[Ppnews] US guards at Guantanamo tortured me, says UK man

[PPnews at freedomarchives.org]

US guards at Guantanamo tortured me, says UK man
By Severin Carrell
24 April 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=632488



A British resident has claimed he was tortured by US guards at
Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an
attack in which he was blinded.

The Independent on Sunday has been given a detailed account from Omar
Deghayes of repeated abuse by American and Pakistani interrogators over
the past three years including electric shocks and sodomy by US guards.

The allegations, made by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, have
persuaded British ministers to take up Mr Deghayes's case.

In some of the most disturbing allegations to emerge from Guantanamo, Mr
Deghayes also accuses US and Pakistani interrogators of beating him
repeatedly since his arrest three years ago, smearing his face with
human excrement, starving him of food, and withdrawing light and
clothing.

In a detailed 10-page account Mr Deghayes, whose family fled Libya after
his father, a prominent lawyer and trade unionist, was allegedly
murdered by agents of Muammar Gaddafi in 1980, claims:

* Pakistani interrogators put him in a "snake room" with glass cases
holding poisonous snakes to make him confess, and tortured him with
electric shocks;

* Members of the US "extreme reaction force" at Guantanamo Bay blinded
him in his already weak right eye with Mace riot control gas and by
gouging it with a finger;

* At Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, US guards allegedly sodomised five
detainees, and forced petrol and benzene into the anuses of others;

* In Pakistan, two interrogators tied him to a bench, repeatedly whipped
him with wooden canes in turns and threatened with him rape;

* British intelligence officers interrogated him in Pakistan - adding to
allegations that MI6 and MI5 collaborated in the arrests of many of the
British residents in Guantanamo Bay.

Mr Deghayes's testimony was recorded during more than 20 hours of
interviews by his US attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, in a Guantanamo Bay
cell in January and March this year, and has only recently been cleared
by US Department of Justice censors.

Mr Stafford Smith said he found Mr Deghayes's testimony "totally
credible". He added: "He has been treated worse in Guantanamo than any
other person I have come across. He is legally trained and tries to help
other people there, so the Americans think he's a trouble-maker.
Consequently, he's suffered for it."

The claims are understood to have shocked the Foreign Office minister
Baroness Symons, and played a major part in the Government's decision to
directly intervene in the cases of five British residents still held at
Guantanamo Bay. Until now, the UK has refused to intervene.

The Government has been under intense pressure to lobby for the release
of Mr Deghayes and the other British residents - a Jordanian, an Iraqi,
a Saudi Arabian and a Ugandan who have lived in Britain for up to 20
years as refugees or permanent residents. Mr Deghayes's family,
including his mother and wife, an Afghani, live in Brighton.

All five men - and up to four others believed to have close British ties
- are in legal limbo because they kept their original nationality to
reclaim property or have legal rights in their country of origin. Their
parents, wives and children are British citizens, but the Foreign Office
says their foreign nationality bars the UK from formally representing
the men. None of their home countries has intervened. The US has also
refused to give the UK any access to them.

Mr Deghayes's case has alarmed human rights lawyers because the US has
allowed Libyan intelligence officers to interrogate him in Cuba - even
though he is a refugee from Col Gaddafi's regime.

Mr Stafford Smith said they could now "conclusively prove" that Mr
Deghayes was the victim of mistaken identity. They had established that
video footage allegedly showing him in Chechnya was of another man, who
is now dead. Mr Deghayes had never been to Chechnya, the lawyer
insisted.

Mr Deghayes was seized in the Pakistani city of Lahore in April 2002 by
armed local intelligence officers, and alleges he was immediately
subjected to repeated torture, threats against his wife and children,
and violent assaults by his captors.

He claims the Pakistani interrogators told him they were holding him at
US request, and insisted they had no interest in him. He claimed: "I
underwent systematic beatings every night for three days. Each time,
when I was nearly unconscious, I would be thrown back into the cell to
await more."

After several weeks in Lahore, he said, he was taken to the Pakistani
capital Islamabad where he claims to have been interrogated by both
British and US intelligence officers. He alleges he was "similarly
abused" there for approximately a month, including having his head
forcibly held under water in a large drum "until I was almost drowned".

Mr Deghayes was terrorised by one technique - shoving prisoners into a
chamber nicknamed the "snake room". The Libyan claimed: "One day they
took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes. The room
was painted black and white, with dim lights. They threatened to leave
me there, and let the snakes out with me in the room. This really got to
me, as these were such sick people that they must have had this room
specially made."

Over his two months in Afghanistan, he added, they starved him of food
for nearly eight days, deprived him of light "for days on end",
"effectively suffocated" him in an airtight box, and subjected him to
beatings and being forced to live naked for long periods "as part of the
humiliation process".

He added: "The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films ...
Lying on the floor of the compound, all night I would hear the screams
of others in the rooms above us, as they were tortured and interrogated.
My number would be called out, and I would have to go to the gate. They
chained me, and put a bag over my head, dragging me off for my own turn.
They would force me to my knees for questioning. They would threaten me
with more torture."

In September 2002, Mr Deghayes was transferred to Guantanamo Bay from
Bagram. Since then, he alleges, he has been repeatedly subjected to
violent assaults and humiliating ill-treatment. He is now living in
solitary confinement, in a concrete cell.

The blinding incident came in March last year after the prisoners
protested against forcible intimate body searches by guards training for
their transfer to Iraq. Mr Stafford Smith recounts: "The prisoners were
Maced, but they fought back this time. The officer standing behind the
MPs kept urging them to spray more Mace at Omar's eye. 'More, more', he
shouted. Then one of the MPs pushed his finger into Omar's eye. Again,
the officer shouted 'more, more'. Omar was trying desperately not to
scream, the pain was agonising."

Mr Deghayes was left unable to see in either eye at first. His right
eye, already weakened by a childhood accident, has been left permanently
"milky white" and blinded, Mr Stafford Smith said.

Other severe assaults involved the camp's "extreme reaction force", a
form of riot squad allegedly used to quell or punish prisoners. In a
series of incidents, US personnel smeared another man's faeces in his
face; he was nearly drowned when water from high-pressure hoses was
forced up his nose; he had his head shoved into a flushing toilet; had
his nose nearly broken; and was violently assaulted in the recreation
yard.

The US government insists it investigates all allegations of
ill-treatment, and now admits to 10 proven cases of abuse at Guantanamo
Bay, and at least two detainee murders in Afghanistan. In January, the
Pentagon launched a fresh inquiry, which reported its findings last
month, after leaked FBI papers revealed serious allegations of abuse
witnessed by FBI agents at Camp Delta.

Mr Stafford Smith said Mr Deghayes was now "very, very paranoid because
they've played so many games with him". However, he added, his client
"is holding up better than many" at Guantanamo Bay. "All he wants to do
is to get back home to his family."


***

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