[News] The torture scandal that won't go away - Guantanamo Bay

[News at freedomarchives.org]

David Rose

Sunday May 16, 2004

The Observer

<http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4925269-102275,00.html>http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4925269-102275,00.html

'I was in extreme pain and so weak that I could barely stand. It was 
freezing cold and I was shaking like a washing machine. They questioned me 
at gunpoint and told me that if I confessed I could go home.

'They had already searched me and my cell twice that day, gone through my 
stuff, touched my Koran, felt my body around my private parts. And now they 
wanted to do it again, just to provoke me, but I said no, because if you 
submit to everything you turn into a zombie.

'I heard a guard talking into his radio, "ERF, ERF, ERF," and I knew what 
was coming - the Extreme Reaction Force. The five cowards, I called them - 
five guys running in with riot gear. They pepper-sprayed me in the face and 
I started vomiting; in all I must have brought up five cupfuls. They pinned 
me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my 
head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and then 
they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out 
of the cell in chains, into the rec yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my 
eyebrows.'

Tarek Dergoul, a British citizen born and brought up in east London and 
released without charge after almost two years at Guantanamo Bay, was 
describing one of many alleged assaults he says he suffered in American 
custody. With the world still reeling from the photographs of prisoner 
abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, Dergoul's testimony 
suggests that Guantanamo hides another terrible secret - proof, in the 
shape of hundreds of videos shot by US guards, that here, too, America's 
war against terror has led to wanton brutality against helpless detainees.


Dergoul, 26, was released at the same time as four other Britons in March, 
but was too traumatised by his experiences to tell his story until now. 
While it is shocking, it is also credible: his description of his 
interrogations and the 'ERF' squad's violent reprisals closely matches that 
from other released prisoners, including his fellow Britons, while possibly 
his most important claim, that the ERF was always filmed, has been 
confirmed by the US military.

'Much of his story is consistent with other accounts of detention 
conditions in both Afghanistan and Guantanamo,' said John Sifton, a New 
York-based official from Human Rights Watch who has interviewed numerous 
former Guantanamo prisoners in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 'It is now clear 
that there is a systemic problem of abuse throughout the US military's 
detention facilities - not merely misbehaviour by a few bad apples.'

Dergoul also disclosed personal experience of the techniques pioneered by 
the former Guantanamo commandant, General Geoffrey Miller, to 'set the 
conditions' for detainees' interrogation, which Miller then took to Iraq.

He said they included humiliation, prolonged exposure to intense heat and 
cold, sleep deprivation, being kept chained in painful positions, and the 
threat of 'rendition' to an Arab country where, his interrogators said, he 
would be subjected to full-blown torture.

On Friday Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, from Tipton in the West Midlands, 
who told their stories to The Observer when they were released, wrote an 
open letter to President George Bush, alleging they suffered very similar 
abusive treatment at Guantanamo. Within hours US military spokesmen denied 
their allegations, saying they were 'simply false'.

Now, however, Dergoul has revealed a means of proving the claims of 
violence at Guantanamo, potentially as dramatic as the Abu Ghraib 
photographs. Every time an ERF squad was deployed, he said, the entire 
process was recorded on digital video: 'There was always this guy behind 
the squad, filming everything that happened.'

Last night Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, the Guantanamo Joint Task Force 
spokesman, confirmed the videos existed, saying that all ERF actions were 
filmed so that they could 'be reviewed by the camp commander and the 
commanding general'.

All of them, he said , were kept in an archive at Guantanamo. He refused to 
say how many times the ERF squads had been used and would not discuss their 
training or composition, saying: 'We do not discuss operational aspects of 
the Joint Task Force mission.'

Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, said the government 
must demand 'that these videos be delivered up and the truth of these very 
serious allegations properly determined once and for all. The videos 
provide an unequalled opportunity to check the veracity of what Mr Dergoul 
and the other former detainees are saying.'

In Washington, Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate 
Judiciary Committee, demanded that the videos be shown to Congress. 'If 
evidence exists that can establish whether there has been mistreatment of 
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, it should be provided without delay,' he said. 
'That must include any tapes or photos of the activities of the Extreme 
Reaction Force.'

