Fresh air for prisoners at Guantanamo
Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan meteorologist currently designated an "enemy combatant" and imprisoned by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay, has mysteriously contracted AIDS inside the notorious compound. According to his lawyer Candace Gorman, Al-Ghizzawi had already previously contracted Tuberculosis inside the facility, and may have been initially infected with HIV from a botched blood test.
Gorman says she found out about the diagnosis from a letter her client sent her, but that military officials would neither confirm nor deny the diagnosis. Says Gorman on her blog: "The military claimed it did a complete physical when Al-Ghizzawi arrived and the ONLY condition he suffered from at that time was Hepatitis B. So I guess there is good reason why they don't want to confirm the diagnosis."
This is the second time Al-Ghizzawi has garnered attention in recent weeks. A piece in the Forward last month by Leonard Fein, claimed that there was significant evidence that Al-Ghizzawi was being tortured inside Guantanamo as well as being denied medical treatment for his TB and Hepatitis B.
Fein's piece goes on to suggest Al-Ghizzawi has no business being detained as an enemy combatant in the first place.
Al-Ghizzawi...has now been held in Guantanamo for more than five years. [He] has had hearings before two Combatant Status Review Tribunals.
A November 2004 tribunal unanimously determined that there was no factual basis for concluding that he should be classified as an enemy combatant. Ordered to re-open its hearing, the tribunal came again to the same unanimous conclusion.
Shortly thereafter a second tribunal was formed and held a hearing in Washington, D.C. — without the knowledge of Al-Ghizzawi — and decided to find him to be an enemy combatant, this despite the fact that no new evidence was introduced.
H/T to Solana over at Global Voices
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Comments
There are 3 comments posted for this article.
One might note that there is an incubation period in which an HIV test will read negative after it has been contracted; he could have contracted HIV outside of the camp well before being tested, and still have read negative. Also, the fact that medical provisions are seriously lacking in Guantanamo is well documented, and has been for a long time. It is a cruel joke to humanity that Cuba's health system, present on the very same island, was one of the first to successfully combat the AIDS epidemic in our hemisphere, and is a communist, underdeveloped nation at that.
Posted on January 31, 2008 1:51 PM by smart chic
Al-Ghizzawi has been detained for over five years. The HIV virus often needs months to incubate before it can be detected, but not years.
Posted on February 1, 2008 10:09 AM by Matthew
Those held incommunicado by our military are subject to exposure to almost anything; think of the black soldiers from WWII who were infected with syphillis by the government. Think of those held during WWII in Asian internment camps and what THEY were subjected to: typhus, tuberculosis, polio, etc. Prisoners of all types are convenient subjects for "testing", and what with the privatization of the criminal justice system here in the US, are often not even considered to be "worthy" of the most basic medical treatments. And when you consider the number of the previously-incarcerated who are now being freed due to faulty dna test and/or incompetent attorneys and police corruption and coverups.....
Posted on February 12, 2008 3:25 PM by Liza Null