My weight last Tuesday was 37.2 kg. I was 77 kg when I was free in my home in Karachi, in 2002, so this means that 52 percent of me has escaped from this horrible prison. I have a plan where I will get down to 34 kg. If I reach 30 kg then that should be about when I die. I don’t want to, but I can’t see much alternative. They have locked me up for more than 18 years, and there is no end to my torture in sight.
On September 10th, 2002, I was sold to the Americans, with the false story that I was a notorious terrorist called Hassan Ghul. They took me to Kabul and tortured me for almost two years. They put me in a deep pit in an old Soviet torture chamber called the “Dark Prison”, where they used an even older Spanish torture method called strappado. This involved hanging me up by my wrists so my feet barely touched the ground. My shoulders were gradually dislocating and from time to time I passed out from the pain. Over many months, they ran through their whole menu – my volunteer American lawyers have documented sixty different torture methods, from simple beatings to mock executions. Eventually I was rendered here to Guantánamo in Cuba, where life has been no better.
I talked to the Guantánamo SMO (the “Senior Medical Officer”) recently. “Why do you continue to torture me?” I asked him. I have been on hunger strike for seven years now, and every day the make me go to the Torture Chair, where they shove a 110 centimeter tube up my nose, before forcing liquid nutrient into me. They are not trying to keep me alive because they care about me, but because they would look bad if I died. And they force feed me in a gratuitously painful way – General Branz Craddock told the New York Times they were making it “inconvenient” for detainees to go on a peaceful strike protesting mistreatment, essentially by mistreating us some more. The U.N. authorities have labelled General Craddock’s force-feeding system as torture itself.
“By letting your weight drop even further,” the SMO replied, “you are torturing us, not us torturing you! Every day, I worry that you might die.”
I am not sure whether I should laugh at this. They have ruined my life, messed up my family, and put me through torture of the most medieval kind. But now they are worried about me. I asked the SMO for the prison to spend perhaps $100 a month (less than one hundredth of one percent of the $13 million they say they spend on holding me each year) on what the doctors say I need to digest even the liquid they pump into me. Without that, I will just continue to decline, no matter how much they force into me.
“I have written the recommendation that you should get what you need,” the SMO said, “and the doctor has written a recommendation too, but what can we do? It is not in our hands.” He blames the new prison camp administration.
It is true that they are callous, and needlessly rough. The rule change constantly, and punishments are inflicted just to show you who is boss- they treat us like the “worst of the worst” even though most of the men here these days are nobodies like me, detained indefinitely without charge for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The other day I was wearing a long T-shirt that came to my knees. I called the supervisor and asked him to take a photo of me so that they would have it to use in their medical classes – the students should learn what a person looks like shortly before his death. I am nothing but skin and bones and I hobble around with a cane. I am jut 51, but I look like a 95-year old man. I caught a reflection of myself in one of the windows, and I thought I was in the film Unbroken – about the American pilots who were almost starved to death in World War Two, as prisoners of war by the Japanese. In one scene, the hero is offered food if he will just speak out against his country. He refuses. And yet my American captors also want me to see my conscience and my character, betray my religion and my morals, for a small amount of food.
It is not possible for me to do this. It may, ultimately, be that I escape entirely from Guantánamo by going home to my family in a coffin. I hope that is not the case. But they seem to think that they can break my peaceful protest after all these years by more violence. That is not going to happen, so we must just continue along the path that has been chosen until the Pakistan government brings me home to my family.