The effects on Dergoul of his ordeal in Afghanistan and Guantanamo are very 
visible. A slight, slim man, he has difficulty walking: for weeks his 
American captors failed to treat his frostbitten feet, until a big toe 
turned gangrenous and had to be amputated. He has also lost most of his 
left arm, the result of a shrapnel wound. Two months after regaining his 
freedom he has nightmares and flashbacks, especially of his many beatings, 
and is about to begin treatment at the Medical Foundation for the Care of 
Victims of Torture.

'I get migraines, I'm depressed and I suffer from memory loss. There's 
stuff that happened, embedded in my head, that I can't remember.'

He has nothing to live on because the Benefits Agency, wrongly believing he 
is not a British citizen, says he has lost his entitlement because he was 
out of the country, though a prisoner, for more than two years.

Born to Moroccan parents in Mile End in December 1977, Dergoul was once in 
trouble for stealing a computer chip, for which he was sentenced to 
community service. After leaving school at 15 he worked in a succession of 
jobs: selling double glazing, office cleaning, driving a minicab and as a 
carer at an old people's home in Suffolk. Living in east London, many of 
his friends were from Pakistan and he decided to visit the country for an 
extended holiday in July 2001.

'Before I went I'd never even heard of Osama bin Laden or the Taliban and I 
didn't know where Afghanistan was,' he said. 'I was not political and I 
didn't read the papers. My parents are religious but I never went to the 
mosque.'

After the 11 September attacks, he and two Pakistani friends had an idea 
for what, in hindsight, was one of the worst-judged business ventures of 
all time. With war looming, they thought many Afghans would want to flee 
their homes. Dergoul had £5,000 in cash, which he pooled with his friends' 
savings. 'The plan was to buy some property away from where the bombing 
was. We thought we could buy it very cheap, then sell it at a profit after 
the war.'

They travelled to Jalalabad and looked at several empty homes. On the verge 
of signing a deal, Dergoul and his friends spent the night in a villa. 
While they were asleep, he said, a bomb landed on it - killing his friends. 
He went outside and was hit by another bomb, sustaining shrapnel wounds.

For at least a week, unable to walk, he lay among the ruins, drinking from 
a tap that still worked, and living on biscuits and raisins he had in his 
pocket. Exposed to the freezing weather, his toes turned black from 
frostbite. At last he was found by troops loyal to the Northern Alliance. 
They treated him well, taking him to a hospital where he was given food and 
three operations. However, after five weeks he was driven to an airfield 
and handed over to Americans, who arrived by helicopter. Dergoul said the 
Americans paid $5,000 for him - according to Human Rights Watch, this was 
the standard fee for a 'terrorist' suspect. They flew him to the US 
detention camp at Bagram airbase, near Kabul.

As at Abu Ghraib, Dergoul said, violence and sexual humiliation appeared to 
be routine. 'When I arrived, with a bag over my head, I was stripped naked 
and taken to a big room with 15 or 20 MPs [military police]. They started 
taking photos and then they did a full cavity search. As they were doing 
that they were taking close-ups, concentrating on my private parts.'

Possibly because he was British, Dergoul said he was spared the beatings he 
saw being administered to others in neighbouring cages. 'Guards with guns 
and baseball bats would make the detainees squat for hours, and if they 
fell over from exhaustion, they'd beat them until they lost consciousness. 
They called it "beat down".'

His interrogators accused him of fighting with al-Qaeda in the Tora Bora 
mountains towards the end of the main Afghan war. At the time, he insisted, 
he had no idea of Tora Bora's significance and never went there. But in the 
course of 20 to 25 interrogations at Bagram - including one session with a 
British team from MI5 - he was told his family's assets would be seized.

'I was in extreme pain from the frostbite and other injuries and I was so 
weak I could barely stand. It was freezing cold and I was shaking and 
shivering like a washing machine. The interrogators - who questioned me at 
gunpoint - said if I confessed I'd be going home. Finally I agreed I'd been 
at Tora Bora - though I still wouldn't admit I'd ever met bin Laden.'

After about a month, in February 2002, Dergoul was taken south to another 
camp at Kandahar. His memories of this time are hazy: it was there that his 
feet, left untreated, went septic and, as the infection spread, he 
underwent a further amputation.

In three months there, he said, he had only two showers. Finally, on 1 May, 
he was dressed in goggles and an orange jump suit, injected with a sedative 
and flown to Guantanamo Bay.



