Revealed: the full story of the Guantanamo Britons

[kskiska]

The Observer's David Rose hears the Tipton Three give a harrowing account of their captivity in Cuba

Three British prisoners released last week from Guantanamo Bay have revealed the full extent of British government involvement in the American detention camp condemned by law lords and the Court of Appeal as a 'legal black hole'.

Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, the so-called 'Tipton Three', speaking for the first time since their release at a secret location in southern England, have disclosed to The Observer the fullest picture yet of life inside the camp on Cuba where America continues to hold 650 detainees.

(snip)

· The existence of a secret super-maximum security facility outside the main part of Guantanamo's Camp Delta known as Camp Echo, where prisoners are held in tiny cells in solitary confinement 24-hours a day, with a military police officer permanently stationed outside each cell door. The handful of inmates of Camp Echo include two of the four remaining British detainees, Moazzem Begg and Feroz Abbasi, and the Australian, David Hicks;

· That they endured three months of solitary confinement in Camp Delta's isolation block last summer after they were wrongly identified by the Americans as having been pictured in a video tape of a meeting in Afghanistan between Osama bin Laden and the leader of the 11 September hijackers Mohamed Atta. Ignoring their protests that they were in Britain at the time, the Americans interrogated them so relentlessly that eventually all three falsely confessed. They were finally saved - at least on this occasion - by MI5, which came up with documentary evidence to show they had not left the UK;

more…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1169147,00.html

[Jacobin]

1. Good god.

My country has gone stark raving mad.

[dand]

2. No wonder we are internationally despised,

we are the new barbarions.

[keopeli]

3. Holy sh*t! These lucky brits had a government who works FOR them...

Imagine if a US citizen was locked up in there...they don't have an MI5 that will save their ass. Wow. That's you and me, kids. Our government no longer works FOR THE PEOPLE.

God save America...please...

[R Hickey]

4. But Halliburton made millions on the contract to build the place...

If most of the detainees are not terrorists, as the three Brits claim, then why are they there? Are they mostly there in order to justify building the concentration camp? Are they there just to make money for Halliburton?

Couldn't the Army Corps of Engineers have built Gitmo? Who decided that Amerika needed it? Was it the PNAC? How did Halliburton get the contract to build it? Who else bid? Why did it cost so much?

Since 1980 when Reagan became President, the number of non-violent prisoners in the US has ballooned. Whackenhut Corporation, which Poppy Bush helped establish, likewise has ballooned.

Currently, the prison industry is bankrupting most of our states, at the expense of the universities. Tuitions are way up. For some reason, the Republicans love prisons of all kinds, and hate universities, except of course 'Bob Jones' style schools.