Man Survives Guantánamo Hell, Tells Story

[Stop_the_War]

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

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. any other country besides Germany filing war crimes charges?

Bush and his mininos are committing atrocities and should be held accountable.

[Swamp Rat]

2. Wow!

Mubanga the poet:

"Dem labelled me a

terrorist

Calling me a thug.

Dem labelled me a terrorist

Calling me a slug... But I never did join bin Laden's crew anyway And now me know to be a Muslim is a hard core ting...

And I got no love for the American government

Dey can go suck and I don't mean peppermint.

Now hear da bombs drop

As de Muslim babies, dem a die,

Now hear de bombs drop

As de Muslim mothers dem a cry

Now hear de bombs drop

As de Muslim soldiers dem a fly

Why? Because dey no want fe die."

[indigobusiness]

3. How I entered the hellish world of Guantanamo Bay

How I entered the hellish world of Guantanamo Bay

Martin Mubanga went on holiday to Zambia, but ended up spending 33 months in Guantanamo Bay, some of the time in the feared Camp Echo. Free at last and still protesting his innocence, he tells the full story to David Rose

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.'

A few days later, Mubanga said, the same interrogator began to question him in one of the camp's 'hot rooms', where the heating was turned up to almost 100F. 'When you went for interrogation, you never knew whether they were going to take you to a booth where the air conditioning was turned up to the max, so it was really cold, or a hot room,' Mubanga said. 'This made life very difficult, because you only had two T-shirts in your cell, and if you wore just one in a cold room you'd be freezing, but wearing two in a hot room was almost unbearable. The thing was, once you were in there in your chains, it was impossible to take one off.'

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.'

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

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Thanks. I'm reposting this in Articles, to keep it alive for while.