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Despite New Denials by Rumsfeld, Evidence Shows US Military Used Waterboarding-Style Torture

By: LGHR
Published August 7, 2011, in Mohamed al-Qahtani, Murat Kurnaz, Omar Deghayes

by: Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout | Report

Former United States Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld speaking at CPAC 2011
in Washington, DC. Rumsfeld has recently
denied knowledge of any waterboarding
by US military personnel taking place at
Guantanamo Bay. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo, period.”

In his memoir, “Known and Unknown,” Rumsfeld maintained, “To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees,not at Guantanamo or anywhere else in the world.” But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.

Others have insisted as well that the military never waterboarded anyone. Law and national security writer Benjamin Wittes wrote in The New Republic last year that “the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody.” Harper’s columnist Scott Horton also noted last year, “There is no documentation yet of waterboarding at Gitmo, but the case book is far from closed on that score, too.”

Yet, though not widely reported and scattered among various articles and reports on detainee treatment by the military, including first-person accounts, there are a number of stories of forced water choking or drowning, both at Guantanamo and other US military sites.

In little-known testimony in May 2008 before Congress, former Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz testified he endured a form of simulated drowning. In his testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Kurnaz said that under US military captivity at Khadahar, Afghanistan, prior to his transfer to Guantanamo, his head was “dunked under water to simulate drowning.”

Asked by Republican Congressman Rohrabacher if he hadn’t then been waterboarded, Kurnaz responded, “No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called ‘water treatment.’ There was a bucket of water.”

ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?

KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.

Rohrabacher reportedly commented, “The CIA is claiming that only three people have been waterboarded. And this may be a loophole that they’re suggesting that’s not ‘waterboarding.’”

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Guantánamo Bay detainee says interrogation record was blanked

By: Iya
Published July 18, 2010, in Omar Deghayes

A former Guantánamo Bay detainee says that key exchanges from his interrogation by British security service officers have been blacked out or deliberately omitted from the notes to hide the agents’ complicity in torture. Other exchanges, he says, have been removed simply to hide evidence of spurious and potentially embarrassing lines of questioning.

Omar Deghayes, one of six UK detainees suing the government over their clandestine removal to the US base in Cuba, was able for the first time to read notes from his interrogations after they were published by the Guardian last week. He alleges that they provide an inaccurate impression of what took place, and that a true record of his meetings with British security would have shown that he made specific allegations of ill-treatment, starvation and beatings to MI6 and MI5 officers.

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Judges ban Government from giving evidence in secret in Guantanamo damages case

By: LGHR
Published May 4, 2010, in Binyam Mohamed, Jamil El Banna, Martin Mubanga, Omar Deghayes

By James Slack

Judges yesterday delivered another humiliating rebuke to David Miliband by striking down his attempts to hear a damages claim by six ex-Guantanamo Bay residents in secret.

The Court of Appeal ruled that allowing the Government to use secret evidence to defend itself against the men’s allegations of torture and ill-treatment would undermine the ‘most fundamental principles’ of fairness.

Ministers, led by the Foreign Secretary, must now decide whether to surrender to the men’s claims for tens of thousands of pounds in compensation – or fight them on a significantly weakened basis, without the use of secret documents.

Secret evidence: Binyam Mohamed, left, and Jamil El Banna are two of the former Guantanamo Bay detainees seeking to sue the Government for complicity in torture

The men – who include Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who claims the security services were complicit in his torture overseas – had previously been told that parts of MI5 and MI6’s defence could be kept secret.

But the Court of Appeal yesterday said it would ‘take a stand’ against secrecy that would undermine the ‘most fundamental principles of common law’.

The detainees were held in foreign prisons at the instigation of U.S. forces.

