From your imprisoned brothers in the Guantanamo of Britain (Belmarsh Prison)
To the Muslims all over the World:
This is the second letter in which we describe to you the oppression we experience at the hands of the British, as a result of what you know of the policies of this country and its engagement in all forms of oppression as done by other countries like Israel and US against the Muslims, but (this oppression is done) in a manner that fools the weak and simple minded.
We had mentioned to you before that the situation here in Belmarsh is akin, without any difference except in its portrayal from that which occurs to your Muslim brothers in Guantanamo, and their newspapers, and some of the more truthful journalists testify to this; but the government tries to conceal all this from the media and strives to do as it wishes in a secretive manner.
When the government began to find out that the knowledge of its oppression had begun to leak into the public domain it brought a TV crew which began to take photos of Belmarsh prison which had become a source of shame for it, like Guantanamo became a shame on US, in an attempt to enhance its image. It further took photos of some of the short term benefits, such as the provision of good food and interviewed some of the prisoners who were benefiting from some of these benefits, and likewise photographed some of activities that occur within the prison, making the prison out to be a paradise that someone outside it would desire.
Frankly, your brothers here didn’t know of this deception that was happening in this land, nay, they thought it was restricted to our home lands, but it became clear that all the lies that are told in our lands, were taken and derived from the policies of this country and its government.
The situation of your brothers has become unacceptably bad, for some of your brothers almost lost their minds, and others have begun to suffer from psychological diseases. This is not as a result of nothing; rather this was a pre-planned evil and malevolent policy to cause your brothers to reach these levels.
The sexual humiliation of Muslims in the War on Terror
وَلَا تَقْرَبُوا الزِّنَىٰ ۖإِنَّهُ كَانَ فَاحِشَةً وَسَاءَ سَبِيلًا And do not approach unlawful sexual intercourse. Indeed, it is ever an immorality and is evil as a way. (17:32)
Sex in Islam is a matter that carries with it a great deal of modesty and shame – the above verse indicates the clear and unequivocal ban on extramarital relations.
It is considered a private matter between a husband and his wife, whether it is in a monogamous or polygynous relationship. Indeed, covering oneself to maintain a minimum level of dignity even when alone is recommended according to the shari’ah (Islamic law).
As part of the psyche of Muslim communities around the world, they respond to sexuality and references to sexuality based on the societies they have grown up in and the extent of conservatism within their communities. For Muslims living in the Western world, overexposure to images of sex and nakedness in order to sell objects, is commonplace, thus having a desensitising impact on their psyche, however much they may dislike what they see. For those living in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, such images are far less commonplace, in fact non-existent, resulting in a greater degree of sensitivity.
On 4 April 2012, the Zelikow torture memo (previously thought to be destroyed) was released, which effectively confirmed that years after criticism of the way in which torture has been systematically used, that enforced nudity is still to be considered an acceptable practice in interrogations,
“The control conditions, such as nudity, sleep deprivation, and liquid diet, may also be sustainable, depending on the circumstances and details of how these techniques are used.”
The Tipton Three (Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed) were amongst the first to detail the forms of sexual humiliation that detainees in Guantanamo were suffering. Shafiq Rasul described a cavity search that was conducted on him soon after his arrival in Guantanamo as being, “both painful and humiliating.” However, the shame that was associated with such acts resulted in the slow acceptance that this was taking place,
“We didn’t hear anybody talking about being sexually humiliated or subjected to sexual provocation before General Miller came. After that we did.
Although sexual provocation, molestation did not happen to us, we are sure that it happened to others. It did not come about at first that people came back and told about it. They didn’t.
What happened was that one detainee came back from interrogation crying and confiding in another what had happened. That detainee in turn thought that it was so shocking he told others and then other detainees revealed that it had happened to them but they had been too ashamed to admit it.”
In their statement, the men highlighted the case of one of the Algerians, one of whom was treated to a particularly horrific incident,
“We were told by one Algerian (not one of the Bosnian Algerians) that he had been taken to interrogation and been forced to stand naked. He also told us he had been forced to watch a video supposedly showing two detainees dressed in orange, one sodomising the other and was told that it would happen to him if he didn’t cooperate.” Read the rest of this entry »
Now we were in Oklahoma City Detention Center and the bus just arrived and one of the guards pointed his finger at the four of us and said: ‘You, you, you, and you get up now,’ and asked the rest of the inmates to remain seated.
