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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Prisons : Regime |
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FORMER GUANTANAMO DETAINEES RELEASE 115-PAGE REPORT |
Current rating: 0 |
by Center for Constitutional Rights
(No verified email address) |
04 Aug 2004
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New reports shows that Abu Ghraib abuses were only the tip of the iceberg, part of a larger, systematic policy of the Bush Adminstration and US military to violate human rights and to conceal their war crimes |
Synopsis
In a detailed report, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed provide a graphic first-hand account of life at Guantanamo Bay. On August 4, 2004, attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) sent the report detailing the former Guantánamo detainees' experiences to Senators Warner, Levin and Leahy and called for an independent commission to investigate the allegations of abuse.
The 115-page report is testimony by the three young men from Tipton, a poor neighborhood in the West Midlands of England with a small community of Pakistani and Bangladeshi people. All three were detained in Northern Afghanistan on November 28, 2001. In March of 2004, after 2 ½ years in extreme conditions, they were released to the U.K. They were never charged with any crime and were released shortly after they returned. The men completed this report solely to let the world know the truth about what is happening to the prisoners at Guantánamo and in the hope that their testimony might help improve conditions for those still there. The document was compiled by the Tipton men and their attorney, noted British civil rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.
The report details the several weeks that Rasul and Iqbal were held in open cages at Camp X-Ray, allowed out for only a few minutes each week for one shower, and otherwise left to swelter in the Cuban heat. Scorpions and snakes were allowed to roam the cells, and many prisoners were bitten. According the report, the US marines who ran the camp were “very brutal,” and the abusive treatment was focused in a carefully planned and sophisticated manner to have maximum impact on the individual prisoner:
• The report discusses the sexual humiliation of the prisoners that first began when General Geoffrey Miller, later of Abu Ghraib notoriety, came to Guantánamo. For example, the prisoners would be stripped naked and forced to watch videotapes of other prisoners who, in turn, had been ordered to sodomize each other. The sexual humiliation was reserved for those who would be most impacted by it, those who had been brought up strictly in their Muslim faith.
• The religious humiliation was similarly focused. The guards would throw the prisoners’ Korans into the toilet. They would forcibly shave the prisoners. There was a clear policy to try to force people to abandon their religious faith.
• The prisoners would be forcibly injected with unidentified drugs as part of the interrogation process. They were told they could only get medical care if they cooperated.
• Some among the British detainees – Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi – have been held in total isolation for well over a year.
It is hardly surprising that as a result of these abusive and torturous tactics, prisoners routinely confessed to things they had not (and could not have) done. After endless pressure, Asif Iqbal agreed that he was the person interrogators pointed to on a videotape with Osama Bin Laden. The interrogator said, “I’ve put detainees here in isolation for 12 months and eventually they’ve broken. You might as well admit it now so that you don’t have to stay in isolation.” After being in the isolation cells for about six weeks, Asif finally said, “Okay, it’s me.” It was his pure good fortune that this was disproved by British Intelligence – in truth, along with the other Tipton men, he was living and working around Birmingham at the time the videotape was made.
Commenting on the report, Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, stated, “It is clear from the allegations made in the Tipton Three report that Congress must immediately establish a commission independent of the Department of Defense to investigate the abuses at Guantánamo. What happened to these individuals is Kafkaesque. Any door that opened led to more coercive interrogations from which there was no exit. This report calls into question the reliability of any information or confession obtained from any detainee. Every bit of information has been acquired by unlawful coercive techniques.”
“It is a very sad day for the United States, and humanity in general, to learn the details of what has been happening at Guantánamo Bay,” said Clive Stafford Smith, founder of Reprieve and a lawyer for many of the detainees. “It is torture pure and simple. It is cruel, and it is pointless. We have known since the Middle Ages that no useful information can come out of coerced confessions.”
CCR represented Mr. Rasul and Mr. Iqbal in Rasul v. Bush, the historic Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the Bush Administration’s policy of indefinitely holding detainees at Guantánamo Bay without judicial review. In its ruling the Court held that foreign terrorism suspects may use the American legal system to challenge their detention.
