Training with al-Jazeera ‘makes you a terrorist’
Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith has accused the US military of detaining Sudanese journalist Sami al-Hajj in Guantanamo because he had trained with the al-Jazeera agency.
“The precise words were: ‘the detainee admitted that he had trained in the use of the camera with al-Jazeera,’ and that is meant to be understood as some sort of terrorism,” he said in an interview with Reporters Without Borders.
There was no legal basis to the detention of Sami al-Hajj who was released in May, he charged. “They would come up with new allegations and we would prove that the allegations were rubbish.”
Sami al-Hajj arrived at hospital in Khartoum, Sudan after his release following a 20-hour flight in which he was not allowed to use the toilet and was shackled and hooded.
Clive Stafford-Smith said that as well as being tortured during his captivity, Sami al-Hajj had been told by US doctors that he had cancer, but that he could not see a specialist. Sudanese doctors said he tested negative for cancer.
The US authorities deny the charge of torture, but the lawyer said Sami al-Hajj spent a total of 478 days on a hunger strike and that guards pulled the tube inserted through the nose of hunger strikers explicitly to try to press prisoners to come off the hunger strike.
He said: “Guantanamo Bay is going to close. But the real issue is that the US has about 27,000 prisoners in other secret jails where prisoners are in worse conditions than those in Guantanamo.”