Posted on 11/15/2006 10:37:31 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - An attorney for a Guantanamo Bay detainee has asked a judge to block a planned medical procedure on the prisoner's heart, saying that performing it at the U.S. base puts his life at risk.
Saifullah A. Paracha, a 59-year-old multimillionaire businessman from Karachi, Pakistan, already had one heart attack while in U.S. custody and in recent days has suffered chest pains, his lawyers said. Doctors plan to perform a cardiac catheterization on Paracha this month at the isolated Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in southeast Cuba.
Gaillard T. Hunt, one of Paracha's attorneys, asked a federal court in Washington Tuesday to block it, saying Guantanamo lacks the medical facilities for the procedure and sufficient backup in case anything goes wrong.
Hunt said it should be carried out in a hospital in the United States or Pakistan.
"There is no excuse for risking petitioner Paracha's life by subjecting him to this procedure at Guantanamo," Hunt said in an emergency petition, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press.
Transferring Paracha to a hospital in the United States could present legal complications for the Bush administration, which has maintained that because the Guantanamo detainees were picked up overseas and are being held on foreign land, they may be detained indefinitely without charges or trial. A new law strips foreign "enemy combatants" held anywhere by the United States of their right to contest their detention in court. That law is being challenged.
Paracha's legal team has no ulterior motives, said another of his lawyers, Zachary Philip Katznelson.
"Our goal here is not anything duplicitous or underhanded to get court jurisdiction," he said in a telephone interview. "It is to get decent medical care."
The government is to reply to Hunt's petition by Friday. The case was expected to be argued in court on Monday, Hunt said.
Katznelson said he found Paracha chained to a bed at the base hospital when he visited Guantanamo on Nov. 7 and 9.
"All four limbs were shackled to the bed," and there wasn't enough slack in the chains to enable Paracha to turn over, he complained.
During a cardiac catheterization, a doctor inserts a thin plastic tube into an artery or vein in the arm or leg and pushes it into the chambers of the heart or into the coronary arteries to measure blood pressure within the heart and blood oxygen levels.
Army Lt. Col. Lora Tucker said from Guantanamo that its medical facilities "are excellent" and that additional specialists and medical equipment could be brought to the U.S. Navy base as needed.
"We are committed to preserving the health and lives of all detainees," Tucker said in an e-mail to AP. She declined to discuss Paracha because it was against policy to discuss a specific detainee's heath.
There have been three deaths among detainees at Guantanamo since it began taking in men captured in Afghanistan and other areas in January 2002 - all suicides on June 10. Some 430 men are currently held at the prison camp.
On Nov. 7, Paracha suffered chest pains at Guantanamo and a medical technician was brought in. His pulse had dropped to 46 beats per minute and his blood pressure was around 90 over 58, Katznelson said in a statement to the court.
Paracha suffered his first heart attack in 1995 and had a second one in 2003 while in U.S. military custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Katznelson said. His family in Pakistan, concerned about his health, has urged Pakistan's government to seek his return home for treatment.
A computer science graduate of the New York Institute of Technology, Paracha was arrested on arrival in Bangkok, Thailand, in July 2003, held in isolation for 14 months in Afghanistan and then sent to Guantanamo.
Paracha has acknowledged meeting Osama bin Laden twice, but denied making investments for al-Qaida members, translating statements for bin Laden, joining in a plot to smuggle explosives into the United States or recommending that nuclear weapons be used against U.S. soldiers.
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The STAKE HEART TREATMENT is definitely called for here......
Send him to Boston and have it done there and the costs billed to Kennedy, Kerry and Barney Frankfurter.
Then they can be responsible making sure their hero has some nice mansions to recover in.
This makes my hair stand straight up!!!!
Al Qaeda's No. 3 man offered to invest $200,000 in International Management Group in exchange, federal authorities now believe, for access to IMG's Port Newark-bound shipping containers, sources say.
See this one item....at post #23.
He had his sister do some of that kind of stuff....
I think he really just needs some mineral treatments.
Let's start with lead.
yea. Throw him in a cage for starters.
I wouldn't be surprised either Ernie.
I see what you mean. Tough luck for him.
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