indefinitely without charges, and tortured, for as long as the White House deems necessary to protect “the American people” from “terrorism.” We live in a country where the government can listen in to your phone conversations (landlines or cellphones) and track you with GPS. The military can be called in to act as law enforcement (that is, if they haven’t died from all the exposure to depleted uranium), the White House can declare anyone an “enemy combatant” and take them to jail without pressing charges or allowing them due process of law.
Oh, by the way, according to the Phoenix Federal Bureau of Investigation, terrorists include animal rights activists, Christians, defenders of the Constitution, lone individuals, common law movement proponents, etc. Read the flyer for yourself: front page, back page.
The American media is portraying terrorists as being Arabic, with turbans and big beards. That look is so ingrained in people’s brains, that I see more and more xenophobia everywhere I look. It’s even happening where I work. Patients always say “oh I don’t want that doctor to take care of me, he looks like Osama bin Laden. He might put a bomb in my bed.”
I’m not a violent person, but when I hear things like that it makes me want to hit these people over the head as hard as I can with a history book. Maybe that will bring some sense into them, but I doubt it. I bet you that 95% of the U.S. population don’t even know Osama bin Laden (Tim Osman) was the 3rd highest paid CIA operative. We were giving him weapons in the 1980’s to help us against the Soviets.
All this makes me very sad, angry, and scared. This isn’t the country of my parents’ dreams anymore. I wonder if it’s still the country of everyone else’s dream?
One thing’s for sure. We will reap what we have sown, sooner or later. And I’m afraid we’ve sown mostly terror and suffering.
