Written by Clive Stafford Smith (Human Rights Lawyer) It was very moving to watch the tracker that followed the United States air force C17 aircraft as it flew across the Atlantic and above the Straits of Gibraltar. I knew that seated on board was my Guantánamo client Ahmed Rabbani, going home to Karachi after 20 years of abuse in American custody. On September 10, 2002, Pakistani government officials collected a $5,000 bounty for handing Ahmed over to the US with a story that he was a notorious terrorist called Hassan Ghul. Since then, his path has been one of unfathomable suffering. Ahmed insisted from the start that he was not Ghul but a taxi driver from Karachi. Rather than run the risk it had wasted its money, the US took him to the Dark Prison in Afghanistan for 540 days of torture. Astoundingly, we later learned the US captured the real Ghul and brought him to the same prison – but then set him free while sending Ahmed to Guantánamo. Once in Cuba, Ahmed was compliant for several years but eventually lost patience. Other detainees went home, including the leadership of the Taliban, but he, a self-described “nobody”, remained. So he went on hunger strike. I once joined his strike in sympathy for a week. Ahmed should probably be in the Guinness Book of Records because he persisted for seven years. All the time he was force-fed through the nose twice a day in a gratuitously painful way (condemned by the United Nations as a form of torture). He lost more than half of his body weight. FULL ARTICLE HERE
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