The foghorns of the right expended a considerable amount of time and energy bellowing about the four innocent Uighurs recently released from the Guantanamo gulag 
and relocated to Bermuda. But somehow they have emitted not a sound about Mohammed el-Gharani, another innocent man lately freed from Guantanamo.
Born in Saudi Arabia of Chadian parents, Gharani spent seven of his 21 years at Guantanamo; he was interned there when only 14. Released from Guantanamo in early June, Gharani is currently marooned in Chad, where he was dumped by the US government. He does not speak the language, had never before set foot in Chad, has been told by government officials that they’re not sure they consider him Chadian, and has not been able to obtain a Chadian ID card. Yet he describes himself as “happy.”
“Walking around with no guards, with no shackles, it’s beautiful,” he says.
“If you’ve been in shackles for seven years every day, you will go to Chad. You will go anywhere.”
One of the numberless victims of George II’s War On Terra, Gharani was arrested in a Pakistani mosque in October of 2001. He was turned over to US forces in Afghanistan, held for a time at the infamous Bagram facility, and finally declared an enemy combatant and imprisoned in Guantanamo. There he might have remained for the rest of his life, had not the United States Supreme Court had the temerity to declare that even the inhabitants of George II’s gulag were entitled to legal process.
According to his attorneys, while at Guantanamo Gharani, though but a child, was subjected to various forms of torture, which included bombardments of deafening music and flashing strobe lights, and forced shackling to the ground in a hunched position for hours at a time.
The UK journalist Andy Worthington further claims that:
El-Gharani was treated with appalling brutality. After being tortured in Pakistani custody, he was sold to U.S. forces, who flew him to a prison at Kandahar airport, where, he said, one particular soldier “would hold my penis, with scissors, and say he’d cut it off.” His treatment did not improve in Guantánamo. Subjected relentlessly to racist abuse, because of the color of his skin, he was hung from his wrists on numerous occasions, and was also subjected to a regime of “enhanced” techniques to prepare him for interrogation—including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions—that clearly constitute torture. As a result of this and other abuse, including regular beatings by the guard force responsible for quelling even the most minor infractions of the rules, El-Gharani has become deeply depressed, and has tried to commit suicide on several occasions.
BushCo maintained that Gharani had joined Al Qaeda in 1998, when he was 11. It further hallucinated that he had occupied an al-Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, fought in the battle of Tora Bora, served as a courier for senior al-Qaeda operatives, and even become a member of a London-based Al Qaeda “terror cell.”
In January, US District Court Judge Richard Leon dismissed this balderdash, ruling that there was no credible evidence that Gharani was an “enemy combatant,” and ordering him freed. Pronounced Judge Leon:
“A mosaic of tiles this murky reveals nothing about this petitioner with sufficient clarity, either individually or collectively, that can be relied upon by this court.”
Some five months later, the government finally got around to actually releasing him. Gharani was flown to Chad, where he has relatives (his parents, however, remain in Saudi Arabia). As soon as the guy got off the plane, he was detained by Chadian security forces.
He told the BBC’s Network Africa programme that he had initially been welcomed at the airport in Chad, but had then been detained.
“I went to the police station and they kept me there for eight days—I didn’t know why,” he said.
He said he had been trying to get an ID card since he arrived, but so far had had no luck.
“I was asking every day ‘Why am I here?’ and they were telling me: ‘You’re going to see your family but we have to do paperwork.’”
“One guy working for the government said: ‘We don’t know whether you’re Chadian or not,’” he said.
“I said: ‘Well you guys brought me here, took me from the Americans.’
“He had no answer.”
While at Guantanamo, Gharani (pictured above at the gulag; previous picture, above, also of a Guantanamoed Gharani) wrote a poem about his sale to the US Army for bounty, his kidnapping, and his transfer first to Kandahar and then to Guantanamo. Entitled “First Poem Of My Life,” it was, to my knowledge, first printed publicly in a comment to Daily Kos by Rippen Kitten in April of 2007, who obtained it from a letter. It was published again in November of 2008 by Alexa at Never in Our Names.
Be careful, my brother, when in Pakistan:
They understand money—the price of a man
I came here to study, I learned just deceit:
The Mosque was a war zone, surrounded. Police
Were shouting for silence: “Hands up! Come in peace!”
They took us by truckloads, thrown, bound hand and feet:
Then marched us eight hours, then eight hours more—
We cried for relief but we suffered, footsore.
They kicked us, they beat us, they told us—their guests
They’d sell us for money, and Yankees paid best.
We’re slaves of our century, the slave ship a place
To humiliation, abuse, and disdain.
Respect was abandoned, the Holy Koran
Downtrodden there with us. Their madness, a plan
To torture us, beat us, encouraged by drink—
Send priests with their cross to save us, they think.
They take us to Cuba, pursue without qualm
Crusades of injustice, their war on Islam.
“The Man Without A Country” is a jingoist fable from Nathan Hale that many of us were once subjected to in school. A member of Aaron Burr’s purported treason cabal explodes during his trial: “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” He receives his wish when he is sentenced by the judge to perpetual exile aboard US Navy warships, never to again set foot on US soil, no word of the US ever to be uttered in his presence.
As the years pass, he eventually becomes repentant, then pathetic, and finally pathological. He ultimately bombards all and sundry with uber-patriotic explosions—”there is the Country Herself, your Country, and you belong to her as you belong to your own mother. Stand by her, boy, as you would stand by your mother!”—and obsessively transforms his cabin into a veritable shrine to the US. Finally, he expires happily, after a kindly officer has told him all that happened since his sentence, in his now-beloved country.
Today, thanks to BushCo and the War on Terra, Gharani is only one of many, many men transformed into a very different sort of man without a country. Somehow I doubt that those who so transformed them will die as repentant as did Hale’s belated hero.
Nice!