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Saturday, November 29, 2003
ERAU graduate fighting detention in Cuba
By RON HURTIBISE
NEWS-JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
DAYTONA BEACH — Fouad Mahmoud Al-Rabiah, a 1988 graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, has been detained by the U.S. Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since early 2002, according to family members trying to win his release.
The U.S. government, believed to have captured him near the Afghanistan border during military action that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, considers all 660 Guantanamo detainees “enemy combatants.”
Al-Rabiah’s family in Kuwait says the 44-year-old Kuwaiti Airlines employee is a part-time charity worker who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and then sold out by the poverty-stricken tribesmen he was trying to help.
Al-Rabiah lived with his wife, May, at the Woodcrest Townhouses off Beville Road, while he earned a bachelor of science degree in professional aeronautics and a master’s degree in aviation management, according to his brother, Moonther, and records at Embry-Riddle.
In a telephone interview from Kuwait, Moonther Al-Rabiah said he’s angriest not at the United States, but at his brother’s Afghan captors.
“The people he helped and brought blankets and food and sought refuge with sold him for cheap money – even cheaper than a car, cheaper than a bike, even,” he said.
Al-Rabiah and 11 other Kuwaitis, whose attorneys say are detained at Guantanamo Bay, have filed a federal lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear next spring.
President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are among those named as defendants in the suit.
The Kuwaitis, along with two Britons and two Australians, seek representation by an attorney and contact with family members. They seek to be told what criminal charges, if any, are being used as the basis for their detainment. And they seek an opportunity to stand before a “competent tribunal” and argue for their release.
Attorneys for the Bush administration argue that foreigners detained by U.S. forces outside the country are not entitled to access to U.S. courts. Granting non-U.S. citizens such access, the administration says, would subject the courts to petition by any military detainee abroad, including all 660 Guantanamo detainees.
Several of the plaintiffs are among the first group of detainees who will be tried before military commissions in coming months, The New York Times has reported. Prosecuting and defense attorneys have been selected from the military, and the chief prosecutor, Army Col. Frederick Borch, has said the proceedings will resemble U.S. courts, with detainees presumed innocent until proven guilty, according to a University of Virginia School of Law newsletter.
Information about all Guantanamo detainees has been shrouded in secrecy since their arrival in Cuba.
A Department of Defense spokeswoman contacted last week said she could not comment about Al-Rabiah or any other detainee, other than to confirm all continue to be regarded as “enemy combatants.” She said she could not identify who is scheduled for military commission hearings, or whether anyone has been charged yet.
Families of the 12 Kuwaiti detainees pooled their resources to hire an American law firm and public relations firm. Retired Kuwaiti Air Force Col. Khalid Al-Odah, father of detainee Fawzi Al-Odah, serves as the families’ spokesman.
The Supreme Court’s Nov. 10 announcement that it would hear the Kuwaitis’ case was the first good news the families have heard in months, Al-Odah said in a telephone interview from Kuwait.
“We’ve been struggling for almost two years now,” he said. “I never thought that asking for some simple fairness would take us all the way to the Supreme Court. We’re just asking for due process, nothing else. Just try them. Let them defend themselves before an impartial court or trial, and you will find they are innocent.”
DAYTONA TO GUANTANAMO
Fouad Al-Rabiah was one of hundreds of Middle Eastern students who attended Embry-Riddle over the past 20 years. Because of visa restrictions imposed in the wake of Sept. 11, their ranks have dwindled to just a few, according to Judith Assad, director of international student services at ERAU.
Although flight instruction was part of the professional aeronautics degree, Al-Rabiah did not attend the college to become a commercial pilot, she said.
Instead, he studied the business side of aviation and, until his capture, spent his career as an inventory manager for Kuwaiti Airlines, his brother said.
Al-Rabiah’s record shows no membership in clubs or extracurricular organizations during his time at the university. That’s likely because he spent so much time studying and had little time for much else, Assad said.
“He was a good student, obviously,” she said. “I was impressed when I looked up his record.”
He had time for at least one spare-time activity, according to a certificate of appreciation “for devoted and invaluable services rendered to Tomoka Correctional Institution,” faxed by Al-Rabiah’s family. Fouad earned it volunteering his time counseling Muslim prisoners at the prison, his brother said. “He would tell them it was the wrong path to take,” Moonther said.
Another certificate, an “Honorary Citizenship” jointly issued by the university and The Chamber, Daytona Beach-Halifax Area, is prominently mentioned in a short biography about Al-Rabiah on a Web site, kuwaitidetainees.org, set up to generate support for the detainees’ release. For several years, Assad said, the honor was bestowed upon all non-U.S. citizens who earned degrees at the university.
Al-Rabiah’s family, along with families of the other Kuwaiti detainees, pieced together their theories of how the detainees landed at Guantanamo from accounts by Kuwaiti aid workers and government representatives in Pakistan during the war, letters from the detainees themselves and a revealing Newsweek magazine account, “Guantanamo Justice” published in July 2002.
According to Moonther Al-Rabiah, his brother Fouad regularly spent his vacations, like many Muslim men, performing charitable works. Previous trips had taken him to Bangladesh and Bosnia.
Islamic charitable organizations have come under increased scrutiny from U.S. authorities since Sept. 11.
When the United States prepared to invade Afghanistan, Arab media reported that a crush of refugees from the country was expected to cross the nation’s borders into Pakistan and Iran.
Fouad planned to go to the border region to deliver food and blankets to refugees in Iran, Moonther said.
How he found himself inside Afghanistan isn’t clear, but when he tried to return, the border was closed and Fouad looked for safety among the refugees, Moonther said.
“He woke up one day and was tied up,” Moonther said.
