Prisoner wants out of Guantanamo for heart procedure

MIAMI, Nov 16 (Reuters) A prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp has petitioned a US court to bar the military from performing a medical procedure on his heart, saying it is too risky to be done at the remote US base in Cuba.

Lawyers for Saifullah Paracha, 59, filed a motion with a Washington, D.C. court on Tuesday for an emergency restraining order to stop the cardiac catheterization scheduled for next week at the base where some 430 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners are held.

Paracha, a Pakistani businessman who holds U.S. residency, has had two heart attacks and recently suffered chest pains, prompting doctors at Guantanamo to decide he should have the procedure.

Paracha's lawyers told the court there were cardiac catheterization laboratories in the United States or Pakistan that could perform the procedure.

''There is no excuse for risking petitioner Paracha's life by subjecting him to this procedure at Guantanamo,'' the court papers said.

The documents listed as respondents President George W.

Bush and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

''The government has gone to tremendous expense to ship a cardiologist and some equipment down there, but they are not equipped to do it at Guantanamo,'' Paracha's lawyer, Gaillard T.

Hunt, said on Wednesday. ''It's standard to do these ... at a hospital with surgical backup in case something goes wrong.'' In a cardiac catheterization, a thin plastic tube is inserted into an artery or vein and pushed into the chambers of the heart.

A spokeswoman for the Guantanamo base did not immediately respond to questions about the Paracha case.

The U.S. government's treatment of Guantanamo detainees has been the subject of international condemnation and court challenges since the first of the prisoners were transferred to the U.S. naval base in 2002. Most have not been charged with crimes.

Washington has maintained that the prisoners can be held indefinitely without charges or access to courts.

Hunt said the legal action was designed to get proper medical care for Paracha, not to get him to U.S. soil and under the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

He said the Military Commissions Act signed by Bush in October, which is being challenged, suspends habeas corpus rights against unlawful imprisonment for alleged enemy combatants, meaning the U.S. government would ''suffer no legal setback'' if his client was treated at a U.S. hospital.

''The only reason the government would have not to fly him up to somewhere in the United States ... is this idea they have that by keeping people at Guantanamo they can keep them out of the reach of the law,'' he said. ''But they are really doing this out of reflex.'' Hunt said his client, a businessman and television producer, was seized illegally while on a business trip in Bangkok, Thailand, and taken to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

He was moved to Guantanamo around September 2004.

With the procedure scheduled for Tuesday, a hearing on the request for a restraining order was set for Monday, Hunt said.

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