First hand account of torture at Gitmo by-get this-a Zambian/Brit

[HamdenRice]

Does this man look like an Afghan Taliban or al-Queda to you?



This just shows the idiocy of detention without a hearing. Here's a guy who was of dual Zambian-British nationality, having grown up in the UK from the age of 3. He went to study Islam in Afghanistan and fled to Pakistan after the war started. Apparently, however, he had lost his UK passport in Afghanistan and it ended up in a Taliban/Queda cave. Even though he could document being in Pakistan, rather than Afghanistan, during the fighting, he was arrested when he visited relatives in Zambia on the way home to Britain and was sent to Gitmo for almost three years, without trial, where he was tortured to try to get him to confess his non-existent relationship to the Taliban or al-Queda.

It also shows that the policy of detention without trial and torture are further creating monsters of our own troops.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1406987,00.html

How I entered the hellish world of Guantanamo Bay
Sunday February 6, 2005
The Observer

Martin Mubanga can date the low point of his 33 months at Guantánamo Bay: 15 June, 2004. That sweltering Cuban morning, he was taken from the cellblock he was sharing with speakers of the Afghan language Pashto, none of whom knew English, for what had become his almost daily interrogation. As usual, his hands were shackled in rigid, metal cuffs attached to a body belt; another set of chains ran to his ankles, severely restricting his ability to move his legs. Trussed in this fashion, he was lying on the interrogation booth floor.

The seemingly interminable questioning had already lasted for hours. 'I needed the toilet,' Mubanga said, 'and I asked the interrogator to let me go. But he just said, "you'll go when I say so". I told him he had five minutes to get me to the toilet or I was going to go on the floor. He left the room. Finally, I squirmed across the floor and did it in the corner, trying to minimise the mess. I suppose he was watching through a one-way mirror or the CCTV camera. He comes back with a mop and dips it in the pool of urine. Then he starts covering me with my own waste, like he's using a big paintbrush, working methodically, beginning with my feet and ankles and working his way up my legs. All the while he's racially abusing me, cussing me: "Oh, the poor little negro, the poor little nigger." He seemed to think it was funny.'

<snip>

After several hours of questioning, Mubanga felt severely dehydrated and begged for a bottle of water. Once again he was lying on the floor: the interrogation booth chair had been removed. As he tried to drink and cool himself by spraying a little water around his face and hair, Mubanga said, the interrogator turned violent: 'The guy started kneeling on me, and I was wriggling backwards to get away from him, trying to get in the line of sight of the CCTV camera so someone might see what was going on. Of course, he didn't want to let me do that, so he stood on my hair. It was painful, but I tried to keep moving. Then he stood on the leg chain, so my shackles dug in really deeply, cutting into my legs. But I just took the pain. I'm looking at him, the pain's getting worse but I wouldn't scream out. I just kept looking at him. From that day on, I refused to talk to any interrogator. I said nothing at all for the next seven months.'

<snip>

'I think it was one last attempt to get me to go crazy. One guy went back to Camp Delta after six months in Camp Echo. He'd lost his mind completely.' Mubanga remains deeply concerned about some of the prisoners he met in Guantánamo. One is a former al-Jazeera reporter arrested in Afghanistan whom he saw being assaulted brutally by the IRF, leaving him with black eyes which took weeks to go down. 'There's also a lot of people there who think they'll be killed if they ever went back to their own coun tries. They're in limbo. As far as they're concerned, it's open season for the American government.'

END OF ARTICLE