 |
Sami Al Haj was freed from Guantanamo Bay on 1 May 2008, and repatriated to Sudan, where he was reunited with his wife and seven year old son Mohammed, whom he had not seen since he was a baby.
On his release, Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s Director, who has represented Sami since 2005, said: |
“This is wonderful news, and long overdue. The US administration has never had any reason for holding Sami, and has, instead, spent six years shamelessly attempting to turn him against his employers at Al Jazeera.”
Sami’s story
Whilst working as a cameraman for Al Jazeera, Sami Al Haj was sent on assignment by the station to cover the war in Afghanistan following the US-led invasion in October 2001. The following month, after the fall of Kabul, Sami left Afghanistan for Pakistan with the rest of his crew.
In early December the crew were given visas to return to Afghanistan. When Sami tried to re-enter Afghanistan with his colleagues, he was arrested by the Pakistani authorities – apparently at the request of the US military. He was imprisoned, handed over to the US authorities in January 2002, taken to Bagram, then Kandahar, and finally to Guantánamo in June 2002.
For months, the US did not even discuss any allegations against Sami, instead demanding that he should become a witness against Al Jazeera and accuse the television station of links to terrorism. Sami refused to do so, insisting that there are no such connections between Al Jazeera and Al Qaeda.
As a trained journalist “inside the wire”, Sami provided uniquely detailed insights into the regime at Guantánamo and the prisoners held there, during conversations with his lawyers which were later unclassified by the US military. These included reports on the hunger strikes at the prison, and an investigation of the number of juveniles who have been imprisoned.
For the last 16 months of his imprisonment, Sami undertook a hunger strike to protest against his imprisonment – and that of his fellow prisoners – for so many years without charge or trial. Although the ethics of the medical profession stipulate that a mentally competent hunger striker cannot be force-fed, the US authorities disagreed. Twice a day, Sami was strapped into a restraint chair, secured with 16 separate straps, and force-fed against his will via a tube inserted into his stomach through his nose. This is an enormously painful process, made even more intolerable by the fact that the tube is removed after each feeding, but it was justified by Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the commander of the US Southern Command, who announced that his soldiers were doing it to make the hunger strikes less “convenient.”
Since his release, Sami has been appointed the news producer for liberties and human rights affairs at Al Jazeera, and has pledged to do all he can to help close the prison.
|
Click here
Click here.
Click here.
Click here.
Click here.
