Survivors of CIA torture, rendition speak out

[Suzanimal]

“Publishing this shows the other side, that human rights apply to everyone,” said Abdelhakim Balhadj, a Libyan political dissident who the U.S. rendered back to Libya in 2004, where he was allegedly tortured over a six-year period without being charged with a crime. “The U.S. denied us our human rights. We wanted the American people to recognize this.”

...

Though ex-detainees like Belhadj welcomed those findings, he was disappointed that his name had not been mentioned specifically. In a phone call from his home in Libya, Belhadj, now a prominent politician and military leader in Libya, told of how he and his pregnant wife Fatima were picked up by U.S. authorities as they were trying to leave China, where they had been living until 2004, to seek political asylum in the U.K.

Belhadj, who at the time was a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that opposed then-dictator Muammar Gaddafi, said he was taken to a secret U.S. prison, where he was hooded, hung by his wrists from hooks and beaten. Then, as part of an apparent effort by the U.S. and U.K. to cultivate ties with Gaddafi, a potential ally in the so-called war on terror, the U.S. subsequently rendered the couple back to the Libyan capital, Tripoli. There, Belhadj says he was tortured by Libyan authorities and foreign agents — including some from the U.K. — until his release in 2010.

To date, the U.S. has still never acknowledged involvement in Belhadj’s case, nor explained why he could be subject to such treatment without ever being charged with a crime.

“We were handed over to a dictator,” Belhadj said. “There must be justice. Someone must be held accountable.”

Other notable omissions from the CIA report include Khadija al-Saadi, who was just 12 years old when the U.K. certainly and U.S. allegedly rendered her and her family — including her three younger siblings — back to Libya from their home in Hong Kong in a joint operation.

The family has described Libyan intelligence detaining and torturing Khadija’s father, prominent Gaddafi opponent Sami al-Saadi, for the next seven years, another apparent victim of U.S. and British efforts to build ties with Libya’s dictator. Sami was not freed until 2011, when the country’s uprising toppled and killed Gaddafi in the streets.

Though his family received a settlement from the British government in 2012, the CIA has yet to make amends.

“We now have the actual faxes and flight plans that prove that the CIA arranged the whole thing,” Khadija, now a 23-year-old college student, said in an email on Tuesday. But, like Belhadj, she had hoped her name would be mentioned in the release, as a tacit recognition of American wrongdoing. “This is the very least that is owed me,” she said.

“Hiding the truth is how tyrannies and dictatorships function. … Justice has to take its course if other countries are to learn a lesson from this case,” she said.

In a statement, Saadi’s lawyer Alka Pradhan, who is with the U.K.-based rights NGO Reprieve, also welcomed Tuesday’s release, but added, “no review of the CIA torture program can be complete without an exhaustive list of the victims’ names and the inclusion of their voices on what they suffered.”

Perhaps the most outspoken victim of CIA interrogation, Moazzam Begg, was mentioned a number of times in Tuesday's release. He was even more scathing in his critique of the Senate report.

The U.S. held Begg, a British Pakistani citizen, at Bagram prison in Afghanistan and at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he said he was tortured, sometimes into making false confessions, over the course of three years. Begg was accused of having ties to Al Qaeda but he was never formally charged him with a crime.

The worst moment he said he witnessed in three years of detention was the time he “saw a detainee with his hands tied above his head to the top of a cage, with a hood placed over him, being punched and kicked repeatedly to the point that he was killed.”

Begg is among those calling for CIA officers who engaged in such severe beatings and other “enhanced interrogation” tactics like waterboarding to be prosecuted. He was disappointed, though not surprised, that the names of those officers were redacted from the Senate report.

...

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/10/survivors-of-ciatorturerenditionspeakout.html

 

[Suzanimal]

video at link

Gitmo inmate: My treatment shames American flag

Editor's note: Samir Naji is a Yemeni who was accused of serving in Osama bin Laden's security detail and imprisoned for nearly 13 years without charge in Guantanamo Bay. He was cleared for release in 2009, but remains in detention. The following first-person testimony, recorded during his most recent meeting with lawyers from the international human rights organization Reprieve, has just been released by prison censors. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely his.

