Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident held in Guantanamo Bay for four years, is rapidly losing his sanity, according to three lawyers who have visited him during the past month.
Al-Rawi, 35, who was arrested by the CIA and local security forces during a business trip to Gambia in 2002, is showing clear signs of secure housing unit psychosis, a clinical condition that afflicts high-security prisoners, said Clive Stafford Smith, one of the lawyers.
"I have had several clients on American death rows who have developed it and it's clear to me that he is sliding down that path," Smith said.
"The conditions in which he is being held are worse than any death row I've ever seen," he said.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at Guantanamo, which still has 385 prisoners, despite recent releases. Those who remain were deprived of virtually all legal rights by the US Congress in last year's Military Commissions Act.
Al-Rawi is an Iraqi who fled late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's dictatorship as a child and settled in Britain. Alone of his family, he retained citizenship of Iraq in the hope that one day he would be able to claim the family's abandoned property. He was arrested with his brothers -- one of whom is also in Guantanamo -- and two other men during a trip to set up a peanut processing business. He has never been charged.
Brent Mickum, a US lawyer who also represents him, said al-Rawi was "slowly but surely slipping into madness. Bisher's treatment is designed to achieve a single objective -- to make him lose his mind," he said.
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