For more than a year of the 22 months Dergoul spent at Camp Delta, he said, 
he was held in the isolation block, on the worst 'level four' regime - 
deprived of all stimulation or 'comfort items,' and sometimes allowed only 
a blanket between 11.30pm and 5.30am.



For the first time, he was becoming religious 'and my faith in Allah was 
giving me the strength to resist them'. One way in which he infuriated the 
guards was by translating their conversations into Arabic for the benefit 
of other detainees, and he also helped organise a series of hunger and 
non-co-operation strikes when the prisoners would refuse to go to 
interrogation or their twice-weekly shower and 15-minute exercise period.



No doubt, he agreed, this made him more of a target for the ERF. But he was 
never violent, he said, and unlike other prisoners he never tried to use 
his own excrement as a missile.



The report by General Antonio Taguba into Abu Ghraib states that abuse 
there began when Miller arrived there with 30 colleagues for a visit last 
September and instituted the system he had already created at Camp Delta - 
turning the guards into an interrogation tool by using them to 'set the 
conditions' or soften up prisoners before they were questioned.



Last week, General Lance Smith, deputy chief of the US Central Command, 
told a Senate hearing that some of the 20 techniques Miller authorised were 
banned in Iraq, because there, unlike Guantanamo, prisoners were supposedly 
protected by the Geneva Conventions.



So what are these 20 techniques? A US military spokeswoman said: 'They come 
from a classified document and we don't discuss its contents.' But the 
Senate has heard they include sleep deprivation, binding in uncomfortable 
positions and the use of excessive cold or heat. Dergoul said he 
experienced and witnessed all of them.



For one period of about a month last year, he said, guards would take him 
every day to an interrogation room in chains, seat him, chain him to a ring 
in the floor and then leave him alone for eight hours at a time.



'The air conditioning would really be blowing - it was freezing, which was 
incredibly painful on my amputation stumps. Eventually I'd need to urinate 
and in the end I would try to tilt my chair and go on the floor. They were 
watching through a one-way mirror. As soon as I wet myself, a woman MP 
would come in yelling, "Look what you've done! You're disgusting." '



Afterwards he would be taken back to his cell for about three hours. Then 
the guards would reappear and in Guantanamo slang tell him he was returning 
to the interrogation room: 'You have a reservation.' The process would 
begin again.



Dergoul also described the use of what was known as the 'short shackle' - 
steel bonds pulled tight to keep the subject bunched up, while chained to 
the floor. 'After a while, it was agony. You could hear the guards behind 
the mirror, making jokes, eating and drinking, knocking on the walls. It 
was not about trying to get information. It was just about trying to break 
you.' In their letter to Bush, Rasul and Iqbal also said they endured this 
procedure.



Another technique, applied in periods when Dergoul was being heavily 
interrogated, was to deny him clean clothes or bedding for up to three 
weeks, or to provide clothes which were several sizes too small.



Sometimes, Dergoul said, as with the 'attacks' by the ERF squads, 
interrogation sessions were videoed. Sumpter, the Guantanamo spokesman, 
said he could not confirm this claim.



Every four or five months, Dergoul said, he was visited by British 
diplomats and officials from MI5. Each time he complained bitterly about 
his treatment: 'I told them everything: about the stress positions, the 
interrogations, the ERF.'



Less than a month after he arrived, the Foreign Office sent a letter to his 
brother, Halid, which suggested they knew a lot about conditions at 
Guantanamo: although written in careful language, it described how he had 
been denied 'comfort items' and reported he felt as if he was 'living in 
the twilight zone'.



It also said he had lost a toe because he had not been treated with 
antibiotics. In public, however, the British government continued to defend 
the Americans' right to hold Dergoul and others at Guantanamo - as it still 
continues to do.



Dergoul's experiences have changed him forever, turning him into a devout 
and intensely political Muslim. 'I now look on America as a terrorist state 
because that's what they have done - terrorised us - and I condemn Britain 
as well for contributing to it. Half the people I met in Cuba had been 
purchased. If they really had been captured on the battlefield, as the 
Americans are always saying, maybe I could understand it.



