A Boy Who Grew Up in Guantanamo

When Mohammed was 14, he dreamed of becoming a doctor. 

To study medicine, Mohammed knew he would need to learn English, and learn how to use a computer. But he couldn't go to school to learn those things in the country where he lived. Born in Chad, but living now with his family as an immigrant in Saudi Arabia, he'd been denied access to secondary school, because he was not a Saudi citizen. He spent his days selling religious souvenirs to pilgrims traveling through his neighborhood on their way to visit Mecca. This helped support his struggling immigrant family. But it was not how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

So one day, he traveled to the Chad embassy, determined to acquire a passport that would allow him to move to Pakistan and attend classes there. He was told that a minor child would not be allowed such documentation, but, for a fee . . .

500 Saudi riyals later, fourteen-year-old Mohammed el Gharani left the embassy with a passport saying that he was 20 years old.

Mohammed spent a month in Pakistan trying to find a good school with an opening for a serious foreign student. While he was waiting for a vacancy, he made some local friends, and found a mosque where he could worship. One day, in October, while he was praying at the mosque, it was suddenly surrounded by a team of armed men. Police. Everyone inside was arrested.

After days of beatings and torture by his captors, fourteen-year-old Mohammed el Gharani was sold for $5,000 to American authorities, who were offering cash bounties for "al-Qaeda suspects." He was shipped to a U.S. detention center in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

In the makeshift Kandahar airport detention center, where Human Rights Watch reports prisoners were regularly beaten, subjected to sleep deprivation, and left naked in the cold, the teenaged boy was imprisoned in a barbed-wire pen. Mohammed says he was beaten regularly there, and adds that a U.S. soldier once grabbed his penis and threatened to cut it off with a pair of scissors.

After a time, he was transferred to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. When he entered Guantanamo, he was 15 years old.

He is now 21.

Mohammed el Gharani has spent his entire adolescence in captivity. Isolated from other children his age, he was housed, not in Guantanamo's special "children's" prison camp, Camp Iguana, but among the adult detainees. His life at the prison has been an endless cycle of intense interrogations, stress positions, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and isolation.

On January 14th, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered that Mohammed el Gharani be released immediately. According to Judge Leon, the government's main evidience against el Gharani was information provided to government interrogators, under duress, by two other Guantanamo detainees, whose credibility had been questioned by government officials in the past, and whose stories about el Gharani contradicted one another.

El Gharani has yet to be released.

Mohammed el Gharani is not the only person to have been captured as a child and held in Guantanamo for years without a trial. In May of 2008, the U.S. State Department claimed that only eight children have ever been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, but the government's own written records show that at least twelve known children have been held there, and some human rights organizations estimate that as many as 60 children may have been imprisoned at Guantanamo. We may never know the true number.

Susan J. Crawford, a Bush administration official recently appointed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to review practices at Guantanamo Bay, admitted in a recent interview with the Washington Post that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay were indeed torture, and qualify as torture under existing law.

We must therefore accept the possibility that the United States government, under the explicit direction of the Bush administration, not only detained but may well have tortured anywhere from 12 to 60 children at Guantanamo Bay.

Some of these children may have been pressed into service by older family members or soldiers and captured on the battlefield. Some of them, like, say, child detainee Omar Khadr, may even have lobbed grenades at American troops (who, in Omar's case, were shooting at him).

But when we find child soldiers forced into service killing people in Africa, we rescue them and try to rehabilitate them. Why should our reaction be any different when we discover child soldiers in Pakistan or Afghanistan? Did those children have any more of a choice? Do child soldiers ever have a choice?

Some of the children of Guantanamo, like Mohammed, may have done nothing worse than purchase fake paperwork from a corrupt government official in hopes of getting a job or an education, to escape a hardscrabble life.

And some of the children imprisoned there may have done nothing illegal at all. They may simply have been picked up by mistake in the heat of battle, or kidnapped by bounty hunters eager for a quick reward.

President-Elect Obama has said repeatedly that he will act to close the notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay as soon as possible when President. He has vowed to end torture and unlawful detention under his administration, and promised a return to the rule of constitutional and treaty law. I believe that Barack Obama will do all of these things. But will that alone be enough to redeem our international reputation, to redeem our nation's soul, after such atrocious acts were committed under our flag?

There has been a great deal of speculation in the press and among bloggers about whether President-Elect Obama's new administration will prosecute members of the Bush administration for torture and war crimes committed during Bush's "War on Terror."

So far, the Obama transition team has not made clear whether they plan to seek prosecution.

Given that the incoming Obama administration will face severe crises on multiple fronts immediately upon taking office, I worry that the Bush-era government officials who ordered and perpetrated these serious crimes will not be charged.

Obviously, it would be both impractical and politically inconvenient to stage a series of high-profile war crimes trials while simultaneously trying to bring a nation out of the worst economic meltdown in recent history, create an energy-independent green economy, solve a national health care crisis, address international terrorism, and bring peace to the Middle East. 

But I would encourage our soon-to-be President to think very, very carefully about the ramifications of letting crimes like the ones I have mentioned here go unpunished. 

If we as a nation fail to bring to justice those who stole childhood from the children at Guantanamo Bay, then we will all be responsible for their crimes.

Comments

[phhhst]

This is a very sad story that needs to be told. Many more stories from these events will hopefully surface soon as well.

I am curious how you came by your information sbout Mohammed el Gharani. Is the information of more of the prisoners' stories available to the public?

A strong supporter of Obama, I feel that he needs to tackle the issues you mention before he takes on war crimes trials.

[jaelithe]

If you click on the links in the post, you'll find several detailed sources of information on Mohammed el Gharani. I obtained most of my information from court documents written by Judge Leon, a Wikipedia entry of el Gharani, and journalist and author Andy Worthington's excellent website, here: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/.

However, to corroborate these sources, I also consulted several other articles and resources on el Gharani and the children at Guantanamo Bay. The ACLU has good information on the lives of prisoners at Guantanamo, and Human Rights Watch is also a good place to look.