The rest of the story

May 30, 2007

Civil rights attorney fears her client will die in prison

[This series follows up previously published stories in the Express]

In October, Northern Express wrote about Candace Gorman, a civil rights attorney and part-time Interlochen resident, who is representing a Guantanamo prisoner.
The article reported that Gorman was just leaving for Switzerland to ask the government to take Abdul Al-Ghizzawi, an Afghan man who is so ill that he doesn’t expect to live to see his six-year-old daughter (she was an infant when he was captured).
Gorman chose Switzerland because a “wonderful doctor there is willing to treat him,” but officials refused to accept him into the country. “It’s not that they didn’t want him, they feel sincere compassion for him. But the European community has decided it doesn’t want to fix the mess that the U.S. has created until our president comes forward, admits he screwed up, and formally asks for their help.”
Al-Ghizzawi, a shop-keeper from Afghanistan, was found innocent at his first Combat Status Review Tribunal, a military hearing in 2004 that processed 700 prisoners within a four-month time frame. Twenty-nine others were also found innocent. All 30 were retried about five weeks later and determined to be enemy combatants.
Gorman is trying to appeal the ruling in federal appellate court, saying the military brought no new evidence to the second hearing, but inexplicably came to an entirely different conclusion—just as it did with all 29 men. A hearing has not been scheduled.
Gorman said 85 percent of the Guantanamo prisoners—based on the government’s own records—were captured by mostly Afghan and Pakistani bounty hunters who were promised money “beyond their wildest dreams,” according to American leaflets dropped across Afghanistan.
Al-Ghizzawi was one of them. An Arab shopkeeper with a wife and new baby, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“My ultimate aim is to release Al-Ghizzawi and reunite him with his family. However, my immediate goal is to keep him alive. The medical staff at Guantánamo have diagnosed Al-Ghizzawi with tuberculosis and hepatitis B, but failed to inform or treat him for either condition.”
Gorman posts her reports regularly on a blog. Here are some of them:

December 2006
Al-Ghizzawi says that his health has worsened since his being moved to Camp 6 and that he has asked to see a doctor since early December but that hasn’t happened yet... at least it had not happened as of February 14th (the last time I saw him). He is now vomiting two or three times a day, his whole body aches in pain... There are many more symptoms but you probably don’t want to hear all of them.

January 2007
Mr. Al-Ghizzawi and the other men … now they have walls, a roof and barred windows. They have air conditioning and concrete floors. Everyday the air conditioning is blasting cold air on poor frail Mr. Al-Ghizzawi. He has no blanket (blankets are not allowed). Instead he has a plastic “thing” to cover himself with. This plastic “thing” is cold when it is cold and hot when it is hot. It is never washed and it stinks.
But the floors are washed. Everyday gallons of a Pine Sol-like substance are thrown on the floors and the men are forced to breathe in the fumes for hours until someone gets around to hosing the solvent off the door. Mr. Al-Ghizzawi described how his eyes and throat burn and how he coughs and gags, every day. Unfortunately, some of the guards laugh at the discomfort that this causes the men. Some even leave buckets with the solvent under the open windows so that Mr. Al-Ghizzawi and the other men are forced to continue breathing in the fumes all day and/or night. These men sit in their tiny cell: day after
day, week after week, year after year. They have nothing to occupy their time.

April 2007
In this most recent letter Mr. Al-Ghizzawi had good news for me, in a Guantánamo sort of way. Mr. Al-Ghizzawi told me that he was finally able to see a doctor. You see, Mr.
Al-Ghizzawi has been trying to see a doctor for more than seven months, ever since I informed him of the government’s admission that he has hepatitis B (and the fact that the government has known about his condition since shortly after he arrived at the base, but never bothered to tell him or treat him).
In his letter Mr.
Al-Ghizzawi expressed initial relief, … but then went on to describe his eventual disgust with the actual visit. It seems that when Mr. Al-Ghizzawi was taken in for his appointment the doctor only wanted to look at his leg! … Anyway, Mr. Al-Ghizzawi tried to tell the doctor that although he is having trouble with one of his legs.... his bigger problem is his liver: a problem that will not be solved until they start treating
his hepatitis B.
The doctor continued examining Mr. Al-Ghizzawi’s leg while Mr. Al-Ghizzawi attempted to give details about the symptoms that are killing him: the constant and severe pain in the area of his liver that goes through his body to his back, the jaundice, the vomiting, and the other symptoms. But this quack was only interested in looking at Mr. Al-Ghizzawi’s leg. When the examination was over, the doctor told Mr. Al-Ghizzawi that he was going to give him some medicine for his leg.
Mr. Al-Ghizzawi struggled to explain to the doctor that he did not need medicine for his leg, that what he needed was to be treated for the hepatitis that was threatening his life. But the doctor was not interested in his hepatitis except to tell Mr. Al-Ghizzawi not to worry, “this medicine will work for both... It works for everything.” So what was this miracle drug that the doctor prescribed for Mr. Al-Ghizzawi? A pain pill.
Mr. Al-Ghizzawi … ended his letter to me with this plea:

“Finally, I would like to ask from you the following: to request from the American Government to ship my body to Afghanistan, to my wife, so that I will be near her and my daughter and be buried there. If that was not possible, ask them to ship my body to my family in Libya. The important thing is that I won’t be buried under any circumstance in Cuba.”

I hope I do not have to make this request on Mr. Al-Ghizzawi’s behalf, not only because this innocent man should not die alone in that hell hole, but also because every request I have made on behalf of this man, either before the courts or directly to the military, has been met with scorn and ridicule – he same kind of scorn and ridicule that allowed this doctor to tell Mr. Al-Ghizzawi that there is one pill that treats everything... from leg ailments to hepatitis.

To read all of Ms. Gorman’s blogs, just google Al-Ghizzawi.