[Ppnews] ‘Don’t interact, don’t talk, they are not humans’ - Gitmo guard's basic orders

[Political Prisoner News]

  ‘Don’t interact, don’t talk, they are not humans’ - Gitmo guard's
  basic orders

May 22, 2013 09:2
http://rt.com/news/guantanamo-guard-islam-torture-608/

One of the methods used to extract information from Muslim inmates in 
Guantanamo was to apply sexual interrogation techniques, Terry 
Holdbrooks, former guard at the camp has told RT.

Such a degradation methods, the former US soldier said, were used on 
innocent men. Holdbrooks, who wrote a book about GITMO prisoners 
<http://rt.com/news/guantanamo-guard-islam-torture-608/%20www.gtmobook.com>, 
claims that it is the inmates’ religious perseverance in the face of 
pain and humiliation made him convinced that US was not fighting for the 
right cause.

*RT:* /What did you experience at the detention camp that changed you?/

*Terry Holdbrooks:* To be honest with you I would not even know where to 
begin with that. Initially seeing religion practiced the way that the 
detainees practice Islam is a really life changing experience in itself. 
I have not really seen any kind of any serious devotion, the faith like 
that growing up in the US.

The torture and information extraction methods that we used certainly 
created a great deal of doubt and questions in my mind to whether or not 
this was my America. But when I thought about what we were doing there 
and how we go about doing it, it did not seem like the America I signed 
up to defend. It did not seem like the America I grew up in, I grew to 
believe in. And that in itself was a very disillusioning experience. 
There was a great deal of personal growth that took there as well.

*RT:* /Could you describe the relationship between the guards and 
detainees at Guantanamo back when you were serving (and how has it 
changed since then)?/

*TH:* I suppose that if we’re going to take a stroll down the memory 
lane, Brandon Neely was there first. He was there when it was camp 
x-ray. It was essentially dog cages, nothing more. It was dog kennels, I 
suppose you can say. When I was there camp Delta was in full swing. 
Delta housed about 612 men that would be the general population of the 
camps.

*RT:* /Were you given any orders as how to treat the inmates?/

*TH:* Our interaction with the detainees was such that we were told not 
to talk to them, not to treat them as humans, to not engage in 
conversation with them whatsoever. And the army sort of made a mistake 
by allowing somebody who is inclined to sociology and to studying people 
by leaving me with individuals from all over the world unsupervised for 
eight hours. I was very low in rank so I was delegated all the work, 
while those who were higher in rank were sitting in the air-conditioned 
shacks, nurturing their hangovers. So the instructions I was given were 
simple – don’t interact, don’t talk, they are not humans.

*RT:* /There have been reports of torture and other human rights 
violations happening at the prison camp. Could you tell us what you saw?/

*TH:* We can begin with experiences I had the pleasure of having. 
Myself, Eric Sarr and another Guantanamo guard were involved in this. 
Eric was a linguist and he was working with an interrogator.

We took the detainee into interrogation and throughout the interrogation 
the interrogator took off her clothing. She essentially gave the 
detainee a lap dance, tried to arouse him and then let him believe that 
he had menstrual blood on him. We then took the detainee back to his 
cell and were told that he was not allowed to have shower privileges nor 
fresh water for days. The idea behind this being that if he could not 
clean himself he would not be able to pray, if he could not pray, he 
could not practice Islam. Essentially it was an idea to break him down 
spiritually.

Omar Khadr and a number of other detainees, I remember hearing just few 
moments ago Shaker Aamer, they were privileged to something we called 
the frequent flyer program, where we would essentially move them every 
two hours. Whether we were moving them from camp Delta to camp Echo or 
moving them from Bravo block to Charlie block, be it a little move or a 
big move, the idea is that every two hours they would be moved and they 
would not be able to sleep. This was essentially to wear down their 
psyche and make them more probable to give out their information during 
interrogation.

But what has questioned me ever since I first saw it, it seemed that 
most of these men were innocent and as numbers are starting to show, 
we’ve sent over 600 of them home, so they must have been innocent; if we 
knew that we were purchasing men that were innocent, why were we trying 
to interrogate innocent men? What were we hoping to get from them?

Some of the tactics I saw practiced in Guantanamo, I just want to never 
want to relive again and then a great deal of regret takes place and 
then I did not take the most productive use of some years after 
Guantanamo. I tried to drown away some of those memories and that is 
something you cannot do. You have to confront it.

/Holdbrooks has written a book, entitled "Traitor" 
<http://www.gtmobook.com/>, to be published in the Summer of 2013/

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/ppnews_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20130522/d88926ac/attachment.htm>