MANAMA, 22 September 2005 — A lawyer for one of the six Bahraini detainees in the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, revealed yesterday the causes for the hunger strike that the detainees began in mid-June.
In an account in Bahrain about his recent visit to the detention center, lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan said his client, Jumah Al-Dossari, informed him that the detainees in the Alpha block of Camp 5 agreed to launch a hunger strike to protest against their conditions.
Colangelo-Bryan is from the law firm Dorsey & Whitney that is representing the six Bahrainis. His visit to Guantanamo took place on July 29-31.
According to Colangelo-Bryan, Al-Dossari said that the message the detainees wished to send to the camp authorities was that they want to die unless they solve their problems.
The detainees were protesting their imprisonment without having fair hearings, interference with their religious practices and non-availability of medical care when needed. They said they were served food which was often rotten and tap water which was yellow and brackish.
The detainees complained that in Camp 5 the call to prayer was interrupted by prison officers who talked loudly during the call and even mimicked it.
The hunger strike was also to protest the fact that the military classifies detainees by level based upon putative cooperation with interrogators and uses these classifications to grant a few additional privileges to some detainees.
Al-Dossari said that once the hunger strike began, many detainees required medical care. The small medical room in Camp 5 was overwhelmed and beds were placed in interrogation rooms to accommodate detainees who had passed out.
Colangelo-Bryan said one of their Bahraini clients was hospitalized after participating in the hunger strike and was still in hospital on the day of their visit. On the second day of the visit, the client, who was not identified, was brought to the visitors’ cell, but he was so weak that could do little more than lying on a sleeping pad.
Commenting on the lawyer’s account, Nabeel Rajab, the vice president of the now dissolved Bahrain Center for Human Rights, said it was believed that the six demands put forward by the detainees fuelled the hunger strike by some 200 Guantanamo detainees that began several weeks ago.
“We have no way of confirming the demands of the detainees that are presently on hunger strike, but it is likely that they restarted the strike because the camp authorities failed to improve the conditions since then,” Rajab said.
US lawyers representing the Arab detainees had called repeatedly in recent months on the Arab governments to exert more pressure on the Washington to get their nationals returned home.
