[Ppnews] Two 50-Year Olds Released From Guantánamo
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http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington10082008.html
Two 50-Year Olds Released From Guantánamo
Seized in Pakistan
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
As the US courts put pressure on the government
to justify the long detention of prisoners at
Guantánamo without charge or trial (following the
Supreme Court's
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington06132008.html>ruling,
in June, that they have constitutional habeas
corpus rights, and that the government must
justify their imprisonment), two of Guantánamo's
oldest prisoners have been quietly repatriated:
51-year old Sudanese prisoner Mustafa Ibrahim
al-Hassan, and Mammar Ameur, a 50-year old refugee from Algeria.
Al-Hassan, a 51-year old father of four -- two
boys and two girls -- was immediately reunited
with his family after he arrived home. He was
held at Guantánamo for six years and two months,
even though there was no basis whatsoever for his
imprisonment. Like others at Guantánamo, he had
traveled to Pakistan in 2002, to study his
religion and to seek out business opportunities,
but was seized at a checkpoint by opportunistic
Pakistani soldiers who were aware that the US
authorities were offering bounty rewards for
"al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects," and that foreign visitors were easy prey.
Despite the fact that he had nothing whatsoever
to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and was one
of many innocent men seized in Pakistan without
ever having set foot in Afghanistan, he reported
that he was treated brutally in Pakistan custody.
"When the investigators were interrogating me",
he said, "when I told them I went there to trade
and I went there to study, they hit me, they
tortured me. They were torturing us with
electricity and they made us walk on sharp
objects. They hit us a lot, and because of the pain we just said anything."
Al-Hassan also suffered horribly in Guantánamo,
and was beset by medical problems. For years he
complained about stomach pains, but received no
treatment. Then, in 2007, medical tests revealed
the cause of the pain -- a stomach ulcer that
required immediate surgery. This was a source of
great concern for Mustafa, as he had already had
his spleen removed while he was a free man.
Mustafa also suffered from liver pain in
Guantánamo, and although his stomach surgery was
successful, a blood test showed that he was also
suffering from liver disease. In spite of this
disturbing discovery, the authorities would not
tell him how advanced his illness was.
Although al-Hassan's health continued to
deteriorate, he remained in Guantánamo, cruelly
overlooked, even as his compatriots were freed.
Last December, he was left behind after
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2007/12/14/the-shocking-stories-of-the-sudanese-humanitarian-aid-workers-just-released-from-guantanamo/>Adel
Hamad and Salim Adem, two other innocent Sudanese
prisoners seized in Pakistan, were released.
Earlier this year, he was told that he would soon
be released, but in May, when al-Jazeera
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/04/13/sami-al-haj-the-banned-torture-pictures-of-a-journalist-in-guantanamo/>Sami
al-Haj and two other men --
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington05072008.html>Amir
Yacoub al-Amir and Walid Ali -- were also
released, he was, inexplicably, left behind yet again.
These disappointments, added to his grave illness
and the pain of separation from his family,
brought Mustafa al-Hassan to the point of
despair. Zachary Katznelson, one of his lawyers
at the legal action charity
<http://www.reprieve.org.uk/>Reprieve, recently
explained, "Mustafa is a family man, but it is
almost impossible to be a father from Guantánamo
Bay. Mustafa is not allowed any phone calls. Mail
takes months and months to arrive. When it does
arrive, it is usually heavily censored, even if
it contains only family news. Still, he thinks
about his children all the time. He wants to
protect his children as much as possible from the
reality of having their father locked up so far away."
"My children should not have to bear these
troubles," he told Katznelson during a visit at
Guantánamo. "They should not feel sadness or
depression, but should be allowed to be children.
But their father has been taken away."
As Katznelson left, he said, "I am innocent. I
didn't do a thing to hurt anyone. All I want is to be home with my children."
The other released prisoner, Mammar Ameur, had
been living in Pakistan since 1990, and had been
a registered UN refugee since 1996. Ameur was
captured at the same time and in the same
building as Adel Hamad, the Sudanese hospital
administrator released last December. He and his
wife and their four children lived in an
apartment downstairs, and Hamad and his family lived upstairs.
In his tribunal at Guantánamo, Ameur specifically
refuted an allegation that his house was "a
suspected al-Qaeda house." He pointed out that it
was a small, two-roomed apartment near an airport
used by the military, in an area that was "full
of police stations," and indicated, with some
justification, that this was not an ideal
location for al-Qaeda to operate in with any degree of safety.
The allegations against Ameur were as weak as
those against Hamad, who was forced to refute
groundless allegations that the Saudi charity who
owned the hospital he worked for, the World
Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), was a front for
terrorism. Ameur was accused of being a member of
the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), but he
pointed out that he left Algeria before it was
founded, serving as a mujahideen fighter against
the Communist regime in Afghanistan from 1990-92,
and stressed, "I don't believe in this ideology
because it's against my religion. These people
are criminals, like criminals everywhere."
Unable to come up with any other allegations, the
US authorities attempted to implicate him in the
purported terrorist activities of the
International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO),
another huge Saudi charity that mounts enormous
humanitarian aid efforts, on the spurious basis
that he knew someone who worked for the
organization, and with the World Assembly of
Muslim Youth, because of his neighbor. Cutting to
the heart of this entire folly, Ameur described
what he was told by one of the Pakistanis who
arrested him: "I was told by Pakistan
intelligence when they captured us that we were
innocent ... but we have to do something for the
Americans. We will have to give you as a gift to
protect Pakistan." He added, however, "Americans
themselves have detained me here for nothing; I
thought it was a Pakistani mistake, but it was
the Americans. They have fabricated allegations as reasons to keep me here."
It is to be hoped that the Algerian authorities
pay attention to Ameur's story, and do not
subject him to a show trial on his return. The
pity, of course, is that the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees failed to help him, and
that he must now endure the dangerous vagaries of
the Algerian courts, who may decide to make some
kind of pointless example of him.
An even greater pity, of course, is that both he
and Mustafa Ibrahim al-Hassan were ever sent to
Guantánamo in the first place. Like at least 120
other prisoners seized in Pakistan, their long
imprisonment never had anything to do with
al-Qaeda or the war in Afghanistan, and was,
instead, the direct result of opportunism on the
part of the Pakistani authorities and gullibility
on the part of the US military and intelligence
agencies, who somehow failed to understand that,
if you offer substantial bounty payments for
"al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects," you end up with
nothing more than innocent men -- in this case a
UN refugee and an economic migrant -- packaged up
as Osama bin Laden's henchmen.
Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published
by Pluto Press). Visit his website at:
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk
He can be reached at:
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk
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