During his captivity, my client Sharqawi Al Hajj has lost both parents and gone through his 30s and most of his 40s. He wonders what future he has left
Sharqawi Al Hajj is a man detained at the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I have been his lawyer for many years. This week marks 22 years since the prison was opened, and Sharqawi’s 20th year inside. He is one of 30 men still detained there, down from nearly 800 ever held. This trajectory is because Guantánamo, though not singular among prisons in its harsh treatment and arbitrary detention, was at least for a time very overt in its extremeness, and what could be seen more plainly than usual caused a reaction.
There are public records and images of an earlier period that people who are old enough remember. A news article from 2002, reporting on the first planeload of detainees arriving, sticks with me. Men chained to their seats for 8,000 miles were led off the plane because they wore goggles covered with black tape; some fell to the ground. A government report from 2008 described interrogations during those years, things like a man being found immobile on the floor of an interview room next to a pile of his own hair.
Pardiss Kebriaei is Mr Sharqawi Al Hajj’s lawyer and has represented men at Guantánamo since 2007. She is a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York
Continue reading...This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
