DR skriver:
Det er tale om 5000 sider uredigerede referater fra de høringer, der skal fastslå om fangerne er fjendtlige kombatanter eller ej. Alle fortrolige oplysninger er sorteret fra. Men dokumenterne bidrager til det stadigt mere nuancerede billede, der bliver tegnet af fangelejren. Og de bidrager til det voksende pres på USA for at lukke lejren.
Mere fra Ablutions gennemlæsning af sagerne:
testimony of this individual, one Abdul Hakim Bukhary (set 3, page 60). Perhaps it doesn’t fit the picture of Guantanamo that the likes of Mr. Sutcliffe and his employers (whether at the BBC or the Indy) wish to convey:
“Prisoners here are in paradise. American people are very good. Really. They give us three meals, juice, fruit and everything! My God! Here they [i.e. the Arab detainees] bother me everyday, every time. Now about 30 months to this day, they bother me. They call me a hypocrite. They call me a spy. You have to say, ‘thank God!’ I thank you for America! If you are in a Taliban prison, they do not treat you well. Here we are in paradise. It is 100% paradise. Yes, really. Thank you!”
Another admitted Taliban fighter, Mohammed Yacob, shares Mr. Bukhary’s positive feelings towards his captors (set 2, page 55):
“I’m very happy with the Americans. I don’t blame the Americans for capturing me. I blame someone who reported me; I got captured because of him.”
Man må jo heller ikke glemme at:
This is al-Qa’eda Rule 18: ‘You must claim you were tortured’
Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga, Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar finally arrived back in Britain last week after their three-year imprisonment in Guantanamo, to near-universal acclaim and sympathy. Their lawyers insist that they are totally innocent of any involvement in terrorism. The men themselves say that they have been tortured, and that the admissions made by three of them – that they had been recruited by al-Qa’eda , and undergone training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan – are completely false
The horrors of what undoubtedly took place in Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq, have convinced many people that the Americans must also have administered hideous tortures to everyone they imprisoned at Guantanamo. In fact it is not at all clear that the Americans have tortured anyone in Guantanamo. Some of the “sexual tortures” – women interrogators rubbing their breasts against the backs of those being questioned – sound, to Western ears, too close to the comfy chair of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquistion to be taken seriously. Surprisingly, perhaps, the US army authorities took them very seriously: they dismissed for “inappropriate conduct” a female interrogator who was found to have run her fingers through one detainee’s hair and sat on his lap during an interrogation.
The detainees in Guantanamo were certainly humiliated and made to feel extremely uncomfortable. They may have been deprived of light and sleep and forced to stand for long periods. But did it constitute torture? The US Department of Defence insists that none of the Britons even alleged they had been tortured or abused until October last year – and that when US officials investigated those claims, they not only found they had no foundation, but that one of the Britons had assaulted one of his interrogators.
The men’s claim that they were tortured at Guantanamo should also be set in the context of the al-Qa’eda training manual discovered during a raid in Manchester a couple of years ago. Lesson 18 of that manual, whose authenticity has not been questioned, emphatically states, under the heading “Prison and Detention Centres”, that, when arrested, members of al-Qa’eda “must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security investigators. [They must] complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison”. That is not, of course, proof that the Britons were not tortured in Guantanamo. But it ought to encourage some doubts about uncritically accepting that they were – which seems to be the attitude adopted by most of the media.
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