Guantánamo in New York City
Muslim-American Fahad Hashmi has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for over two years awaiting trial.

By Madeleine Dubus
April 7, 2010

“You’re twelve miles away knowing your brother is getting tortured and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Faisal Hashmi, of Flushing, Queens, tells me on March 8, 2010, the night of the 16th vigil for his younger brother, Fahad.

On the evening I speak to Faisal, the city is newly warm. Though the sun is long down by the end of the vigil, the 100-plus guests linger, breathing in the air of early spring. But despite the hopeful warmth, there is no mistaking the gravity of the evening.

Faisal and I stand together, rather appropriately, at the dead end of a street. To our right are two of Manhattan’s largest courthouses and to our left stands the Metropolitan Correction Center (MCC), where Faisal’s brother Syed Fahad Hashmi, now 30, has lived in solitary confinement since May 2007.

Known to family and friends by his middle name, Fahad was born in Pakistan and raised in Flushing from the age of 2 when his family moved to America in 1983. Fahad eventually received his citizenship in 1991 and graduated from Brooklyn College in 2003 where he was an average student but outspoken in his advocacy for Muslim-American rights. According to his former professor, Jeanne Theoharris, Fahad wrote his senior seminar paper on “the treatment of Muslim groups within the United States and the violations of civil rights and liberties that many groups were facing.” That paper turned out to be an eerie foreshadowing of Fahad’s own fate.

Fahad is currently held in the MCC on two counts of providing material support and two counts of making a contribution of goods or services to Al Qaida. According to the indictment, when Fahad was studying for his master’s degree in international relations at London Metropolitan University in early 2004, he allowed an acquaintance, Junaid Babar, to stay in his London apartment.

Junaid was arrested later that year; he has been charged with and has plead guilty to five counts of providing material support to Al Qaida, which includes delivering a suitcase full of waterproof socks and rain ponchos to a member of Al Qaeda in South Waziristan, Pakistan. Junaid also allegedly used Fahad’s cell phone to call co-conspirators. Junaid currently faces 70 years in prison and has agreed to serve as a government witness in terror trials in Britain and Canada, as well as in Hashmi’s trial in return for a reduced sentence.

But while Junaid’s case may be concluded, Fahad’s is far from it. “My brother is facing 70 years for socks in someone’s luggage,” Faisal says.

In June 2006, Fahad was on his way to visit family in Pakistan when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport on a warrant issued by the United States. He was held in Britain for 11 months, when he became the first U.S. citizen to be extradited under terrorism laws passed after 9/11.

The evidence against Fahad appears tenuous, and he hasn’t had the opportunity to stand trial. Yet at the time of this publication, Fahad will have been imprisoned for nearly 1,400 days in solitary confinement. He lives under extensive restriction due to the Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) made legal and permanent in October 2007 by former Attorney General Albert Gonzales. The SAMs were initially interim rules created in October 2001. The Department of Justice describes the SAMs as:

“…regulations [that] authoriz[e]the Bureau of Prisons (Bureau), at the direction of the Attorney General, to impose special administrative measures with respect to specified inmates, based on information provided by senior intelligence or law enforcement officials, if determined necessary to prevent the dissemination of either classified information that could endanger the national security, or of other information that could lead to acts of violence and/or terrorism.”

Under SAMs, the Department of Justice can impose these regulations for any period of time designated by the director of the Prison Bureau up to one year. This period of time can easily be extended if the director feels the inmate continues to pose a threat to National Security. Furthermore, SAMs allow the prison where the terror suspect is held to restrict and monitor his or her attorney visits when, “the attorney general has certified that reasonable suspicion exists to believe that an inmate may use communications with attorneys (or agents traditionally covered by the attorney-client privilege) to further or facilitate acts of violence and/or terrorism.”

Essentially, SAMs are legal way for prison directors to restrict or eliminate civil and human rights of terror suspects, as long as they cite “reasonable suspicion.”

In January 2009, on his second day of office, President Barack Obama signed executive orders banning torture of terror suspects and shutting down Guantánamo within a year. The decision was meant to make strong statement about America’s principles, but ultimately it demonstrates failings. Solitary confinement is not classified by the United States as torture. In fact, there are an estimated 25,000 American prisoners currently held in extended solitary confinement. Electroencephalography (EEG) studies, which date back to the early 1960s when the Vietnam War inspired a surge of interest in solitary confinement by psychologists, consistently show that after only a week of solitary confinement a prisoner’s brain waves slow. After months, further brain abnormalities develop rendering a prisoner with symptoms as severe as someone who has suffered Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) which is caused by a serious blow to the head.

The psychological toll of solitary confinement is just as serious as the physical one. Senator John McCain, who famously lived in solitary confinement as a POW during the Vietnam War, describes it as worse than physical torture. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment,” he says. McCain was also brutally beaten on a regular basis and denied medical treatment during his imprisonment. McCain lived in solitary confinement for over two years, like Fahad Hashmi.

Fahad’s trial is currently set for April 28th, 2010. Fahad’s supporters believe that due to his treatment, Fahad may not be mentally capable of testifying on his own behalf in court. Since Fahad’s contact with the outside world is so limited, his current psychological and physical state is not clear.

Before we say goodnight, I ask Faisal if he has noticed a change in Fahad’s letters since his incarceration began. His face falls briefly. He turns to look up at the MCC, at the walls standing between him and his brother, and then declines to answer.

Madeleine Dubus is a writing fellow at The New School and a staff writer for Campus Progress.