Those refugees, members of rural Afghan tribes, delivered Fouad and other Kuwaitis sometime in late December 2001 to members of the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance, Moonther said.
Alliance members in turn surrendered them to the Americans, who were offering cash bounties for the capture of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters.
The Americans detained them for several weeks in a jail in Kandahar, according to the families’ account, then transferred them two to three at a time to the naval base in Cuba, nicknamed Camp X-Ray because the detainees were kept in outside cells constructed of chain-link fencing.
Later they were moved to indoor cells, where they’ve been kept in solitary confinement ever since, according to news reports.
FAMILY’S HOPE PERSISTS
Fouad has sent just a few letters to the family, Moonther said.
“He was saying, ‘Thank God, We are well. All I need is to see Father and Mother. Please pray for me that my release will be fast. People here are treating us quite nicely’ – that kind of thing, just to comfort us.”
Fouad doesn’t know about problems that have befallen his family during his detention.
His father has been hospitalized three times, and Moonther blames his worry over Fouad.
“The last time (he went into the hospital), he went into a trance, became like a vegetable and didn’t want to talk to anyone,” he said. “He was not drinking water or eating. After a few days they put him in intensive care.
“After he woke up he said, ‘Is Fouad back?’ Sometimes he looks at the door, waiting for Fouad to come.”
His wife, a therapist, has moved out of the family’s home and back with her parents, along with the couple’s four children. Though other family members are helping, she is having trouble paying the couple’s mortgage out of her salary, Moonther said.
Tough as it is, Fouad’s detainment isn’t the first major trial weathered by the family.
Hardship followed the 1990 invasion of their country by Iraq, when Kuwaiti Airlines shut down and Fouad was temporarily thrown out of work, Moonther said.
Basic services such as trash collection stopped, so Fouad and his brothers picked up the slack. “We would haul off rubbish – take it away and burn it – or clean the streets,” Moonther said. “Sometimes he worked in the bakery and supermarkets to help out. Anything you know to do, you will do it.”
One of the biggest challenges was avoiding the attention of Iraqi guards, Moonther said. One of his friends was branded a spy, tortured and killed by the Iraqis.
“The country wasn’t a country,” he said. “It was a land with roaming people, with guns, predators, hunters, whatever. We could barely survive.”
Survive they did, however, and Moonther vows Fouad will survive this latest crisis.
Rather than engage in any “hard movement or scrams or tension or that sort of thing to ask for your rights,” the family feels confident that Fouad will be freed after his case winds through the U.S. legal system.
Because Fouad went to Afghanistan “to do something good,” Moonther is sure that “God won’t let him down.”
LETTERS FROM CUBA
Kuwaiti citizen and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University graduate Fouad Mahmoud Al-Rabiah has been detained as an “enemy combatant” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by the U.S. Department of Defense since early 2002, according to his family. He has sent several letters and postcards home since that time. They were provided to The Daytona Beach News-Journal – in both the original Arabic and translated into English – by his family. Here are four messages in their entirety:
Letter, date of writing unknown:
My dear mother, father and family Peace be upon you.
Thanks to God as there is nobody who can provide help and strength except God.
First: I am well and in good health and condition. Further I do not suffer from any disease or even scratch. I swear by God that I am well and in good health.
Second: It is the will of God that placed me in this strange situation. As you know I traveled to deliver rescue materials to the Afghani refugees on the Iranian-Afghani borders and some hospitals in Kandahar.
However, God wanted this problem to occur. The situation in the country turned upside down between one day and night and every Arab citizen has become a suspect. I am detained now pending verification of my identity and personality.
Now I am detained by the American troops and thanks to God they are good example of humanitarian behavior and I am in good health and condition.
Third: There is no doubt that investigation and verification procedures may last for a long period due to the great number of the detained Arabs and other persons, so I would like my brothers Yahiya and Sami to move and contact Patients Helping Fund, the International Islamic Charitable Organization and other charitable organizations as well as other rescue organizations which I used to deal with and inform Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad, may God keep him, of this issue to contact the embassy of the USA.
Please expedite the matter, as nothing can be made except this.
Peace be upon you.
Postcard dated: June 6, 2002
My dear lovers I ask God to enable me to read this message to you, as God is able to achieve this.
All news are bearing good tidings of our release within few days. Thanks to God the treatment here is very good and this nightmare will elapse soon, God willing.
Peace be upon you.
Postcard dated: October 10, 2002
My dear lovers
Peace be upon you
There are not enough messages that can contain the names of every one of you and to express my feelings. However God always brings you to me, I see you in my dreams, I sit down with you and laugh with you and, thanks to God, I am in great bless from God and my morale is high as I am with God surrounded by many persons who memorize the Quran and students seeking knowledge. Our time is fully dedicated for worshiping and happiness. There is no doubt that missing you is the only agony now. I swear by God that sorrow will come to an end, happiness will be restored and we will forget sadness and nothing will remain except the reward.
Peace be upon you.
DID YOU KNOW?
The United States naval base Guantanamo Bay is the oldest U.S. base overseas and the only one located in a communist country.
Its position near the Windward Passage - an important maritime route between the United States and Central and South America - and in close proximity to the Panama Canal - makes Guantanamo Bay strategically important.
During the Spanish-American War, the United States captured and fortified much of the outer harbor of Guantanamo Bay and used it as an anchorage for American warships.
Cuba and the United States signed an agreement in 1903 allowing the United States to maintain a naval base at Guantanamo Bay; the annual lease was $2,000.
In 1934, a treaty between both nations was signed reaffirming the lease, adding the stipulation that the lease could only be terminated by mutual agreement or by voluntary U.S. withdrawal.
Compiled by Karen Duffy, news researcher, from www.nsgtmo.navy.mil, World Book Encyclopedia, Encarta.
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