Part of article below; whole article here: http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=56588&s2=03
At the launch itself, which was extremely well-attended, Moazzam Begg began by explaining that returning British ex-prisoners had support from families, activists, community members and individuals, but that those returning to developing countries had little help. "Whether they are in Bermuda, Morocco, Mauritania or Yemen, the story is pretty much the same," he said, as Reuters described it. "Where is the welfare for the people who have been tortured? Where is the support system for people who have endured cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment? The fact of the matter is — rarely does it exist."
Adding that former prisoners face the stigma of having been held at Guantánamo every single day, Begg said, "How do you remove that from your head? How do you tell people that I am not a criminal, but I endured criminality? How do you explain that to anybody? When Guantánamo, by its definition, means that you must have been guilty of something because the world’s most powerful democracy could not have got it wrong. Even though we know it has got it wrong, we still carry that stigma with us, every single one of us."
Describing the extent of the stigma, Sami al-Haj added, "My son does not deal with me as a normal father and even my wife and our close family like brothers and sisters and even our friends are keeping away from me because they do not want to put themselves in trouble."
Binyam Mohamed, speaking for the first time in public since his release from Guantánamo in February, explained that he was not involved with the GJC "to win compensation," and asked, "How much money can you give me that would make me forget the seven years I have gone through?" He also explained to reporters that, during an interrogation in Karachi shortly after he was seized at the airport in April 2002, his US captors explained how the US approach to the law had changed after 9/11. They told me, "You are guilty until you are proven innocent," he said.
Describing his difficulties in readjusting to life after Guantánamo, and "at times struggling to control his emotions," as the BBC described it, he said that he would "automatically" treat ordinary questions as an "interrogation," and explained, "You have to live it to explain it. It’s very hard. If I enter a room and the light turns off for some reason I wonder if I’m back in the 'Dark Prison.’" Mohamed was referring to the secret CIA prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was held for several months in 2004 after being tortured in Morocco for 18 months on behalf of the US authorities.
He also said, "What the world doesn’t understand is that most people love to hear about torture stories — somebody hanged here, beaten there, blood over here, blood over there, but that’s physical torture. What remains [on release] is, each time you see a rope, you always go back to the time you were hung. That doesn’t go away."
Adding, "I cannot fit into society," he described the opening of the Guantánamo Justice Centre as "an important event" for the former prisoners, saying, "We are here and we are living in torture — a world of torture," and, insisting that it was not a political organization, stated bluntly, "From my point of view, there’s a mess that has been done and someone has to fix it."
Like all the other ex-prisoners, Mohamed was concerned not primarily with relating his own difficulties adjusting to freedom, and the ghosts of torture that still haunt him, but with the plight of others. He explained that he had recently spoken on the phone to Mohammed El-Gharani, the Chadian national — just 14 years old when he was seized in Pakistan — who was released from Guantánamo in June, and that El-Gharani was now "sleeping on the streets, rejected by his family, branded as a terrorist although he was released by the US and cleared of any wrong-doing." "I realized that he can not talk to others, like his lawyers, as he can to me," Mohamed said. "So I have to speak out for him here."
Returning briefly to his own ordeal, he explained, "No one knows that what stays after torture is the memories. Lawyers speak about my rights in court, but I can only think about Military Commissions and about having no rights. After four years I can only think of things in terms of Guantánamo. No institution or medical foundation in the world can change how I feel." He then added, poignantly, "And how about in Chad, where there is nothing to help El-Gharani?"
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