ZGram - 3/15/2004 - "Guantanamo - Part I"

zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
Wed Mar 17 14:53:52 EST 2004




Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

March 15, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Today I will start a three-part series on the Guantanamo situation - 
an article which, had it not come from a reputable paper in Britain, 
I would not have dared to run.  It is gruesome.  You will see how 
confessions are wrought, and how totally innocent people can be 
smeared.

Here is Part I:

[START]

How we survived jail hell

For two years the Tipton Three have been silent prisoners in 
Guantanamo Bay. Now, in this remarkable interview with David Rose, 
they describe for the first time the extraordinary story of their 
journey from the West Midlands to Camp Delta

Sunday March 14, 2004
The Observer

'When I woke up I didn't know where I was. I'd lost consciousness at 
the side of the container, but when I woke up I was in the middle - 
lying on top of dead bodies, breathing the stench of their blood and 
urine.

'They'd herded maybe 300 of us into each container, the type you get 
on ordinary lorries, packed in so tightly our knees were against our 
chests, and almost immediately we started to suffocate. We lived 
because someone made holes with a machine gun, though they were 
shooting low and still more died from the bullets. When we got out, 
about 20 in each container were still alive.'

In a safe house in southern England at the weekend, Asif Iqbal was 
describing his survival, together with his friends Ruhal Ahmed and 
Shafiq Rasul, after a massacre by US-backed Northern Alliance forces 
in Afghanistan - the start of a 26-month nightmare which ended last 
week with their release from the American detention camp at 
Guantanamo Bay.

Their faces gaunt with accumulated stress and exhaustion, they spoke 
softly, still stunned by the change in their circumstances: 'I just 
can't believe we're sitting here,' Ahmed says. 'This time last week, 
we were in the cages at Guantanamo.'

The horror of their story needs no embellishment. One day, perhaps, 
there will be an inquiry into Guantanamo. Until then, some of their 
allegations - which, it can be assumed, America is likely to deny - 
cannot be corroborated. However, many of the experiences they 
describe, including gunpoint interrogations in Afghanistan and random 
brutality both there and in Guantanamo, have been related in 
identical terms by other freed detainees. Last October I spent four 
days at Guantanamo. Much of what the three men say about the regime 
and the camp's physical conditions I either saw or heard from US 
officials.

Having escaped the truck container massacre, they endured 
near-starvation in a jail run by the Afghan warlord, General Dostum. 
When the Red Cross appeared and promised to make contact with the 
British Embassy in Islamabad they thought they were going home. 
Instead, with the apparent agreement of British officials, they were 
handed over to the Americans, first for weeks of physical abuse at a 
detention camp in Kandahar, followed by more than two years in the 
desolation of Guantanamo.

Month after month they were interrogated, for 12 hours or more at a 
time, by American security agencies and, repeatedly, by MI5 - in all, 
they say, they endured 200 sessions each. But when they re-emerged to 
freedom on Wednesday after two final days of questioning at 
Paddington Green police station, every apparent shred of evidence had 
melted away. Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed, together with the other early 
arrivals at Guantanamo, had been described by US Defence Secretary 
Donald Rumsfeld as 'the hardest of the hard core', lethal terrorists 
'involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans'. Even last 
week the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was claiming America 
had been justified in holding them.

Yet despite the denial of legal rights or due process, the 
authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have been forced to accept 
what the three men said all along - that they were never members of 
the Taliban, al-Qaeda or any other militant group. The Americans had 
justified their detention by claiming they were 'enemy combatants', 
but they were never armed and did not fight.

'They formally told us we were going home last Sunday [several weeks 
after this news was relayed to the media],' Rasul said. 'We had a 
final meeting with the FBI, and they tried to get us to sign a piece 
of paper which said something like I was admitting I'd had links with 
terrorism, and that if I ever did anything like this again the US 
could arrest me.' Like the other two detainees freed last week, Tarek 
Dergoul and Jamal al-Harith, they refused.

'They took us to the airport in chains,' said Rasul, 'and when we got 
there this huge plane was surrounded by armed men. As we walked 
towards the steps they had guns trained on us. This military police 
guy hands us over to the British, takes off our shackles and tells 
the Brit he can put on the handcuffs. But the British policemen say, 
"no, no, there's no need for handcuffs". We walk up the steps and 
they're not even touching me.

'For the first time in two years I'm walking somewhere without being 
frogmarched. We get to the door and someone says: "Good morning. 
Welcome aboard." '

Capture

Rasul, 26, Ahmed, 22, and Iqbal, 22, were boyhood friends from the 
Midlands town of Tipton. In Septem ber 2001 they travelled to 
Pakistan ahead of the marriage Iqbal's parents had arranged for him 
to a woman in Faisalabad. Ahmed was to be best man; Rasul hoped to do 
a computer course after the wedding.