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (CNN) -- I've heard that the Senate report on CIA torture is 6,000 pages long. My story, though, takes place elsewhere: in Guantanamo, away from the CIA program that the report covers. The 6,000 pages of the Senate report are just the start of what Americans have to accept happened in their name.
It starts and ends in the silence of a tiny, freezing cold cell, alone.

That's when you hold yourself in a ball, and fight to ignore the confusion of what has just happened to you, and the fear of what might be coming next. Or the fear that comes when you realize that no one is coming to help; that the life, family and friends you knew are all far, far away.

The cell door opens. The next session, seemingly the 100th in a row. I think my first period of interrogation lasted three full months. Two teams of interrogators running shifts, day and night.

Each session begins with shouting, to wake me up. Then they hit me on the face and the back. I am so desperate for sleep, my head is swimming. There are photographs of faces stuck all around the walls of this room. They demand that I identify the individuals, but I can barely focus to see if I might know them. The shouting and the insults get louder, and then they nod to a man in the corner. He injects me twice in the arm with some unknown substance. It's the last thing I know.

The freezing cold cell. The cell door opens. This time the guards enter, making awful honking noises, like wild animals.

I tried to refuse to eat the little food they bring me, in protest at all this. The interrogator laughs at me, but then turns angry; he swears loudly, and pours an army meal pack over my head. They tell the man in the corner to start feeding me intravenously. He inserts the tube in two different places on my arm and makes it bleed.

The freezing cold cell. The cell door opens. This time the guards push me on the floor and take turns trampling over my back.

I tell the interrogators that I can't face not eating any more. They throw food on the floor of the room and tell me to eat like a pig. They won't let me go to the restroom. They watch as it gets more painful, and laugh as they get the translator to describe how they will rape me if I pee in my pants.

The freezing cold cell. The cell door opens. They make me stand and salute the American flag.

I'm in a sort of cinema room, where I have to watch videos of other prisoners being abused. Then they tell me that I have to dance for them, and run in circles whilst they pull on my chains. Every time I try and refuse, they touch me in my most private areas.

Our stories, and our continued detention, cannot be made to disappear.

The freezing cold cell. The cell door opens. It has rained, and there are muddy puddles everywhere. I'm shackled, so I can't really walk; they deliberately drag me through the muddy puddles.

Now it's the pornography room. Awful pictures everywhere. There is one with a man and a donkey. I'm stripped naked and have my beard shaved, in a gratuitous insult to my religion. I'm shown pornographic pictures of women. I'm told to make the noises of different animals, and when I refuse, they just hit me. It ends with them pouring cold water all over me.

Hours later in my cell, I am discovered, nearly frozen. The doctor tells them to bring me urgently to the clinic, where I am given a blanket and treatment. Over the next hours, they observe me as I warm up. They are just waiting for the moment that they can sign off on my return to interrogation.

Four years ago, six U.S. government security agencies sat together and reviewed my case. Their conclusion? That I was innocent of any crime and should be released. The dirty and sadistic methods I endured -- which were then taken directly to Abu Ghraib -- achieved nothing, except to shame that American flag hanging in the prison corridor, which I was made to salute.

One hundred and thirty-six prisoners are still being held at Guantanamo, whilst the politicians squabble over how to black out the Senate report. America cannot keep hiding from its past, and its present, like this. Our stories, and our continued detention, cannot be made to disappear.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/11/opinion/guantanamo-inmate-naji/index.html?hpt=wo_c1

 

[otherone]

 

[Suzanimal]

Guantánamo Diary exposes brutality of US rendition and torture

The groundbreaking memoir of a current Guantánamo inmate that lays bare the harrowing details of the US rendition and torture programme from the perspective of one of its victims is to be published next week after a six-year battle for the manuscript to be declassified.

