On the 10th anniversary of the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, in commemoration of all the prisoners who have suffered, we invite you to listen to former detainee Qari Mohemmed Saad Iqbal Madani.
Guantanamo Photo: Getty/Shane T.McCoy/AFP
Without having being charged nor having committed a crime – and even after the authorities admitted that they had “made a mistake”, he was told that he would still have to go to Guantánamo Bay for a duration or he would have to lie and claim having a link with Osama Bin Laden, so that the authorities would in turn be able to save face.
‘I spent one year Bagram Air Base, then I was transferred to Guantánamo Bay; I was not allowed to sleep. I was not allowed to use the bathroom.
For six months they kept me in a refrigerator naked. It’s hard to explain. After spending 6 months in a refrigerator I have lost my hearing. The way I was treated…animals are not even treated this way…’
Watch the interview.
(This is crossposted on Roqayah Chamseddine’s blog The Cynical Arab)
Why be surprised? Why should torture be used (only) to learn secrets or to compel false confessions or accusations? Torture can be used to cover-up for a bad arrest, to cover-up anything, or just for fun (surely, someone out there thinks torturing other people is fun), or to send a message to someone else; — oh! so many reasons.
And if the torturers know they are immune to punishment, it only gets worse. And they always believe that.
And now, Americans, it has come home to native soil with NDAA 2012 s. 1021, which allows the armed forces to arrest anyone anywhere upon (no one knows how slender and unsupported or knowingly-false) a statement of suspicion that such person is a terrorist. And will they torture YOU if they take YOU? why not? Who’d ever know?
Where are the mainstream liberals on this? Oh yea, there’s a democrat in the white house… A national disgrace, an international scandal ..Madani should get the Bush’s pad in kennebunkport as partial restitution
To think that he isn’t the only one…the look on his face before he broke down. What are we doing? What?
Obscene.
The same people who let the troops think it’s ok to abuse at Guantanamo let them think it was ok to abuse at Abu Ghraib, and let them think it was ok to piss on dead Taliban. The Dersh was all over the msm arguing the legality of torture, as was Rumsfeld. Bush marked his x on all the relevant docs. That this man (along with many others) was known to be totally innocent MUST make his treatment a blatant war crime for which there ought to be prosecution. Why are they above the law???
They did pharmaceutical testing on him?