We were taken first into the building and they put us in a room (15 ft x15 ft) by ourselves. The room had big windows with bars so you can see what is happening outside the room. We saw as the rest of the inmates were taken to other rooms. Some of the inmates were placed in individual cages just like monkeys. I could see about six or seven cages adjacent to each other across the hall from our room. We thought that they will come to take us soon but it took them over three hours to come back.
The room had benches all around it and also had a toilet and a sink that is attached to it. The benches were one foot wide which is not enough to sleep [on]. The walls were completely covered with aluminium sheets panels so no one can write or scratch them. We talked for a while and then we prayed Thuhor and Asr prayer combined. I started singing all the songs I remembered and everyone including El-Mezain joined in dancing the Palestinian Dabkha. Read the rest of this entry »
Our trip to USP Marion started way before Thursday April 24, 2010, the day we were moved from Seagoville to USP Marion in Illinois. The trip went from Seagoville to Texarkana, Texas to Oklahoma City to Philadelphia to Ohio to St. Louis, Missouri and finally ended when we were bussed (three hours trip) from St. Louis to USP Marion in Marion, Illinois. It was six days of pain, extreme discomfort, racist treatment by guards, singled out to be screamed at, and showed disrespect and other forms of racist/behavior at different levels.
There was no reason for us to be moved from Seagoville. It was the prosecutor who initiated the move. He may have thought it was his top national security mission to protect the country by separating us from our families, by keeping us hundreds and hundreds of miles away. He was on a mission to prevent me from hugging and kissing my ten year old daughter for that was a major concern he must address.
It may be that he just could not stand the thought of me seeing, meeting and being with my own family. He was determined to accomplish the mission. Yes, his mission was to destroy my family relationships and ties because that would make our country safer. He was so patriotic, and it was all about protecting our country. So in order to accomplish this cause, in early March, he filed a motion to have us moved from Seagoville, Texas to a prison in Marion, Illinois.
He filed the first motion and followed it with a series of motions and then followed that by involving the Bureau of Prison (BOP) when the Warden filed a declaration with the judge. All this effort was to accomplish one thing, to move us from one jail to another jail. That’s it!!! We were in jail but not in the jail of his choice. He wanted us in a specific jail that is exclusive for Muslims and mainly Muslims. A jail where Muslims were under total control and being discriminated against. Where they receive special treatment. Now that is not racism, is it? Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, the CMU inmates were notified by the Unit Manager that sending simple greeting to any family
members or friends through other family members or third party will be considered a violation of the CMU rules
and a disciplinary action will be taken against the inmate.
Now, we [are] prohibited from sending greeting to our family members. Its not enough that we are deprived of contact visits with our family and friends and we [are] deprived of video-conference visits with our families who live overseas and lack all means and funds to visit with us and its not enough that written letters from family and friends may take weeks or months before it released to us, the new restriction also deprive us of even sending a simple greeting to our brothers, sisters and children!!. Most of us, receive no visits at all. For more than “20″ years, I received no visit from my dad, my sisters and other family members who live in Jerusalem and lack all means to travel to the United States and all my requests for a visit via the available video-conference systems were denied. A 15 minute telephone call cost approx. $15 and now [I] can’t even send greeting to another family member during the limited the “15″ minutes call!!.
Even the so-called out-law governments allows inmates contact visits with their families, allows inmates to freely send greeting to others, allows inmates to have video-conference visits with their childerns, brothers, sisters, parents, and others, allow the Red-Cross and other human rights organizations to monitor the conditions of confinement in their prisons … etc.
I hope this e-mail finds [you] in the best health and spirits and thank you once again for working hard to protect the rights of prisoners.
Sincerely,
Ahmad M. Ajaj
#40637-053
USP-Marion
P.O.Box 1000
Marion, IL 62959
{And what is wrong with you that you fight not in the cause of Allah and the oppressed among men, women, and children who say, “Our Lord, take us out of this city of oppressive people and appoint for us from Yourself a protector and appoint for us from Yourself a helper?”}
Throughout the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, around 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli authorities, more than 10,000 of whom are women. Many of those female detainees were subjected to several forms of abuse, sexual in particular, but very few were willing to talk. On the eve of International Women’s Day, however, some decided to break their silence.
