Politics

Guantanamo sadists ramping up torture as closing approaches (updated, unfortunately)

• 1 Comment
• Sunday 1st March 2009

Reuters reports that the “interrogators” at Guantanamo fear that their opportunities to abuse Muslim detainees will diminish as the deadline to close the military hellhole approaches. The reaction has been an increase in detainee torture:

Abuses began to pick up in December after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike.

…

Ghappour said he had spoken to army guards who, unsolicited, had described the pleasure they took in abusing prisoners, whether interrupting prayer or physical mistreatment. He said they appeared unconcerned about potential repercussions.

He also saw evidence of guards pulling identity numbers off their uniforms or switching them once they were on duty in order to make it more difficult for them to be identified.

Ghappour said he had filed two complaints of serious detainee abuse since Dec. 22 but received no response from U.S. authorities. In one case his client had his knee, shoulder and thumb dislocated by a group of guards, Ghappour said.

In one of the six main camps at Guantanamo, the lawyer said all the detainees he knew were on hunger strike and subject to force-feeding, including with laxatives that induced chronic diarrhoea while they were strapped in their feeding chairs.

“Several of my clients have had toilet paper pepper-sprayed while they have had haemorrhoids,” Ghappour said.

Another area of concern was evidence that detainees were being abused on the way to meetings with their lawyers — sometimes so badly that they no longer wanted to meet with counsel for fear of the beatings they would receive, he said.

________________________________

Update

Wire service The Canadian Press reports on a leaked International Red Cross report definitively calling detaineee treatment in American custody torture. Mark Danner reads the report closely in the NY Review of Books.

Probably not for those with weak stomachs.

From the Canadian Press:

“Detainees told the Red Cross about being routinely beaten, waterboarded, forced into coffin-like boxes while naked, bleeding and wounded, and exposed to loud music, cold temperatures and frigid water.

Those interviewed by the Red Cross were isolated and hadn’t been in contact with one another, and yet their detailed stories of torture techniques were remarkably similar, observers noted.”

The International Red Cross, via Mark Danner:

Contents_Introduction

1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program

1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment

1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime….

-to its stark and unmistakable conclusion:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.