ZGram - 3/16/2004 - "Guantanamo - Part II"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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

March 16, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is the second of a three-part series on the Guantanamo situation 
- horrific!  You will see how confessions are wrought, and how 
totally innocent people can be smeared. 

Here is Part II as it appeared in the Observer, dated March 14, 2004:

[START]

Two days after the three talked to the Red Cross, Dostum's troops put 
them in chains, marched them through the main gate and handed them 
over to American special forces. Ahmed says: 'They put something like 
a sandbag over my head so you could see nothing. Then we got thrown 
on to a truck. They taped the sacks at the bottom of our necks, 
making it difficult to breathe.'

The Americans took them to Shebargan airport, where they were beaten, 
then loaded on a plane. 'I wanted to use the toilet,' Rasul says. 
'Someone smacked me on the back of my head with his gun. I started 
peeing myself.'

Trussed like chickens, their chains replaced by plastic ties, they 
were flown to the US detention centre at Kandahar. The weather was 
freezing. Wearing only thin salwar kameez, with no socks or shoes, 
they were tied together with a rope and led into the camp, where they 
waited to be processed.

In the very different setting of a sitting room in suburban England, 
Iqbal demonstrates how they were made to kneel bent double, with 
their foreheads touching the ground: 'If your head wasn't touching 
the floor or you let it rise up a little they put their boots on the 
back of your neck and forced it down. We were kept like that for two 
or three hours.'

Rasul adds: 'I lifted up my head slightly because I was really in 
pain. The sergeant came up behind me, kicked my legs from underneath 
me, then knelt on my back. They took me outside and searched me while 
one man was sitting on me, kicking and punching.'

All this time they were still wearing their hoods. Then one soldier 
took a Stanley knife and cut off their clothes. Naked and freezing, 
they were made to squat while the soldiers searched their bodily 
cavities and photographed them. At last, they say, they were 
frog-marched through a barbed wire maze and put into a half-open tent 
where they were told to dress in blue prison overalls.

They had not washed since the container massacre a month earlier. 
There, Iqbal had sustained a ricochet wound to the elbow. Displaying 
an ugly purple scar, he explains that by the time he reached 
Kandahar, it had become infected. It was late at night by the time 
they had been processed, but next morning, they say, they were taken 
straight to their first interrogation. Rasul says: 'A special forces 
guy sat there holding a gun to my temple, a 9mm pistol. He said if I 
made any movement he'd blow my head off.'

Each endured several such sessions at Kandahar: each time, they say, 
they were questioned on their knees, in chains, always at gunpoint. 
Often they were kicked or beaten. (Other released detainees have 
described Kandahar in similar terms.)

Not all their interrogators were American. Iqbal and Rasul also 
describe an English officer in a maroon beret who said he was a 
member of the SAS. 'He had a posh English accent,' Rasul says. 'He 
mentioned the names of British prisons like Belmarsh and said we'd 
end up there.' Iqbal says the SAS officer told him: 'Don't worry, you 
won't be beaten today because you're with me.'

Ahmed says he was also questioned by an officer from MI5 and another 
Englishman who said he was from the British Embassy. 'All the time I 
was kneeling with a guy standing on the backs of my legs and another 
holding a gun to my head. The MI5 man says: "I'm from the UK, I'm 
from MI5, and I've got some questions for you." He says he was called 
Dave. He told me: "We've got your names, we've got your passports, we 
know you've been funded by an extremist group and we know you've been 
to this mosque in Birmingham. We've got photos of you." None of this 
was true.

'The second occasion was on the morning I left - they said I was 
going home. In fact I was on my way to Cuba.'

As Muslims, they were shocked when in repeated 'shakedown' searches 
of the sleeping tents, copies of the Koran would be trampled on by 
soldiers and, on one occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket. 
Throughout their stay at Kandahar the guards carried out head-counts 
every hour at night to keep the prisoners awake.

Rasul says: 'You'd just be dozing off and then you were made to get 
up, and that's the way it was all the way to morning.'

To Cuba

At 3AM on 13 January 2002, Rasul was moved to a new tent with Iqbal. 
Next morning their numbers were called out and they were made to sit 
while soldiers chained them tightly, sat them in a tent and attached 
another chain to a hook on the floor. 'These guys came in with 
clippers,' Rasul says, 'they shaved my hair and my beard; they cut 
all my clothes off and threw this medication over me, to kill the 
lice. Then they unlocked me from the floor and led me into another 
tent naked where they forced me to squat again and did another 
intimate cavity search.'

Instead of the blue overalls they were dressed in orange jumpsuits, 
chained and cuffed and made to wear thick gloves taped to their 
sleeves. Then, says Rasul: 'They made us sit outside on the gravel 
while they processed everyone. We had no water all day, but towards 
the end they gave us an MRE [a ready-to-eat US army meal] but no 
spoon. I had to try and trough it like an animal.'

