August 27, 2004
Celebrity Observes: Guantanamo's Torture Regime a Shameful Disgrace
"I have also just finished reading the 115-page document Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay compiled by Birnberg Pierce & Partners, lawyers for the three British citizens released from Guantanamo Bay without charge in March. Their accounts of detention are horrifyingly similar to the conditions in Goli Otok. In both cases, the denial of a trial, and a specified date of release added to the physical torture the three endured.
Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed were captured in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. All three state that they were physically tortured in Sherbagan, Kandahar, before being consigned to the psychological and physical hell of Guantanamo Bay. In March this year they were sent back to England and released without charges.
Asif and Shafiq say they were interrogated by an SAS officer in Kandahar before they were flown to Guantanamo. Rhuhel states that he was questioned in Kandahar by MI5 and separately by someone from the Foreign Office. He was in a terrible state from prolonged sleep deprivation, starvation and dehydration. The MI5 officer told him he would be sent home if he agreed to "admit to everything" that was put to him. "I just said ’OK’ to everything they said to me. I agreed with everything, whether it was true or not. I just wanted to get out of there." During their two years of incarceration in Guantanamo M15 officers and a representative of the British embassy in Washington made six or seven visits/interrogations. All three men made complaints about the conditions under which they were being held; and about the interrogations by US military intelligence and other US agencies. The British intelligence services and the Foreign Office appear therefore to be complicit in the conditions of psychological and physical torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay."
article
~She has a right to her observations.
Isn't it ironic that the two nations that claim responsibility for the defeat of world communism are complicit in torture indistinguishable from what was practiced by those totalitarian regimes?