S.H., who refused to disclose her full name, was arrested for a few days to put pressure on her husband, also detained at the time, and extract confessions from him.
“They stripped me and the officer who was interrogating me sat beside me and tried to molest me but I resisted,” she told al-Arabiya.
Hanaa Shalabi, the 30-year-old prisoner who has been on a hunger strike for 21 days in protest of the humiliation to which she was subjected in detention, said that an officer in civil clothes claimed he was a nurse at the prison and asked her to take off her clothes so he could search her.
“When I refused, he called other officers who tied me up and started beating me,” she said in a statement to the Palestinian Prisoner Society.
Shalabi’s lawyer Mahmoud Hassan said that one of the female officers wanted her to take off all her clothes in front of the other interrogators for the search.
We currently have no access to educational, vocational or rehabilitative programs available in other BOP prisons nor are there staff or inmates to provide such classes.
We are not allowed to make legal calls to attorneys except when the attorney first calls the prison and proves urgent need to speak to his client.
We are not allowed to make legal calls to human rights organizations, legal aid centers and the clerk of the court.
The CMU is completely isolated from the prison general population. We have no access to a yard and instead we only have access to cages for recreation.
We are not allowed to have contact visits with our families and communications with our families are very limited.
We are not allowed to have video-conference visits with our beloved ones despite the fact that such visits are allowed even in Bagram Prison in Afghanistan and will be allowed in GTMO according to news articles. Read the rest of this entry »
They locked me in this room, Alone, by myself, just me – With no one to talk to except for the walls, or the face in the mirror I see. So I sit, listen, and watch the television in my head Not a notion to move nor a second spared I record everything that is said – Absence of Kindness, Distinct Memories of Pain Caused by the things that they took away So I’m holding my breath,until they let me out But I’m afraid of what might happen the next time I breathe.
I wrote that poem when I was 17. These days I am living it; all over again. Then it was a proverbial prison. I was a conscious youth inside one of the most dangerous institutions of America: the public high school. Today, 16 years later, I am in another – the U.S.prison system where I am but one of a growing number of Muslim Americans who dared to speak out. Today I am a pretrial federal inmate housed in solitary confinement and in conditions that best resemble those of Guantanamo Bay.
Trust me I am not alone. In 1994, my junior year of high school, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the prison population had reached one million. By 2009, that number had more than doubled to 2.3 million with 5 million more on probation or parole. U.S. citizens now represent only 5% of the global population but account for 25% of the world’s prisoners. Additionally,1 in15 Americans is in “extreme poverty” with 48% of Americans labeled “in poverty” or “working poor”, but a recent Gallup poll documented that the percentage of Americans that realize the levels of poverty are so high, has dramatically decreased. These two seemingly distinct sets of statistics suggest something more sinister is going on.
The civil rights era included prison protests like the Attica riots of 1971 and paved a way for productive reform, but today talk of human rights tends to cover a manipulative compromise with the power elite and diverts attention away from structural cause. Generally prisoners today have enhanced rights and services but like the starving people fed by NGO’s in Africa or refugee camps in Afghanistan, such rights and philanthropy are counterproductive where they allow society to ignore the root causes of such appalling levels of crime, punishment, hunger or war. These contradictions become apparent with regard to civil liberties in a time of confrontation, when the citizen is reduced to an object of propaganda about domestic enemies in order to maintain public support for wars abroad.
The authors of the American constitution unanimously resented any sacrifice of civil liberties in the name of national security, but the reaction to 9/11, the immediate passage of the Patriot Act and a new approach to law enforcement the Bush Administration called a “preventative paradigm” ushered in an order of sustained national liberty sacrifice. These changes disproportionately affected American Muslims, however while “terrorists” abroad were “disappeared”, water boarded and held without charges at Guantanamo Bay, the courts approved warrantless wiretapping, ethnic profiling, blacksite rendition and preventative detention targeting Muslims on America’s shores. Wartime propaganda alongside a wave of arrests utilizing entrapment, where undercover agents encourage fund, and coerce potential terrorist attacks, have helped to sustain support. Recent polling documents that two-thirds of Americans support sacrificing some privacy and freedoms in the fight against terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »
We the undersigned Nouzha Amrani and Fatiha Hassani (Um Adam El-Mejjati), the lawful wives of Moulay Umar Amrani Hadi who is sentenced to 10 years imprisonment unjustly. He is constantly being transferred to and from Toulal 2 prison and Sale’ 2 prison. We appeal to the American government to transfer its prisoner from its previously mentioned prisons to its detention centre in Guantanamo, Cuba.