The restraint device they were now forced to wear would become 
extremely familiar for the next 26 months - the 'three-piece suit', a 
body belt with a metal chain leading down to leg-irons with 
hand-shackles attached to it. Rasul says: 'I told the guard they'd 
put it on much too tight and he said: "You'll live." '

Before boarding a military aircraft they were dressed in earmuffs, 
goggles and surgical masks. Inside, they were chained to the floor 
with no backrests, and even when they requested the toilet, they were 
not released from their chains. 'Basically people wet their pants. 
You were pissing all over your legs.'

'The only thing that relieved the sensory deprivation and occupied me 
for the 22-hour flight was that I was in serious pain,' Rasul says. 
'The guards told me to go to sleep but the belt was digging into me - 
when I finally got to Cuba I was bleeding. I lost feeling in my hands 
for the next six months.'

Rasul and Iqbal were on the second flight to the new Camp X-ray - the 
first had been three days earlier. (The Australian David Hicks and 
another British prisoner, Feroz Abbasi, were on that first flight.) 
Ahmed followed on 10 February on the fifth flight from Kandahar to 
Guantanamo Bay. 'When I got there,' he says, 'I was half dead. We had 
a two-hour stopover somewhere in Turkey. As we were being 
frog-marched from one plane to another, one of the guards stamped on 
the metal body bar of my three-piece suit so the leg-irons bit deeply 
into the flesh of my ankles.'

But Ahmed, at least, had been told where he was going. When Rasul and 
Iqbal landed they had no idea where they were: 'All I knew was that I 
was somewhere with intense heat,' Rasul says. 'An American voice 
shouted: "I am Sergeant so-and-so, US Marine Corps, you are arriving 
at your final destination." '

The Guantanamo airstrip lies a three-mile ferry journey across the 
bay from the detention facilities, a journey the prisoners made in a 
school bus. Iqbal says: 'The boat was moving in the swell, making the 
bus rock and the American guy says: "Stop moving." I couldn't stop, 
so he hit me.' Rasul made the mistake of telling a guard he was 
English. 'Traitor,' he yelled. Later, when Ahmed took the ferry, he 
heard a guard whispering: "This motherfucker speaks English." 
Repeatedly the guard kicked his leg: 'I couldn't move it for days, it 
was so badly bruised.'

At last they arrived at Camp X-ray, and became part of the group of 
orange-jumpsuited prisoners kneeling in the dust, still shackled and 
blindfolded, whose images went round the world. Rasul says: 'They 
made us kneel in that awkward way, and every time you moved, someone 
would kick you.

'The sun was beating down and the sweat was pouring into my eyes. I 
shouted for a doctor, someone poured water into my eyes and then I 
heard it again: "Traitor, traitor." ' Rasul was the last one 
processed, and by the time he got to his cage it was dark. First he 
was stripped naked and, still wearing his goggles and chains, he was 
given a piece of soap and told to shower for the first time since his 
capture. 'I looked around and I thought what the hell is this place?'

Iqbal recalls the moment his goggles were finally removed: 'I look up 
and I see all these other people who hadn't yet been processed in 
orange suits and goggles and I think I'm hallucinating.' Two days 
after arriving in Guantanamo Bay, with his family still desperate for 
information as to his whereabouts, Rasul was taken in his three-piece 
metal suit to an interrogation tent. 'I walk in and this guy says: 
"I'm from the Foreign Office, I've come from the British Embassy in 
America, and here is one of my colleagues who's from the embassy as 
well." Later he added his colleague was actually from MI5.'

Rasul asked where he was and the British officials replied: 'We can't 
disclose that information.' His family heard nothing for another 
three weeks. It would be many months before the British Government - 
which, in public, was voicing deep concerns about the lack of legal 
process at Guantanamo, and claiming it was trying to exert diplomatic 
pressure - would confirm that its own Security Service had connived 
from the outset.

Camp X-ray

In the early days at Camp X-ray, the conditions of detention were extreme.

The detainees were forbidden from talking to the person in the next 
cell and, Rasul recalls, fed tiny portions of food: 'They'd give you 
this big plate with a tiny pile of rice and a few beans. It was 
nouvelle cuisine, American-style. You were given less than 10 minutes 
to eat and if you hadn't finished the Marines would just take your 
plate away.' After a few more days Rasul was questioned again by MI5. 
The officer asked how he was. 'I started crying, saying I can't 
believe I'm here. He says: "I don't want to know how you are 
emotionally, I'm only interested in your physical state." '

After about a week the prisoners were allowed to speak to detainees 
in adjacent cells, and a few weeks later still were given copies of 
the Koran, a prayer mat, blankets and towels. Yet all witnessed or 
experienced brutality, especially from Guantanamo's own riot squad, 
the Extreme Reaction Force. Its acronym has led to a new verb 
peculiar to Guantanamo detainees: 'ERF-ing.' To be ERFed, says Rasul, 
means to be slammed on the floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, 
pinned to the ground and assaulted.

Iqbal and Rasul were at opposite ends of the same block and were 
forbidden from talking to each other. There was almost nothing to do. 
'Time speeds up,' Rasul says. 'You just stare and the hours go 
clicking by. You'd look at people and see they'd lost it. There was 
nothing in their eyes any more. They didn't talk.'

[END]


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