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Former Guantánamo detainees set for payouts after winning secrecy appeal

By: LGHR
Published May 4, 2010, in Binyam Mohamed, Bisher Al-Rawi, Jamal el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, MI5, MI6, Omar Deghayes, Richard Belmar

Out-of-court settlements likely after judges say government not to use secret evidence in men’s torture cases, Guardian told

British residents held at Guantánamo Bay could be offered millions of pounds in compensation for wrongful imprisonment and abuse after the court of appeal today dismissed an attempt by MI5 and MI6 to suppress evidence of alleged complicity in torture.

The judges ruled that the unprecedented legal move by Britain’s security and intelligence agencies – which the attorney general and senior Whitehall officials backed – to suppress evidence in a civil trial undermined the principles of common law and open justice.

MI5 and MI6 said evidence in the case should be kept secret from everyone except the judges and “special advocates” (vetted barristers). The Guardian, the Times, the BBC, and the civil rights groups Justice and Liberty intervened, arguing that at stake was the right to a fair and open trial, the right to freedom of expression and the public’s right to know what agents of the state are or have been doing on its behalf.

Former detainees – Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes and Martin Mubanga – deny any involvement in terrorism and allege that MI5 and MI6 aided and abetted each man’s unlawful imprisonment and extraordinary rendition. The five are seeking compensation for abuse and wrongful imprisonment.

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Guantánamo detainee keeps his promise to prisoners

By: LGHR
Published March 28, 2010, in Guantanamo, Omar Deghayes

By Andy Worthington

KENT NEWS: Former Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes paid a visit to Kent to help fulfil a promise made to fellow inmates after six years of captivity.

The Libyan-born British citizen claims he was blinded, beaten and sexually assaulted at the notorious American detention camp between 2002 and 2007, despite having never been charged with an offence.

He is now one of six former Guantánamo detainees who are suing the British government and its intelligence agencies for alleged complicity in their abuse while behind bars.

Mr Deghayes is also featured in a new documentary entitled Outside the Law, which was introduced by co-director Andy Worthington at the University of Kent last week.

He said: “I already knew Andy and knew he had studied the subject deeply.

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Spanish judge to probe Guantanamo torture claims

By: LGHR
Published January 30, 2010, in Jamil El Banna, Omar Deghayes, Torture

MADRID — Spain’s top investigating judge Baltasar Garzon is to probe suspected torture and ill-treatment of inmates at the US prison of Guantanamo Bay, a judical source said Saturday.

The judge will be acting on complaints lodged by a number of associations, focussing on one prisoner, Ahmed Abderraman Hamed, who has Spanish nationality, the source added, confirming a report published in daily El Pais

Three other detainees, Moroccan Lahcen Ikasrrien, Palestinian Jamiel Abdulatif al-Banna and Libyan Omar Deghayes would also be concerned as they had links with Spain.

In 2005 Spain declared itself competent to investigate any crime committed abroad, but after diplomatic problems the scope of the inquiries was reduced in 2009.

Spanish courts can now deal only with cases that have a clear link with Spain, or cases that are not being investigated in countries where the offences are alleged to have been committed.

El Pais said Washington had not replied to a request made seven months ago from Madrid as to whether it was investigating the allegations now being taken up by Garzon, who is best-known internationally for his pursuit of Latin American dictators.

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How I fought to survive Guantánamo

By: LGHR
Published January 20, 2010, in Omar Deghayes

Patrick Barkham

For nearly six years, British resident Omar Deghayes was imprisoned in Guantánamo and subjected to such brutal torture that he lost the sight in one eye. But far from being broken, he fought back to retain his dignity and his sanity

It is not hot stabbing pain that Omar Deghayes remembers from the day a Guantánamo guard blinded him, but the cool sensation of fingers being stabbed deep into his eyeballs. He had joined other prisoners in protesting against a new humiliation – inmates being forced to take off their trousers and walk round in their pants – and a group of guards had entered his cell to punish him. He was held down and bound with chains.

