I saw Americans kill terror suspects, says Guantanamo Briton

[struggle4progress]

By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent
25 February 2005


One of the four Britons released from Guantanamo Bay last month said he was tortured by the Americans at a separate holding camp and spent many hours trussed like an animal with a bag over his head.

Moazzam Begg, 37, who was released by the Metropolitan Police without charge and reunited with his wife and four children after three years' imprisonment, also accuses his American captors of beating two detainees to death at the Bagram air base near Kabul in Afghanistan. In his first interview since his release, he told Channel 4 News he "witnessed two people get beaten so badly I believe it caused their deaths".

In February 2003, Mr Begg was transferred from Bagram to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The former law student and bookshop owner from Birmingham joined hundreds of other "unlawful combatants", shackled and dressed in orange jumpsuits, then held without charge, trial or access to lawyers. For much of his detention he was in solitary confinement, often exposed to extreme weather and deprived of basic necessities. Last night he said he was interviewed at Guantanomo by US security officers who asked him to identify the guards in the alleged beatings.

He told Channel 4: "I saw one body actually being carried away and the other one, I wasn't sure whether he had been killed but the photographs the American intelligence officers had brought confirmed this person had been killed." <snip>

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=614556

[LostInAnomie]

1. Nothing to see here folks.

Keep moving.

[BeHereNow]

2. Where is the consciousness of America?

This story is outrageous.
I am so ashamed that my tax dollars
paid for the murders of people denied any due
process of law.
How can this be happening?
BHN

[Say_What]

3. America's Amnesia

How is it that muriKans don't know their own history?? What's happening in Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and who knows where else on the planet has been going on for decades around the globe since WWII!!

---

<clips>
America's Amnesia

...Americans are "very naïve," she says. "They don't want to see" the involvement of the United States in torture over the years. The Abu Ghraib scandal "is nothing new," she says. "This has been happening behind your eyes for many years."

The United States likes to see itself with a halo on its head, and whenever a revelation like Abu Ghraib or My Lai surfaces, U.S. citizens tend to shrug it off as an anomaly. When you look at the last fifty years of U.S. history, it is anything but.

From Greece to Iran to Indonesia to Vietnam and throughout Latin America, the U.S. government has been complicit in the torture or murder of hundreds of thousands of people.

"If we had photographs of what our so-called allies in Honduras and El Salvador and Chile were doing, based on training they had received from us in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the American public would have been even more horrified," says Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. This was torture by proxy, but it was at the direction of Washington. "The only difference between this kind of conduct now and in the past is that there wasn't somebody with a digital camera back then keeping track of what was going on," says Kornbluh.

http://www.progressive.org/july04/roth0704.html

[lebkuchen]

4. If the US were torturing people on its own soil

and hauling off dead bodies in horse-drawn wagons with broken and bruised legs sticking out beyond the covered tarp, moving at a snail's pace through Jacksonville NC (or any other red district in the US), Americans would probably stand and applaud the action.