'But maybe now they'll get their comeuppance. After what's happened at Abu 
Ghraib, if I'd been the Americans I would have destroyed those videos. Let 
them be shown. Then the world will know I'm telling the truth.'



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004





US guards 'filmed beatings' at terror camp

Senator urges action as Briton reveals Guantanamo abuse

David Rose and Gaby Hinsliff

Sunday May 16, 2004

<http://www.observer.co.uk/>The Observer



http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1217973,00.html



Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks 
on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an 
investigation by The Observer has revealed.



The disclosures, made in an interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British 
prisoner freed last March, who has been too traumatised to speak until now, 
prompted demands last night by senior politicians on both sides of the 
Atlantic to make the videos available immediately.



They say that if the contents are as shocking as Dergoul claims, they will 
provide final proof that brutality against detainees has become an 
institutionalised feature of America's war on terror.



In the wake of the furore over the abuses photographed at Abu Ghraib jail 
in Iraq, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has continued to insist they 
were the work of a few rogue soldiers, and not a systemic problem.



The disclosures come as the top American commander in Iraq, 
Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, announced he has barred all coercive 
interrogation practices, including forcing prisoners into stress positions 
for long periods and disrupting their sleep, except in very rare 
circumstances.



British military police made four arrests over allegations that British 
troops abused Iraqi prisoners. All four men were later released without 
charge, pending fur ther interviews. It is the case of Dergoul, however, 
that is likely to be the most damaging. The 26-year-old, from Mile End in 
east London, spent 22 months at Guantanamo Bay from May 2002. Today he 
tells The Observer of repeated assaults by Camp Delta's punishment squad, 
known as the Extreme Reaction Force or ERF.



Their attacks, he says, would be prompted by minor disciplinary 
infractions, such as refusing to agree to the third cell search in a day - 
which he describes as an act of deliberate provocation.



Dergoul tells of one assault by a five-man ERF in shocking terms: 'They 
pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down 
and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into 
the toilet pan and flushed.



'They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking 
and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the 
rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.'



After their release last March, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, 
the so-called Tipton Three from Staffordshire, told of similar ERF attacks.



Rasul said they led to a new verb being coined by detainees: 'to be ERFed'. 
That, he said, meant being slammed against a floor by a soldier wielding a 
riot shield, pinned to the ground and beaten up by five armed men.



However, it is Dergoul who now reveals that every time the ERFs were 
deployed, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that 
happened.



Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, the Guantanamo Joint Task Force spokesman, 
confirmed this last night, saying all ERF actions were filmed so they could 
be 'reviewed' by senior officers. All the tapes are kept in an archive 
there, he said. He refused to say how many times the ERF squads had been 
used and would not discuss their training or rules of engagement, saying: 
'We do not discuss operational aspects of the Joint Task Force mission.'



The Observer can also now disclose that a British military interrogator 
posted to the now notorious Abu Ghraib abuse jail raised the alarm about 
maltreatment of detainees by US troops as long ago as last March.



While ministers insisted last week that the three Britons working in the 
jail did not see any of the systematic and sadistic abuse, an unnamed 
lieutenant - a debriefer trained to deal only with co-operative witnesses - 
made an official complaint to US authorities after seeing what he 
considered to be 'rough handling' of prisoners.



But it is the revelations about Guantanamo Bay that are the most damaging 
for a White House desperately trying to draw a line under the Iraq abuse 
allegations.



Senator Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary 
Committee, who has been an outspoken critic of the Abu Ghraib abuse, said 
he would demand that Rumsfeld must produce the videos this week.



'Congressional oversight of this administration has been lax in many areas, 
including detention policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo,' Leahy 
said. 'It is past time for that to change. If photos, videotapes or any 
other evidence exists that can help establish whether or not there has been 
mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, it should be provided without 
delay to Congress.



'I have asked the Pentagon for sufficient information to allow Congress to 
evaluate the effectiveness and propriety of the treatment of those in our 
custody. Pentagon officials owe the Congress a comprehensive response. I 
have made clear that compliance must include any tapes or photos of the 
activities of the ERF or any other military or intelligence units there.'



In London, Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, said: 'The 
Government must demand that these videos be delivered up, and the truth of 
these very serious allegations properly determined once and for all.



'The videos provide an unequalled opportunity to check the veracity of what 
Mr Dergoul and the other former detainees are saying.'



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