Guantanamo Bay

[j corlett]

Subject: British resident has claimed he was tortured by US guards at Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an attack in which he was blinded.
Date: Monday, April 25, 2005 3:11 PM

> US guards at Guantanamo tortured me, says UK man
>
> Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
>
> sent by Simon McGuinness
>
> [This is the kind of human rights abuses that have the tacit support of
> the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The details here are
> entirely new and as shocking as anything we have heard before.  This
> legally trained victim, who speaks good English, is very credible.  The
> only logical course of action open to the UNHCR is to resign en mass in
> shame.]
>
> The Independent - 24 April 2005
> http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=632488
>
> US guards at Guantanamo tortured me, says UK man
>
> By Severin Carrell
>
> A British resident has claimed he was tortured by US guards at
> Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an
> attack in which he was blinded.
>
> The Independent on Sunday has been given a detailed account from Omar
> Deghayes of repeated abuse by American and Pakistani interrogators over
> the past three years including electric shocks and sodomy by US guards.
>
> The allegations, made by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, have
> persuaded British ministers to take up Mr Deghayes's case.
>
> In some of the most disturbing allegations to emerge from Guantanamo,
> Mr
> Deghayes also accuses US and Pakistani interrogators of beating him
> repeatedly since his arrest three years ago, smearing his face with
> human excrement, starving him of food, and withdrawing light and
> clothing.
>
> In a detailed 10-page account Mr Deghayes, whose family fled Libya
> after
> his father, a prominent lawyer and trade unionist, was allegedly
> murdered by agents of Muammar Gaddafi in 1980, claims:
>
> * Pakistani interrogators put him in a "snake room" with glass cases
> holding poisonous snakes to make him confess, and tortured him with
> electric shocks;
>
> * Members of the US "extreme reaction force" at Guantanamo Bay blinded
> him in his already weak right eye with Mace riot control gas and by
> gouging it with a finger;
>
> * At Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, US guards allegedly sodomised five
> detainees, and forced petrol and benzene into the anuses of others;
>
> * In Pakistan, two interrogators tied him to a bench, repeatedly
> whipped
> him with wooden canes in turns and threatened with him rape;
>
> * British intelligence officers interrogated him in Pakistan - adding
> to
> allegations that MI6 and MI5 collaborated in the arrests of many of the
> British residents in Guantanamo Bay.
>
> Mr Deghayes's testimony was recorded during more than 20 hours of
> interviews by his US attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, in a Guantanamo
> Bay
> cell in January and March this year, and has only recently been cleared
> by US Department of Justice censors.
>
> Mr Stafford Smith said he found Mr Deghayes's testimony "totally
> credible". He added: "He has been treated worse in Guantanamo than any
> other person I have come across. He is legally trained and tries to
> help
> other people there, so the Americans think he's a trouble-maker.
> Consequently, he's suffered for it."
>
> The claims are understood to have shocked the Foreign Office minister
> Baroness Symons, and played a major part in the Government's decision
> to
> directly intervene in the cases of five British residents still held at
> Guantanamo Bay. Until now, the UK has refused to intervene.
>
> The Government has been under intense pressure to lobby for the release
> of Mr Deghayes and the other British residents - a Jordanian, an Iraqi,
> a Saudi Arabian and a Ugandan who have lived in Britain for up to 20
> years as refugees or permanent residents. Mr Deghayes's family,
> including his mother and wife, an Afghani, live in Brighton.
>
> All five men - and up to four others believed to have close British
> ties
> - are in legal limbo because they kept their original nationality to
> reclaim property or have legal rights in their country of origin. Their
> parents, wives and children are British citizens, but the Foreign
> Office
> says their foreign nationality bars the UK from formally representing
> the men. None of their home countries has intervened. The US has also
> refused to give the UK any access to them.
>
> Mr Deghayes's case has alarmed human rights lawyers because the US has
> allowed Libyan intelligence officers to interrogate him in Cuba - even
