Khalid al-Ouda, founder of The Kuwaiti Family Committee [ Project Kuwaiti Freedom ], is optimistic his son Fawzi al-Ouda will soon be released from Guantanamo Bay.
Ouda said six Kuwaiti prisoners have joined a hunger strike being staged by some 200 inmates to protest at their conditions and prolonged confinement without trial. “Two of the six, Abdulaziz al-Shimmari and Fawzi al-Ouda, have been hospitalised after their health deteriorated for refusing to take food for five weeks,” said Ouda, citing US lawyers who visited them. “The lawyers told me the two were skin and bones and Shimmari could not walk … The remaining four are not in good health condition.” According to Thomas Wilmer, the US lawyer defending the Kuwaitis, most of them were captured by bounty-hunters in 2001 near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and sold to the United States. The New York Times reported Sunday that as many as 200 prisoners — more than a third of the camp’s population — have refused food in recent weeks, while camp officials put the number at 105.
This hunger strike is getting as much attention as the bounty/reward programme run by the U.S. in Afghanistan that put some of these men in Gitmo. Why is that?