Topic: Detainee Drawing Reported Censored

Philadelphia Inquirer
March 18, 2008
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- The United States has censored a gruesome drawing by a Guantanamo Bay detainee depicting him as a skeleton and being force-fed at the military prison, his lawyers said yesterday as they released a re-creation of the sketch.
Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameramen for Al-Jazeera, marked his 431st day on hunger strike yesterday at the U.S. base in Cuba. "My picture reflects my nightmares of what I must look like," Haj said in a statement released by the British legal-rights group Reprieve.
The lawyers said they had commissioned a political cartoonist to re-create four of Haj's drawings, based on descriptions of the originals, to reveal "aspects of the prisoners' suffering in U.S. custody." Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt denied that detainees were mistreated, and Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon said the drawings were censored because they were beyond the scope of allowed material. -- AP