The Internment of Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Dossary

Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Dossary is being held in solitary confinement at the Guantanamo Bay prison. He is alleged to have ties to the "Lackawanna Six", the six Yemeni-Americans that traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan for jihad training in early 2001. Two members reportedly told FBI agent Peter J. Ahern that Al Dossary gave a "fiery speech" at the Guidance Mosque in Lackawanna, NY. According to Ahern, the FBI is interested in learning whether Al Dossary has ties to al-Qaeda and helped fun the Lackawanna Six’s travel expenses.

To this day, Al Dossary has not been charged with a crime.

Since his internment, Al Dossary has made the following allegations of torture:

• In a letter dated in 2005, Al Dossary claimed that he suffered various abuses, including cigarettes being extinguished on his body, being made to walk on barbed wire and was urinated on by GI’s.


• Al Dossary’s father was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer in 2005. Since Al Dossary was denied access to letters from his family, he only learned about his father’s death during a visit with a Guantanamo Bay psychiatrist nine days later.


• In a note to his attorney last year, Al Dossary reported that medical treatment was withheld, the lights were never turned off in his cell.

British detainees Tarek Dergoul and Shafiq Rasul had cells in Guantanamo Bay prison that were nearby Al Dossary’s. This is their account of a beating Al Dossary received from guards:

When Jumah saw them coming he realized something was wrong and was lying on the floor with his head in his hands. If you’re on the floor with your hands on your head, then you would hope that all they would do would be to come in and put the chains on you. That is what they’re supposed to do.

"The first man is meant to go in with a shield. On this occasion the man with the shield threw the shield away, took his helmet off, when the door was unlocked ran in and did a knee drop onto Jumah’s back just between his shoulder blades with his full weight. He must have been about 240 pounds in weight. His name was Smith. He was a sergeant E5. Once he had done that the others came in and were punching and kicking Jumah…

"Jumah had had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in the operation… [Smith] grabbed his head with one hand and with the other hand punched him repeatedly in the face. His nose was broken. He pushed his face and he smashed it into the concrete floor. All of this should be on video. There was blood everywhere. When they took him out they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood. We all saw it."

Do Dergoul and Rasul’s names sound familiar? Dergoul and Rasul were part of the Tipton Three and their story was made into a documentary you may have seen recently. It’s called The Road to Guantanamo.

You can find all of this information and more on Al Dossary’s entry in Wikipedia. Click here to review it.

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