Tales of abuse in Guantanamo testimony

One man claimed he was working with the Americans and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance.

“I was working with you and now I am here, and I see those people here that I helped capture in Afghanistan,” said the purported former commander, adding he fears if he’s ever released to his country he will be killed because of information he has provided to the Americans.

Stories of false accusations abound. One prisoner said he was in Afghanistan to buy heroin so he could sell it to open a nightclub in Europe, another said he was a goat herder — while others said they offered false confessions to their captors to make alleged abuse stop.

A 24-year-old detainee said he confessed to giving a militant group the names and serial numbers of security personnel assigned to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai but “I said this under torture.” He described how an American interrogator “threatened me with a gun to my mouth, to try to make me say something.”

The tribunal president asked him about the alleged torture, established it was purportedly carried out at a U.S. facility in Kabul by an American, then moved on to other questions.

Given a Bible
Another Muslim prisoner from Uzbekistan talked of abuse he had suffered and how he was given a Bible — not a Quran.

The testimonies also brought up allegations that interrogators — hastily recruited after the Sept. 11 terror attacks — may have manipulated the confessions.

“When I was in the Kandahar prison, the interrogator hit my arm and told me I received training in mortars,” a man said, referring to the U.S. detention camp in western Afghanistan where the Taliban rose to power.

“As he was hitting me, I kept telling him, no I didn’t receive training. I was crying and finally I told him I did receive the training. My hands were tied behind my back and my knees were on the ground and my head was bleeding. I was in a lot of pain. ... At that point, with all my suffering, if he had asked me if I was Osama bin Laden, I would have said yes.

“What is my crime? Because of the United States, my hand is handicapped. I can’t work.”

Another man alleged that U.S. troops stripped the prisoners of their clothes in Afghanistan and bullied them into saying things the Americans wanted to hear.

“Americans were beating us really hard, and they had dogs behind us and they said if we didn’t say this, they would release the dogs,” he said.

The tribunal president made no comment and moved on to the next question: Where were you born?

While most of the prisoners denied the accusations that led to their imprisonment, some freely admitted joining the Taliban but wanted to be charged and tried for their alleged crimes.

“It seems like you are keeping and detaining innocent people,” said one detainee, accused of asking Afghan soldiers for guns to fight Americans.

‘Is this really happening?’
Although detainees sought to call witnesses from abroad to vouch for them during the tribunals, many requests were rejected as irrelevant and approved witnesses didn’t appear because requests to their government to track them down got no response, according to the transcripts. In more than 3,500 pages of testimonies, the only witnesses are other detainees.

“All the rules in the United States and in the world, the person is innocent until you prove he is guilty, not innocent. But here, with Americans, the detainees are guilty until proven innocent,” one detainee complained.

One prisoner told the tribunal that some of his fellow detainees at Guantanamo are sick and elderly. “I found my brothers being tortured in Kandahar and here,” he said.

He compared his detention at Guantanamo to the 1998 Hollywood movie “The Siege,” in which Arabs are indiscriminately hunted down and detained in New York City after a terrorist attack.

“I was shocked, thinking am I in that movie or on a stage in Hollywood? Is this really happening? Sometimes I laugh at myself and say when does that movie end?” he says.

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