“I didn’t realise what was going on until the guy had pushed his fingers inside my eyes and I could feel the coldness of his fingers. Then I realised he was trying to gouge out my eyes,” Deghayes says. He wanted to scream in agony, but was determined not to give his torturers the satisfaction. Then the officer standing over him instructed the eye-stabber to push harder. “When he pulled his hands out, I remember I couldn’t see anything – I’d lost sight completely in both eyes.” Deghayes was dumped in a cell, fluid streaming from his eyes.

The sight in his left eye returned over the following days, but he is still blind in his right eye. He also has a crooked nose (from being punched by the guards, he says) and a scar across his forefinger (slammed in a prison door), but otherwise this resident of Saltdean, near Brighton, appears relatively unscarred from the more than five years he spent locked in Guantánamo Bay. Two years after his release, he speaks softly and calmly; he has the unlined skin and thick hair of a man younger than his 40 years; he has just remarried and has, for the first time in his life, a firm feeling that his home is on the clifftops of East Sussex.

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The Human Cost of Guantanamo

By: admin
Published December 4, 2009, in Andy Worthington, Guantanamo, Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes

by: Sari Gelzer and Troy Page, t r u t h o u t | Video Report

Andy Worthington has spent the past several years exposing the stories of the hundreds of men who were taken to Guantanamo prison.

The British journalist, who is also a contributing reporter to Truthout, produced a groundbreaking book, “The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison,” the only book published that meticulously pieced together the stories of all the men who have been detained in the US prison.

An interview with British journalist Andy Worthington about his latest film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo.”

Now Worthington has released a new documentary, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantanamo,” co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash. The film provides intimate interviews with two former detainees, Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, and their lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith and Tom Wilner. Deghayes and Begg describe how they ended up in US custody, the gruesome conditions they faced while being held by the US and the impact this experience has had on their personal lives.

In a gripping moment in the film, Deghayes speaks to the camera and expresses that the worst part of being captured and held in Guantanamo prison wasn’t the torture, but the years spent away from his child. “Not my eye, not my broken finger, not my broken ribs, not my broken nose, not the humiliation, not the sexual abuse, not all that transport and things; these things are bad enough,” said Deghayes, “but the worst thing,” he said, was being unable to witness the formative years of his son’s life.

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Ex-Bagram & Gitmo Prisoner Speaks About Bagram’s Future

By: admin
Published July 10, 2009, in Bisher Al-Rawi, Farid Hilali, Omar Deghayes, Richard Belmar

Moazzam_Begg

Bagram: Where The Future of Guantanamo Meets Its Tortuous Past

by Moazzam Begg

Moazzam Begg is Director for the British organisation, Cageprisoners. The opinions expressed are his own.

[Moazzam Begg was interviewed at length in the Academy Award winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side]

Little seems to have changed regarding the treatment of prisoners held at the U.S. military-run Bagram prison since I was there (2002-2004). The recent study conducted by the BBC shows allegations of sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings, degrading treatment, religious and racial abuse have gone unabated. On a personal level though, I can’t help wonder if British intelligence services are still involved.

In April this year, a report issued by Cageprisoners entitled Fabricating Terrorism II highlighted through eyewitness testimony the cases of 29 people, all of them either British residents or citizens, who had allegedly been tortured and abused in the presence of British intelligence agents or at their behest.

One of them, the case of Farid Hilali, featured in the Guardian newspaper, showed how allegations of complicity in torture against British intelligence predated the Sept. 11 attacks. The story of Jamil Rahman too – regarding allegations of British complicity in his torture in Bangladesh – would have been included in the report but he was worried at the time about the safety of his family. The recurrent factor in all these cases is the extent to which denial and prevarication remain as much a part of the intelligence services’ arsenal as outsourcing torture and abuse. The others include the British cases of Omar Deghayes, Bisher Al-Rawi, Jamil Elbanna, Richard Belmar, Shaker Aamer and Binyam Mohamed – all of whom were held at Bagram.

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