Guantánamo Diary, the first book written by a still imprisoned detainee, is being published in 20 countries and has been serialised by the Guardian amid renewed calls by civil liberty campaigners for its author’s release.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes a world tour of torture and humiliation that began in his native Mauritania more than 13 years ago and progressed through Jordan and Afghanistan before he was consigned to US detention in Guantánamo, Cuba, in August 2002 as prisoner number 760. US military officials told the Guardian this week that despite never being prosecuted and being cleared for release by a judge in 2010, he is unlikely to be released in the next year.

The journal, which Slahi handwrote in English, details how he was subjected to sleep deprivation, death threats, sexual humiliation and intimations that his torturers would go after his mother.

After enduring this, he was subjected to “additional interrogation techniques” personally approved by the then US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. He was blindfolded, forced to drink salt water, and then taken out to sea on a high-speed boat where he was beaten for three hours while immersed in ice.

The end product of the torture, he writes, was lies. Slahi made a number of false confessions in an attempt to end the torment, telling interrogators he planned to blow up the CN Tower in Toronto. Asked if he was telling the truth, he replied: “I don’t care as long as you are pleased. So if you want to buy, I am selling.”

Slahi’s manuscript was subjected to more than 2,500 redactions before declassification, ostensibly to protect classified information, but with the effect of preventing readers from learning the full story of his ordeal. The book is being published with all the censor’s marks in place, and the publishers – Canongate in the UK and Little, Brown in the US – hope they will be able to publish an uncensored edition when Slahi is eventually released.

Although one federal court has ordered his release on the grounds that the evidence against him is thin and tainted by torture, Slahi has been languishing in a form of legal limbo since December 2012 after the justice department entangled the case in an unresolved appeal. Several US officials have indicated that he is unlikely to be released this year. One, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity as he had not been cleared to do so, said getting Slahi out of Guantánamo was not a priority. “Our focus is acutely on the individuals who have been approved for transfer,” he said. Slahi is not among them.

Slahi describes the toll the abuse has taken on his body and mind: “I started to hallucinate and hear voices as clear as crystal. I heard my family in a casual familial conversation … I heard Qur’an readings in a heavenly voice. I heard music from my country. Later on the guards used these hallucinations and started talking with funny voices through the plumbing, encouraging me to hurt the guard and plot an escape. But I wasn’t misled by them, even though I played along.” ‘We heard somebody – maybe a genie!’ they used to say. ‘Yeah, but I ain’t listening to him,’ I responded … I was on the edge of losing my mind.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has launched an online petition calling for Slahi’s release. Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s national security project, said: “Mohamedou Slahi is an innocent man whom the United States brutally tortured and has held unlawfully for over a decade. He doesn’t present a threat to the US and has never taken part in any hostilities against it.

“We’re asking the government to put an end to Mohamedou’s years-long ordeal by not contesting his habeas case and releasing him without delay. We hope everyone moved by Mohamedou’s story of abuse and unlawful detention will join us in seeking his freedom.”

The 44-year-old travelled twice to Afghanistan in the early 1990s. There, he swore allegiance to al-Qaida and joined the fight against the Soviet Union-backed regime in Kabul. He says he severed all connection with the group in 1992.

But after 9/11 he was detained on suspicion of being involved in an unsuccessful plot to bomb Los Angeles international airport while living in Canada in 1999. No evidence has been found to support the allegation, other than his own forced confessions. In 2004 a military lawyer refused to play any further part in the prosecution on the grounds that the evidence against him was the product of torture.

The chief military commissions prosecutor in the mid-2000s, Air Force colonel Morris Davis, later said he could not find any offence with which to charge Slahi.

The detainee’s lawyer, Nancy Hollander, said: “Mohamedou has never been charged with anything. The US has never charged him with a crime. There is no crime to charge him with. It’s not that they haven’t found the evidence against him – there isn’t evidence against him. He’s in what I would consider a horrible legal limbo, and it’s just tragic: he needs to go home.

“Mohamedou’s book takes us into the heart of this man the US government tortured, and continues to torture with indefinite detention. We feel, smell, even taste the torture he endures in his voice and within his heart. It is a book everyone should read.”

