Accused 9/11 suspect held in isolation at Guantanamo Bay as ‘punishment for complaining’
Man accused of helping plot the attacks is said to be on hunger strike to protest against his treatment
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the alleged deputy plotter of the September 11 terrorist attacks, is being held in an isolation cell with only a prayer rug and Koran – no bed and no running water – as punishment for protesting conditions in his Guantanamo confinement, his lawyer said on Saturday.
Bin al-Shibh, 45, has for years claimed that somebody is causing his cell to vibrate and making noises in a campaign of sleep deprivation reminiscent of his 2002-2006 abuse in CIA custody. Prosecutors dismiss the complaint as untrue. A US military doctor at one point treated him as delusional.
“He’s in really, really bad shape,” the Yemeni captive’s capital defence lawyer Jim Harrington said, adding that he’s been on a water-only hunger strike since he was moved into a disciplinary cell on April 12 at Camp 7, the housing for former CIA black site prisoners at the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“They’ve really, really made it much worse, much more akin to what he was subjected to in the black sites,” Harrington said. “He’s clearly being re-traumatised right now.”
Bin al-Shibh allegedly aspired to become one of the suicide hijackers. But US diplomats in Germany four times denied him a US visa. So he is instead accused of helping al-Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheik Mohammed organise the attacks that killed 2,976 people in New York, at the Pentagon and on an aeroplane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field on September 11.