Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Gli eroi di Guantanamo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1644024,00.html
A hero of Guantánamo
As the Camp Delta hunger strikers grow weaker, the US Senate is denying
them justice
Victoria Brittain
Thursday November 17, 2005
The Guardian
Fawzi al-Odah weighed just 44.5kg (7st) last week when his lawyer,
Thomas Wilner, visited him in Guantánamo. In August 2002 he weighed
63.5kg (10st). The young Kuwaiti is one of the hundred or so men in the
US prison camp who have been on sporadic hunger strikes since August.
During Wilner's previous visit in September, he tried, on Fawzi's
father's instructions, to persuade him to end his hunger strike. But
Fawzi told him: "Tell my father I'm trying to be a hero like him, and
if he was here he would do the same as I am doing." Khalid al-Odah,
Fawzi's father, was a US-trained Kuwaiti fighter pilot who fought in
the underground during the Iraqi invasion.
Article continues
Fawzi was brought to that meeting with his lawyer from the prison
hospital with a plastic tube protruding from his nose, which bled
intermittently. He has since been in Camp Delta, where the
force-feeding continues.
He appears to be completely innocent: his story has been investigated
and told in detail twice, by two respected US journalists, Roy Gutman
in Newsweek and Peter Jennings in a special TV report on Guantánamo.
Both reports were devastating to the official line on the war on
terror. Fawzi was also the man named in one of the supreme court cases
that successfully challenged the refusal of habeas corpus to the
prisoners. Is he still being held precisely because his case has deeply
hurt the Bush administration's credibility before the country's highest
lawyers, and in the mainstream media?
Fawzi was a university student in Kuwait who spent two vacations
teaching in poor areas of Pakistan, and who went on to help refugees on
the Afghan border when they fled US bombing in October 2001. Those who
sold them to the Pakistani authorities, who handed them over to the
Americans, told both US reporting teams that the soft city boys from
Kuwait were clearly nothing to do with any of the Afghan fighters.
Wilner, a quintessential establishment Washington lawyer, has
represented the 12 Kuwaitis in Guantánamo since April 2002 and has
been to the prison camp 10 times. Five of his clients were recently
released and are back in Kuwait. Fawzi remains in Cuba. Last week the
US Senate approved a plan, sponsored by Senator Lindsay Graham, that
would severely limit the chance of Fawzi, and the other prisoners, ever
being given access to the US courts. The plan defies a supreme court
decision of June 2004 - although not one prisoner has been brought to
court since, amid legal battles between the Bush administration and
lawyers such as Wilner.
Another of Wilner's clients is Abdullah al-Kandari, who was on the
Kuwaiti national volleyball team. Wilner saw him changed by the hunger
strike from a happy, outgoing, strongly pro-American young man to a
withdrawn, cadaverous, weak figure. Abdullah was one of those who
shouted out to the visiting Congressional delegation that they were not
being told the truth. He was punished.
Wilner's affidavits on these two prisoners and another, Saad al-Azmi,
who was sexually harassed by his female interrogator, reveal that cruel
and unusual punishment is still the order of the day in Guantánamo.
The Senate has been grossly misled by the administration about
conditions in the prison, and the nonexistent cases against many of
those held, or it could never have approved Senator Graham's plan,
slightly modified this week. Graham will join many others, such as
Alberto Gonzales, General Geoffrey Miller, Donald Rumsfeld and
President Bush, who will be harshly judged by history for what has
happened at Guantánamo.
Fawzi al-Odah, whether he lives through this horror or dies, will be
remembered by many people as the hero he wanted his father to know
about.
· A longer version of this article appears in today's Arabic daily
Al-Quds.

authorities,
Si vede che questi "refugees on the Afghan border when they fled US
bombing in October 2001" non hanno gradito il suo disinteressato aiuto
:)
-Stefano