Publisher Jamie Byng said Slahi’s account was one of the most significant books Canongate would ever publish. “It’s a gracious, brutal, humbling, at times funny, but more often enraging, and ultimately heartbreaking testimony by a truly gifted writer. And all of his many international publishers hope that by bringing his story to the wider world we can play a part in ending his wrongful and barbaric imprisonment.”

Slahi’s memoir is published on the heels of a landmark US Senate study into CIA torture, and arrives as Republicans in Washington have redoubled their efforts to block Barack Obama from fulfilling his vow to close Guantánamo. The president is determined to reduce the detention centre’s population during 2015: on Wednesday, five more detainees left Cuba for Oman and Estonia, the latest in a flurry of post-election transfers. This leaves 122 inmates at Guantánamo. Among them is Shaker Aamer, a Saudi-born British resident. David Cameron was expected to raise Aamer’s plight with Obama during talks in Washington on Friday.

However, British ministers have raised his case at least 15 times in the last five years, according to statements to parliament. In the past, US diplomats have said privately that they are not convinced the British government is serious when it says it wished to see Aamer returned to the UK, where he could be reunited with his British wife and four children.

Though his captors have long since ceased treating Slahi as a security threat – he is said to inform on other detainees, and lives in a separate facility where he is allowed to garden – the US insists it has legal justification to deprive the Mauritanian of his freedom. Lt Col Myles Caggins, a defense department spokesman, said: “We continue to detain Mohamedou Slahi under the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force of 2001 (AUMF) as informed by the laws of war. He has full access to federal court for review of his detention by United States district court via petition for writ of habeas corpus.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-diary-exposes-brutality-us-rendition-torture

 

[enhanced_deficit]

[h=3]New Obama HS Chief: MLK would love our wars![/h]

 

[Suzanimal]

Why Did It Take 10 Years to Publish the Diary of a Guantánamo Detainee?

Guantánamo Diary is the only written account by a Guantánamo detainee who is still imprisoned there: Mohamedou Ould Slahi. John le Carré calls the book “a vision of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond Kafka: perpetual torture prescribed by the mad doctors in Washington.” We spoke with Slahi’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, and his editor, Larry Siems.

JW: Who is Mohamedou Slahi, and how did he end up in Gitmo?

Larry Siems: Mohamedou is a 44-year-old man from Mauritania. He went to Afghanistan as a young man to join the fight against the communists there. To do that, he trained at an Al Qaeda camp and pledged loyalty to Al Qaeda. He has said repeatedly that he broke all ties with them after the communist government there collapsed in 1992.

Nancy Hollander: In 2001, he was at his mother’s house in Mauritania and got a call from the police. He turned himself in—and his family has never seen him again. He was taken by the United States to Jordan, where he was detained for eight months. Then he was taken to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, then finally to Guantánamo in August 2002. He’s been there ever since. Originally, the United States thought he was a suspect in the millennium bombing conspiracy to blow up LAX. The government concluded that Mohamedou had nothing to do with that. Then they accused him of being a recruiter of pilots for the 9/11 attack. They then figured out that he probably didn’t even know about 9/11. He won his petition for habeas corpus in 2010 when a judge ordered him released, but the Obama administration has appealed, so that’s where he is today.

JW: What is this diary, and why has it been published?

LS: This is a 466-page manuscript that Mohamedou wrote in Guantánamo in 2005. It was declassified finally in 2012. It’s an account of what he calls his “endless world tour of interrogation and detention” at the hands of the United States. It’s told in a way that, for the first time, lets us understand what it’s like to endure that sort of treatment, and lets us see that, even in this incredibly dehumanized world, there are remarkable and even redemptive human exchanges.

JW: His treatment, according to The New York Times, “involved extended sleep deprivation, loud music, shackling for days in a freezing cell, dousing with ice water, beatings, threats that he could be made to disappear and that his mother would be arrested and gang-raped.” What did the government learn about Al Qaeda from torturing Mohamedou?

