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11/17/2005:

"A hero of Guantánamo"

Fawzi al-Odah weighed just 44.5kg (7st) last week when his lawyer, Thomas Wilner, visited him in Guantánamo. In August 2002 he weighed 63.5kg (10st). The young Kuwaiti is one of the hundred or so men in the US prison camp who have been on sporadic hunger strikes since August. During Wilner's previous visit in September, he tried, on Fawzi's father's instructions, to persuade him to end his hunger strike. But Fawzi told him: "Tell my father I'm trying to be a hero like him, and if he was here he would do the same as I am doing." Khalid al-Odah, Fawzi's father, was a US-trained Kuwaiti fighter pilot who fought in the underground during the Iraqi invasion.

Fawzi was brought to that meeting with his lawyer from the prison hospital with a plastic tube protruding from his nose, which bled intermittently. He has since been in Camp Delta, where the force-feeding continues.

He appears to be completely innocent: his story has been investigated and told in detail twice, by two respected US journalists, Roy Gutman in Newsweek and Peter Jennings in a special TV report on Guantánamo. Both reports were devastating to the official line on the war on terror. Fawzi was also the man named in one of the supreme court cases that successfully challenged the refusal of habeas corpus to the prisoners. Is he still being held precisely because his case has deeply hurt the Bush administration's credibility before the country's highest lawyers, and in the mainstream media?

Fawzi was a university student in Kuwait who spent two vacations teaching in poor areas of Pakistan, and who went on to help refugees on the Afghan border when they fled US bombing in October 2001. Those who sold them to the Pakistani authorities, who handed them over to the Americans, told both US reporting teams that the soft city boys from Kuwait were clearly nothing to do with any of the Afghan fighters.

Wilner, a quintessential establishment Washington lawyer, has represented the 12 Kuwaitis in Guantánamo since April 2002 and has been to the prison camp 10 times. Five of his clients were recently released and are back in Kuwait. Fawzi remains in Cuba. Last week the US Senate approved a plan, sponsored by Senator Lindsay Graham, that would severely limit the chance of Fawzi, and the other prisoners, ever being given access to the US courts. The plan defies a supreme court decision of June 2004 - although not one prisoner has been brought to court since, amid legal battles between the Bush administration and lawyers such as Wilner.
guardian.co.uk