Life After Guantanamo: Why the Media's Happy-Ending Narrative Is Totally Bankrupt

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted June 20, 2009.

Others, the BBC reported, "are not so sanguine about the time in Guantanamo Bay."

"Abdul Mulla, for one, is extremely bitter."

The taxi driver from Thana village in Malakand does not even want to talk about it.

"What purpose will it serve? You are all infidels," he tells me.

And 24-year-old returnee Shah Mohammed says the experience has left him mentally disturbed.

He says he tried to commit suicide four times in Camp Delta.

"The mental distress, along with worries about home made me try to take my life," he says.

And he says the mental wounds have not healed.

"I wake up in the middle of the night scared to death. I find it difficult to forget my recent past."

That was the fall of 2003. The Uighurs have spent six years longer at Guantanamo, where at least five prisoners have committed suicide.

Their own experiences are sure to haunt them. In their first interview since being released, the men described how they were held in solitary confinement for their first year in U.S. custody, spending 22 hours a day in a windowless cell.

They also describe the harrowing experience of being visited in 2002 by a delegation of officials and interrogators from China, who questioned them for hours on end. According to one of the former prisoners, Salahidin Abdulahad, "the Chinese delegation treated us very badly."

"They brought me out and interrogated me for six hours straight with no food or rest.

"They took me back to my cell, and I was extremely tired. But then they came straight back to my cell and took me out for another six hours of interrogation. It went on that way for one-and-a-half days."

Mr. Turahun added: "When the Chinese came, they wanted to take my picture, but I didn't want them to, because I was afraid they would harm my family.

"But one of the American guards grabbed my beard, and the other held my hands behind my back so they could take the picture."

The men did not want to talk about their families.

Ryan Grim, a reporter for the Huffington Post who interviewed the Uighurs over the phone, reported that the 18-hour interrogation sessions took place in "extreme cold."

"Ablikim Turahun, one of the freed Uighurs, endured such an interrogation. He said that after six hours, he was sent back to his room to eat, but before the meal came, he was taken back to the Chinese for another six hours. He was then sent back to his room and given a meal. Just as he was falling asleep, he was brought back again for a third straight six-hour session in extremely cold temperatures."

"When the Chinese delegation came, we didn't really want to meet with them and answer their questions. They brought us out anyway. They made threats, turned down the temperature in the room, made the room very cold."

The interrogation of the Uighurs by Chinese officials has been an open (if underreported) secret for years. In 2008, a report was released by  Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine that confirmed that, according to a footnote on Page 183:

While the Uighurs were detained at Camp X-Ray, some Chinese officials visited GTMO and were granted access to these detainees for interrogation purposes. The agent stated that he understood that the treatment of the Uighur detainees was either carried out by the Chinese interrogators or was carried out by U.S. military personnel at the behest of the Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, an attorney representing a number of Uighur prisoners, told ABC News that the report proved U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese."

"Why are we doing China's dirty work?" Manning said. "Surely we're better than that."

The plight of the Uighurs has become an issue on Capitol Hill. This week, Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., along with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., held a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Oversight Subcommittee on the persecution of the Uighurs by the Chinese government. According to a staffer in Delahunt's office, more hearings are on the way, including on the question of why the Chinese government was allowed to visit the Uighurs at Guantanamo at a time when nobody but the Red Cross had ever been allowed in.

See more stories tagged with: china, new york times, jim webb, guantanamo, albania, huzaifa parhat, uighurs, bermuda, abdul nasser, abdul semet, salahidin abdulahat, abdullah abdulquadirakhun, jalal jalaladin

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