NH: The government learned nothing from torturing Mohamedou. There was nothing to learn—except perhaps how to make someone give up and say whatever the government wants to hear.

JW: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld specifically ordered that Mohamedou was not to be allowed to pray.

LS: That was an illegal order, a violation of religious freedom, as Mohamedou points out. The Defense Department highlights that they respect religious freedom at Gitmo; they say the call to prayer is played five times a day. In fact, in these “special interrogations,” those freedoms were routinely denied. In one of the more poignant scenes in the book, one of his guards tells Mohamedou, “I’m going to hell because I forbade you to pray.”

JW: Many passages in the book Guantánamo Diary have been blacked out by American censors.

LS: There are about 2,600 redactions. Many seem absurd. When a guard tells him not to worry because he’ll soon be home with his family, Mohamedou writes, “I couldn’t help breaking in [redacted].” My guess is that the word is “tears.”

JW: What is going to happen to Mohamedou now?

NH: Obama could send Mohamedou home simply by stopping the fight against this habeas order. Also, they’ve started “periodic review boards”—not real trials, but another means by which he could be released. We believe we would win that too, because Mohamedou is not a threat, and never was a threat. He is an innocent man. He’s been in Guantánamo for fourteen years. He should go home. I would like it to be soon.

Sign the ACLU petition to free Mohamedou Slahi at aclu.org/secure/free-slahi.

https://www.thenation.com/article/197137/why-did-it-take-10-years-publish-diary-guantanamo-detainee

 

[Suzanimal]

'Most tortured man in Guantanamo Bay' freed without charge

A man who is widely regarded as the most tortured prisoner in the history of Guantanamo Bay has been released without charge after nearly 14 years.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national who wrote a best-selling memoir about life in the detention centre, was reunited with his family after US officials ruled he did not pose a strong enough threat to national security to continue his detention.

The Guantanamo Bay Diaries, published in January 2015, provided the first in-depth account of ritual humiliation and mistreatment suffered by inmates in the controversial American military prison.

In his memoir, Mr Slahi describes being shackled, blindfolded, made to stand for long periods, stripped naked, denied water and subjected to sleep deprivation, loud noise and threats of violence.

In one passage he describes being sexually abused by female interrogators. In another, he wrote that he was transported out to sea, forced to drink salt water until he vomited and then beaten in the face and ribs while immersed in ice to hide the bruising.

At the end of his tether in 2004, Slahi wrote that he resorted to making false confessions to keep his interrogators happy.

In Mr Slahi's first public comments after his release, he thanked the Mauritanian president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz for “his efforts to bring him home,” according to Middle East Eye.

Mr Slahi was arrested by US forces in Mauritania following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, accused of travelling to Afghanistan in 1991 and 1992 to join al-Qaeda’s fight against the communist-led government.

He was then taken to Amman by Jordanian armed forces where he was held in solitary confinement for seven months, before being flown to Guantanamo Bay in August 2003 on suspicion of involvement in a plot to bomb Los Angeles in 1999.

Mr Slahi's book, in which he also wrote about longing to be reunited with his children and starting a small business, made him the highest-profile Guantanamo detainee unconnected to the 9/11 plot.

He has reportedly been open about his actions in Afghanistan but publicly stated he had never been an enemy combatant against the US.

A US intelligence threat assessment of Mr Slahi in February 2016 said that “throughout his detention” he had “maintained his support for jihad, but clarifies that his notion of jihad neither condones the killing of innocent people nor supports [Osama] Bin Laden’s version of justice”.

The Pentagon announced the decision to release Mr Slahi after a parole-like review panel of six agencies recommended his transfer in July, citing his “highly compliant behavior in detention” and “clear indications of a change in the detainee’s mind-set.”

Nancy Hollander, one of his attorneys, said at the time: “We are thrilled that the PRB has cleared our client. We will now work toward his quick release and return to the waiting arms of his loving family. This is long overdue.”

There are currently 61 prisoners remaining in Guantanamo Bay, 30 of whom have been cleared for release.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...rtured-man-freed-without-charge-a7371666.html

 

[AZJoe]