> though he is a refugee from Col Gaddafi's regime.
>
> Mr Stafford Smith said they could now "conclusively prove" that Mr
> Deghayes was the victim of mistaken identity. They had established that
> video footage allegedly showing him in Chechnya was of another man, who
> is now dead. Mr Deghayes had never been to Chechnya, the lawyer
> insisted.
>
> Mr Deghayes was seized in the Pakistani city of Lahore in April 2002 by
> armed local intelligence officers, and alleges he was immediately
> subjected to repeated torture, threats against his wife and children,
> and violent assaults by his captors.
>
> He claims the Pakistani interrogators told him they were holding him at
> US request, and insisted they had no interest in him. He claimed: "I
> underwent systematic beatings every night for three days. Each time,
> when I was nearly unconscious, I would be thrown back into the cell to
> await more."
>
> After several weeks in Lahore, he said, he was taken to the Pakistani
> capital Islamabad where he claims to have been interrogated by both
> British and US intelligence officers. He alleges he was "similarly
> abused" there for approximately a month, including having his head
> forcibly held under water in a large drum "until I was almost drowned".
>
> Mr Deghayes was terrorised by one technique - shoving prisoners into a
> chamber nicknamed the "snake room". The Libyan claimed: "One day they
> took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes. The room
> was painted black and white, with dim lights. They threatened to leave
> me there, and let the snakes out with me in the room. This really got
> to
> me, as these were such sick people that they must have had this room
> specially made."
>
> Over his two months in Afghanistan, he added, they starved him of food
> for nearly eight days, deprived him of light "for days on end",
> "effectively suffocated" him in an airtight box, and subjected him to
> beatings and being forced to live naked for long periods "as part of
> the
> humiliation process".
>
> He added: "The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films ...
> Lying on the floor of the compound, all night I would hear the screams
> of others in the rooms above us, as they were tortured and
> interrogated.
> My number would be called out, and I would have to go to the gate. They
> chained me, and put a bag over my head, dragging me off for my own
> turn.
> They would force me to my knees for questioning. They would threaten me
> with more torture."
>
> In September 2002, Mr Deghayes was transferred to Guantanamo Bay from
> Bagram. Since then, he alleges, he has been repeatedly subjected to
> violent assaults and humiliating ill-treatment. He is now living in
> solitary confinement, in a concrete cell.
>
> The blinding incident came in March last year after the prisoners
> protested against forcible intimate body searches by guards training
> for
> their transfer to Iraq. Mr Stafford Smith recounts: "The prisoners were
> Maced, but they fought back this time. The officer standing behind the
> MPs kept urging them to spray more Mace at Omar's eye. 'More, more', he
> shouted. Then one of the MPs pushed his finger into Omar's eye. Again,
> the officer shouted 'more, more'. Omar was trying desperately not to
> scream, the pain was agonising."
>
> Mr Deghayes was left unable to see in either eye at first. His right
> eye, already weakened by a childhood accident, has been left
> permanently
> "milky white" and blinded, Mr Stafford Smith said.
>
> Other severe assaults involved the camp's "extreme reaction force", a
> form of riot squad allegedly used to quell or punish prisoners. In a
> series of incidents, US personnel smeared another man's faeces in his
> face; he was nearly drowned when water from high-pressure hoses was
> forced up his nose; he had his head shoved into a flushing toilet; had
> his nose nearly broken; and was violently assaulted in the recreation
> yard.
>
> The US government insists it investigates all allegations of
> ill-treatment, and now admits to 10 proven cases of abuse at Guantanamo
> Bay, and at least two detainee murders in Afghanistan. In January, the
> Pentagon launched a fresh inquiry, which reported its findings last
> month, after leaked FBI papers revealed serious allegations of abuse
> witnessed by FBI agents at Camp Delta.
>
> Mr Stafford Smith said Mr Deghayes was now "very, very paranoid because
> they've played so many games with him". However, he added, his client
> "is holding up better than many" at Guantanamo Bay. "All he wants to do
> is to get back home to his family."
>
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