This is for the following reasons:
Your prisoner suffers from various chronic illnesses, he is 47 years old, yet he is always subjected to torture. Bearing in mind he was sentenced to prison only not prison and torture.
Types of torture:
Psychological torture:
Subjecting him to constant psychological pressure by, Provocation, humiliation, Insults and threats. He is held in a wing with the general prison population where cigarette smoke fills the air, abusive language is the norm and there is constant noise that prevents him from sleeping. For nine months he has been held in solitary confinement, in a very small cell that lacks the conditions for human residence. He was put in a punishment cell twice within three months. He is prevented from direct visits (without barriers), and being with his wife Nouzha Amrani. They suffice with a barrier visit, even his kids, Abdulrahman, 7, and Zainab, 5. Since three weeks ago his son visited him without a barrier for 15 minutes only in an office. They had a desk in-between them and were surrounded by guards. Zainab refused to go to the visit because of what she experienced before. She would remember the barriers and small windows and the fact she couldn’t sit with her father nor kiss him. He is prevented from seeing his second wife Um Adam, since the 4th of July 2011, even if the visit is a barrier visit. This continues although she has legal permission from the general prosecutor of the King in Meknes. The prison administration and all those behind it, have sought to hinder the process of completing a legal (marriage) contract, bearing in mind we have completed all the necessary procedures on our part from the date of the 28th of February 2011. Read the rest of this entry »
The video, reportedly filmed by a BSF (Border Security Force) soldier, shows members of the BSF’s 105th Battalion stripping a man, a Bangladeshi national later identified as Habibur Rahman, tying him up and beating him, while laughing and engaging in verbal abuse. BSF personnel apparently caught Rahman when he was engaged in smuggling cattle from India into Bangladesh. Instead of handing him over to the police as required by Indian law, they illegally detained and tortured him and then left him to make his way back home. (Warning: Graphic Content)
Human Rights Watch Release:
The Indian government should prosecute members of the security forces for recent high-profile cases of torture, to send a message that such practices will no longer be tolerated, Human Rights Watch said today.
Border Security Force (BSF) soldiers, long implicated in torture and extrajudicial killings near the border with Bangladesh, were captured in a video posted on YouTube brutally beating a Bangladeshi national caught smuggling cattle in West Bengal state. And the Indian government has awarded a medal to a police superintendant alleged to have ordered the torture and sexual assault of a female schoolteacher in Chhattisgarh state, instead of investigating him.
“These horrific images of torture on video show what rights groups have long documented: that India’s Border Security Force is out of control,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Indian government is well aware of killings and torture at the border, but has never prosecuted the troops responsible. This video provides a clear test case of whether the security forces are above the law in India.”
In December 2010, Human Rights Watch, together with Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM), a Kolkatta-based nongovernmental organization that posted the video, and Dhaka-based Odhikar, published “‘Trigger Happy’: Excessive Use of Force by Indian Troops at the Bangladesh Border.” This report documented numerous cases of indiscriminate use of force, arbitrary detention, torture, and killings by the BSF, and highlighted the failure of the Indian government to conduct adequate investigations or prosecute troops responsible for abuses. It showed that the BSF routinely abuses both Bangladeshi and Indian nationals residing in the border area. After the report’s release, the Indian government ordered an end to the use of lethal force except in cases of self-defense. While the number of killings decreased, allegations of killings and torture have continued.
![Sanâbil: [ Faith | Finance | Family ] French Advocacy Association (French | English)](http://aseerun.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/sanabil.png?w=128&h=128 "Sanâbil: [ Faith | Finance | Family ] French Advocacy Association (French | English)")
![Defence of Human Rights: [ Determination | Awareness | Courage ] Pakistani Rights Group (English | Urdu)](http://aseerun.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/defenceofhumanrights.png?w=128&h=128 "Defence of Human Rights: [ Determination | Awareness | Courage ] Pakistani Rights Group (English | Urdu)")
