Wednesday, January 11, 2006

A Peek Behind the Curtain at Gitmo

So Amnesty International just released some testimony from Gitmo detainees, and boy, is it hairy. Don't have time to delve into them properly, but this one seems, at first glance, to be standard (and terrible):

They started beating us and took pictures of us on a camera; I could see the flash. I had a violent pain in my stomach – I had had an operation on my stomach and there was a piece of metal in it; when I complained about the severity of the pain, a soldier came and started kicking me in my stomach with his military boot until I vomited blood.
...
Once I fell when I fainted and found my head under the boot of a soldier who started beating me severely. I fainted again and woke only to find the soldier urinating on my head and back; he was roaring with laughter. I was still lying on my stomach; he raised my head by the hair and started kicking me in my face with his boot and put it inside my mouth until my face and my lips were cut, my face was swollen and my blood was flowing copiously. Then he started hitting me on my eye; I almost went blind, were it not for the grace and mercy of Allah. We were in this situation for a long time. Then the soldiers started taking us one by one to another tent. When it was my turn, a soldier came, he had an electric saw with him and he cut off the Pakistani shackle and replaced it with an American one. They took me to that tent pulling me by my face. In that tent, there was an Egyptian interpreter with a dirty tongue who cursed us, our families and our honour in strong terms. He shouted at us, "you’re from Al Qaeda, you’re terrorists, you’re dogs" and other insults that I am loathe to repeat. Then they made me and the other prisoners take off all our clothes, most of which were torn from the severe beating we had received. Then they photographed us and examined us. My blood was everywhere, my face was swollen from being beaten and kicked and I had cuts all over my body. All of this was captured on video and I have pictures of myself in this state; an investigator showed me some of these pictures during a subsequent investigation session in Cuba. We were not allowed to talk or complain; anyone who complained was beaten severely. Most of the beating was concentrated on sensitive areas, like the eyes, the nose and the genitals. Then they took us to an old metallic building designed for plane maintenance at the airport. Inside, they had divided it into several enclosures fenced off by barbed wire. They made us all enter one of the enclosures which looked like a sheep pen. While the soldiers were taking me to this part of the tent, they beat me really brutally and banged my head against the iron building. I was not wearing shoes, I was walking barefoot and they made walk on the barbed wire.
...
"During that time, I was moved to the camp clinic because of the terrible state of my health. They would take me for investigations which were mostly held at night; they would beat me severely and tell me to confess that I was a terrorist!! Once, from the excessive and severe beatings, one of my foot shackles broke. Once, they poured boiling hot liquid on my head and the investigator stubbed his cigarette out on my foot. I said to him, "why are you treating me like this?" He then took a cigarette and stubbed it out on my right wrist and said, "in the name of Christ and the Cross I am doing this". Once, they had beaten me so severely that my clothes were ripped and my genitals were exposed. I tried to cover myself up but they started kicking me with their boots. They stripped me of my clothes and lay me flat on the ground. One of the soldiers urinated on my head and my face after one of the other soldiers had raised my head by the hair. After that, a soldier brought petrol and injected it into my penis. I screamed because it was extremely painful. They took me back to the camp after a long night of torture. I was bleeding where they had injected the petrol and it was very swollen so I asked to see the doctor. When I met the doctor and told him what had happened, he became very angry and said, "you’re a liar and a terrorist and you deserve worse than this". He left me and went away. When it was almost sunset, they took me to the investigation tent, the torture tent, and beat me as they were taking me there. I saw the investigator and he was really angry with me; he said, "you’ve been complaining to the doctor about us?! We’ll show you what we’ll do to you" and they hit me really hard all over my body. They started kicking me with their boots and then they took me to another camp while I was blindfolded. I heard an Afghani prisoner scream; he was crying and saying, "O Allah, O God", in Afghani and other words in his language that I did not understand. When I approached the door of the camp, they took off the blindfold. I saw an Afghani brother in his fifties, he had a lot of white hair in his beard, and he was tied to the ground. Soldiers were holding on to his shackles and he was naked and lying on his stomach. One of the soldiers was sexually assaulting him. One of the soldiers had a video camera with him and was taping this distressing scene. The investigator said to me, "he was with the Taliban and he doesn’t want to confess" They made me really scared; I became hysterical and I almost went mad out of fear. They put the blindfold back on my eyes and took me back to the same tent where they were beating me. The investigator said to me, "if you complain again or talk about what happens here, we will do the same thing to you that we did to that Afghan terrorist". Then he hit me very hard and they took me back to my tent.
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Once, while being tortured, the investigator brought a small device like a mobile phone but it was an electric shock device. He started shocking my face, my back, my limbs and my genitals.
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"As for the Emergency Reaction Forces (ERFs), one could go on forever but I will only mention some general incidents that happened. There was a group of soldiers whose emblem and badge was 9/4. These soldiers were the most detestable and abusive and abused our rights...There were other groups as well who all had the same hate for us. They would deploy the ERFs for the most trivial matter so that there was an excuse to attack us and vent their secret hate with the blessing of their officers in charge. If they went into the cage of a detainee, his blood would be sure to flow or they would break his bones; seldom would they exit without injuring the defenceless detainee. Perhaps I will mention some of the incidents I saw myself here. They went to a detainee and put his head in the toilet. The toilets in Camp Delta are iron, Turkish-style toilets and then they flushed his head down the toilet until he almost died. They went to a detainee and started beating his head against the toilet rim until he lost consciousness and he could not see for more than 10 hours. He suffered facial spasms as a result. They went to a detainee when he was praying the maghrib (sunset) prayer and beat him severely. That was in isolation block I India. On that same day, they came and beat me. At that time, we were angry because the duty chief supervisor cursed Allah and banged on the doors of our cells and said, "Merry Christmas"; that was on Christmas day 2002. There were many, many attempts to gouge the eyes of the detainees and to hit them in their private parts. They would beat them when they were ill and would hit them on their injuries. One detainee, called Abdul Aziz Al-Masri, was ill and was asleep in the hospital. These soldiers went and beat him very badly in the hospital in front of the doctors and nurses. His injuries were excessive and caused his spine to break. He is now hemiplegic. They are now trying to operate on him but he is refusing out of fear that they will play with his back and make it worse rather than make it better as their operations often do. These kinds of incidents happen often. They would make sending them to the detainees an excuse for incidents in which we would suffer extensive injuries, severe disfiguration and fractures as there was no one monitoring or following up their actions. Rather, their officers and officials gave them the orders. They tortured the detainees in the name of the law. There are too many incidents to mention or even count. Perhaps those I have mentioned are enough because many of these incidents have been mentioned in the media.

Posted by crimnos @ 11:18 AM