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Guantánamo's Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home - by Andy Worthington

Guantánamo's Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home - by Andy Worthington: "by Andy Worthington

Ahmed Zuhair, a 35-year old Saudi prisoner at Guantánamo – and a father of ten – has been on a hunger strike since June 2005, at the start of a fraught summer at the prison in which up to 200 prisoners (over a third of Guantánamo's total population at the time) embarked on a mass hunger strike in protest at their ongoing – and seemingly endless – imprisonment without charge or trial, and also as a protest against the day-to-day conditions in the prison, where casual brutality was still widespread, and a severe regime of punishment was still in place.

This regime had been instigated by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the prison's commander from November 2002, whose approach to dehumanizing the prisoners, and making every shred of comfort in their lives dependent on their perceived cooperation with the interrogators, impressed Donald Rumsfeld to such an extent that, in the fall of 2003, he sent him to Iraq to 'Gitmo-ize' the prison system there, leading directly to the implementation of the sadistic regime that was exposed when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004. "

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