ZGram - 3/15/2004 - "Guantanamo - Part I"
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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:
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http://www.zundelsite.org/gallery/donations/index.html
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