> * Report of Former Guantanamo Detainees (PDF) 237 KB
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/docs/Gitmo-compositestatementFINAL23july04.pdf
© 2004 CCR
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Questioned at Gunpoint, Shackled, Forced to Pose Naked |
by Vikram Dodd and Tania Branigan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Aug 2004
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Britain and the US last night faced fresh allegations of abuses after a British terror suspect said an SAS soldier had interrogated him for three hours while an American colleague pointed a gun at him and threatened to shoot him.
The allegation is contained in a new dossier detailing repeated beatings and humiliation suffered by three Britons who were captured in Afghanistan, then held in Guantánamo Bay for two years, before being released in March without charge.
Rhuhel Ahmed, one of the "Tipton Three", claims in the 115-page dossier that shortly after his capture in November 2001 he was interviewed in Afghanistan by a British interrogator who said he was from the SAS. Mr Ahmed alleges he was taken by US guards to be interrogated by the British officer in a tent. "One of the US soldiers had a gun to his head and he was told if he moved they would shoot him," the report says. The SAS officer pressed him to admit he had gone to Afghanistan to fight a holy war. Last night the Ministry of Defense said it would investigate the allegation.
A spokesman said: "The British army follows the rules laid out in the Geneva convention and soldiers are told to follow that. It is not permissible to point guns at people's heads during interrogation. We would investigate if any allegation of that nature is made."
The dossier, based on two months of interviews by the men's lawyers, provides the first full account by the three Britons of their ordeal as terror suspects.
Details of the experiences of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, all from the same small Midlands town, are revealed today by the Guardian, and will be formally released this afternoon in the US. The three Britons allege they were repeatedly beaten, shackled in painful positions during interrogations and subjected to sleep deprivation. On one occasion, Mr Iqbal recalled: "I was left in a room and strobe lighting was put on and very loud music. It was a dance version of Eminem played repeatedly."
Mr Rasul said he was asked: "If I wanted to get surface-to-air missiles from someone in Tipton, who would I go to?"
In an echo of the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad which shamed Washington, the three Britons, held as illegal enemy combatants by the US, say they were photographed naked and subjected to anal searches unnecessarily, after being shackled for hours.
The three claim their interrogators, from a phalanx of US intelligence agencies including the CIA, accused them of being in a video shot in 2000 alongside Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader, and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the September 11 attack. At the time one of the three was working in a Currys electrical store in the Midlands and two others were in trouble with the British police. Despite this, all three say the pain they were in and ill treatment led them confess to being in the video.
The dossier also alleges complicity by Britain in their treatment. The three challenge a claim by the Foreign Office junior minister, Chris Mullin, who in the Commons said no Briton had complained of their treatment in Guantánamo. Mr Iqbal says a British embassy official took down a two-page list of alleged abuses, while the two others say they made their complaints orally. Mr Rasul says he was interrogated by British personnel up to seven times, with MI5 officers questioning the Britons repeatedly.
On June 4 last year Tony Blair told the Commons: "Information is still coming from people detained there ... that information is important."
In the dossier the Britons say the level of mental illness among detainees is higher than admitted by the US. The Tipton Three say guards told them that a fellow British detainee, Moazzam Begg, still imprisoned in Guantánamo, had been kept in isolation and "was in a very bad way". They say that Jamil el-Banna, of London, was so traumatized that "mentally, basically, he's finished".
Mr Banna is a Jordanian citizen with refugee status in Britain, but the government refuses to represent him. It also refuses to represent another Londoner, Bisher al-Rawi, originally from Iraq, who lived in Kingston, south-west London.
Lawyer Gareth Peirce said the report showed Britain's complicity in the human rights abuses at Guantánamo: "The [British government] attitude displayed the hypocrisy of the public face in the UK saying we're doing all we can and the private face there in Guantánamo involved up to their elbows in the oppression."
Nine Britons were imprisoned in Guantánamo without charge or access to a lawyer. The Tipton Three were among five released in March, who were questioned on arrival in Britain before being released. Four Britons remain in Guantánamo, as well as four British residents.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk |
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