The three were in no sense fundamentalists: their brand of Islam, 
they say, was never that of the Taliban. But like many young Muslims 
in Pakistan they crossed the border into Afghanistan in October 2001, 
as it became clear that, in the wake of the 11 September attacks on 
America, one of the poorest countries in the world was about to be 
attacked. They had no intention of joining the fighting, they insist, 
but only of giving humanitarian aid. In England, none of them was 
rich, but in Asia, the little money they had could go a long way. For 
a short time they used the savings accumulated for their trip to buy 
food and medical supplies for Afghan villagers.

But in Taliban-led Afghanistan one aspect of their appearance made 
them dangerously visible - they had no beards. Travelling through a 
bombed landscape, they tried to escape in a taxi. But instead of 
reaching safety they were driven further into danger - to the city of 
Kunduz, which was promptly surrounded and bombarded by Dostum's 
troops. Aware that a bloodbath was imminent, they tried to leave on a 
convoy of trucks but their own vehicle was shelled, killing almost 
everyone on board. 'We were trapped,' says Iqbal. 'There was nothing 
we could do but give ourselves up. They took our money, our shoes, 
all our warm clothes, and put us in lines.'

They were part of a vast column of prisoners, around 35,000, says 
Rasul: 'You'd look down the slope and there were lines and lines of 
people, as far as the eye could see. We went through the mountains 
and the open desert. There were these massive ditches full of bodies. 
We thought this was the end. We thought they were going to kill us 
all.' Many of the prisoners were wounded and died by the wayside.

After two days they ended up outside Shebargan prison and crammed 
into the containers - it was night, says Iqbal, and the massacre 
began under the glare of spotlights which the three men claim were 
operated by American special forces. 'The last thing I remember is 
that it got really hot, and everyone started screaming and banging. 
It was like someone had lit a fire beneath the containers. You could 
feel the moisture running off your body, and people were ripping off 
their clothes.'

When he came to, Iqbal had not drunk for more than two days. Maddened 
by thirst, he wiped the streaming walls with a cloth, and sucked out 
the moisture, until he realised he was drinking the bodily fluids of 
the massacred prisoners. 'We were like zombies,' Iqbal says. 'We 
stank, we were covered in blood and the smell of death.'

Freed from the trucks which had become mass graves, they were taken 
into Shebargan prison, where they were held in appalling conditions 
for the next month. Much was open to the elements, and to make room 
inside its bare communal cells the prisoners lay down in four-hour 
shifts. They were fed a quarter of a naan bread a day, with a small 
cup of water: sometimes, says Rasul, there were fights over the 
rations. Often snow blew into the buildings.

Rasul says: 'There were people with horrific injuries - limbs that 
had been shot off and nothing was done. I'll never forget one Arab 
who was missing half his jaw. For 10 days until his death he was 
screaming and crying continuously, begging to be killed.'

A few days earlier Taliban prisoners had organised the uprising 
against their captors at Qala-i-Jhangi Fort at Mazar-e-Sharif, and 
western reporters paid a visit to Shebargan. They seemed blind to the 
misery there, Rasul says. 'All they seemed to be interested in was if 
any of us knew the American Taliban John Walker Lindh.'

After 10 days the Red Cross arrived, bringing some improvement and an 
increase in the water supply. But by now all three were malnourished 
and suffering from amoebic dysentery. Ahmed says: 'We were covered 
with lice. All day long you were scratching, scratching. I was 
bleeding from my chest, my head.' Iqbal adds: 'We lost so much weight 
that if I stood up I could carry water in the gap between my collar 
bones and my flesh.'

Prisoners died daily: of the 35,000 originally marched through the 
desert, only 4,500 were still alive, the three men estimate. All this 
time they could see American troops 50 metres from their prison wing 
on the other side of the gates.

Beatings

After a month of this living hell, on 27 or 28 December, the Red 
Cross spoke to the three and promised they would contact the British 
Embassy in Islamabad and ask them to intervene on their behalf and 
notify their families that they were alive. Rasul's brother, Habib, 
says he had contacted the Foreign Office at the end of November and 
asked for help in tracing his missing brother.

In fact, very soon, the three would meet British officials. But Habib 
would be told nothing until February 8 - three weeks after his 
brother's arrival in Guantanamo.

[END]


Reminder: 

Help free Ernst Zundel, Prisoner of Conscience.  His prison sketches 
- now on-line and highly popular - help pay for his defence.  Take a 
look - and tell a friend.

http://www.zundelsite.org/gallery/donations/index.html






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