An Afghan prisoner suffered significant weight loss and other health problems when the military subjected him to two weeks of sleep deprivation at Guantanamo in 2004, his lawyer said Friday. Mohammed Jawad lost 10 percent of his body weight and told doctors he was urinating blood after guards subjected him to the sleep deprivation program, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, his Pentagon-appointed lawyer, said, citing records from the prison on a US base in Cuba. The records, Frakt said, contradict military claims that Jawad suffered no ill effects from what the military called its “frequent flyer” sleep deprivation program. “It provides substantiation there was not just mental suffering but there were medical side effects,” Frakt told The Associated Press. Jawad is charged with attempted murder for throwing a grenade that wounded two US soldiers and their translator in Afghanistan in December 2002. The lawyer had previously filed a motion asking a military judge to dismiss the charges because of the treatment, which he has labeled torture. On Friday, he says he filed an additional motion for dismissal because prosecutors failed to provide records of the health effects before a hearing on the issue last month. US military prosecutors have acknowledged that guards kept Jawad awake by repeatedly moving him from cell to cell over two weeks in May 2004 but say the treatment did not amount to torture and they have urged the judge not to dismiss the charges. A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, declined Friday to comment on Frakt's allegations, which are based on records from the prison. In a separate motion, Frakt argues for a dismissal on the grounds that a senior Pentagon legal official may have misled the court in his testimony last month. The lawyer said Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann was deliberately evasive when testifying on a hearing called to determine whether he had used what the military calls improper “command influence” to push for criminal charges to be filed against Jawad. A ruling is pending on the issue. In Canada, newly released documents indicate that Canadian officials knew in 2004 that a teen being held at Guantanamo Bay was being deprived of sleep for weeks to soften him up for interrogation. The Department of Foreign Affairs reports say Canadian official Jim Gould visited Toronto-born Omar Khadr at the US military base and was told by the military that measures were taken to make the then-17-year-old more pliable for interviews. Khadr is scheduled to face trial in October for allegedly lobbing a grenade that killed a US Special Forces soldier following a firefight in Afghanistan.
