The Torture Administration Continued: Former Gitmo Guard Speaks Out

by Damozel | An Army private who served at Guantanamo Bay --- previously deterred by fear of retaliation -- is speaking out about his experiences there. (Harper's)   Scott Horton quotes the AP interview:

“The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed.  (Harper's; emphasis added)

Non-liberal Andrew Sullivan points out the reason why it's so important to consider the source.

We were long told that the grueling accounts of torture, sexual abuse, and mental terror inflicted under orders from president Bush in Guantanamo Bay (and many other sites in the war on Jihadist terrorism) were lies. The testimony came from Jihadists, after all.... But then came the testimony from FBI agents who saw the barbarism authorized in the camp; and increasingly, more and more US service members have come forward to testify to rigged trials, orchestrated sadism, instrumental rape as policy and abuse of medical ethics.

Neely's gone into quite a lot of detail.

Neely’s comprehensive account runs to roughly 15,000 words. It was compiled by law students at the University of California at Davis and can be accessed here.

But just looking at that list I quoted from Horton's article?  That's a lot of wrong things right there. 

Let's go through the list of things he saw and did that were wrong a little more systematically.

1. the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb
2. sexual abuse by medical personnel
3. torture by other medical personnel
4. brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution
5. torturous shackling, positional torture
6. interference with religious practices and beliefs
7. verbal abuse
8. restriction of recreation
9. an isolation regime...put in place for child-detainees.

Yes, yes, I know.  The United States under George W. Bush has not and  would never, ever engage in "torture."  George W. Bush would never, ever countenance torture unless it was absolutely necessary.  It's all in how you define "torture."

Oh, but there's more.

Neely discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued. The IRF approach was devised to use a perceived legal loophole in the prohibition on torture. Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners....

Further to this point, Andrew Sullivan quotes from the 15,000 words of Private Brandon Neely.

By the time the IRF team was coming off the block and I was walking back towards Alpha Block I noticed a couple of the guys had blood on their arms, hands, and uniforms. They were washing their hands with water. The detainee was escorted off the block to medical, where he was given stitches for multiple lacerations to his head. Later that day I came back on the block and saw the cage this detainee was IRFed in. The cement floor was a dull red color from the blood. You could tell at one point before it was washed out that there was a lot of blood on the floor of that cage.

Want another example?  This one comes via NION and illustrates what happened to Gitmo prisoners who called a female MP a bitch. 

For punishment, the IRF team was called upon to enter the cage and hog-tie the detainee. The female MP was very upset, yelling "Whip his ass!"

The IRF team, along with the camp OIC, approached the detainee's cage and told him to stop yelling and lay down so he could be restrained. The detainee just stood there, staring at them. The IRF team lined up in position to enter the cage. The OIC unlocked the lock on the cage door and, when this was done, the detainee turned around, went to his knees and placed his hands on the top of his head. The lock was taken off and the cage door was opened. The Number One Man on the IRF team tossed his shield to the side and, with a quick run towards the detainee, hopped in the air and came down on the back of the detainee with his knee (the Number One guy on the IRF team was no small guy). This caused the detainee to fall to the cement floor of the cage with the Number One Man on top of him. Then the whole IRF team was on top of him hitting, punching, and kicking him. It seemed like a long time, but in reality it lasted 15-20 seconds.

While the IRF team was still on top of the detainee someone yelled for the female MP that was called a bitch. She entered the cage and she punched the detainee a couple times in the head and then left the cage. Everyone in the cage stood up and the detainee laid there cuffed-up but motionless and unresponsive. Next thing I saw were medics coming from the medical house with a stretcher. They left the block with the detainee on the stretcher; they took him to a waiting military ambulance and was transported to the main hospital. The IRF team would ride along with the detainee. I went back to work not fully knowing what was wrong or what happened to the detainee.

Later that night, after we had been off for a while, the IRF team came back from the hospital. They would go on and talk about how they hit and punched the detainee and how they held him down so the female MP could hit him a couple times. They went on to talk about the ambulance ride saying no one spoke and it was a very silent ride. One of them even stated the detainee went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance.

Neely further observed:

Every time I witnessed an IRFing a camera was present, but one of two things would happen: (1) the camera would never be turned on, or (2) the camera would be on, but pointed straight at the ground. In the incident on Bravo Block I spoke about I found out through talking to people and hearing them joke that the video of the incident was destroyed.  (NION)

Also:  how disturbing is Neely's confirmation that medical professionals did their bit to enhance the detainees' interrogation? 

So disturbing.  Horton sums it up:

[H]ealth professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. (Harper's)

Horton and those present were curious about why Bush & Co. didn't want accountability for rape by instrumentality. 

When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking. (Harper's)

I ought to be beyond being shocked by anything that happened under Bush/Cheney and yet I go on being shocked, every time.

Digby reminds us that we already knew about sodomy by instrumentality and forced enemas.

There was also this....

A US military investigation, carried out by Major General Antonio Taguba, uncovered evidence of war crimes against the inmates, including: breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick (Harper's).

So what do we want to do about it?  Joe Conason argues that we should pardon the perpetrators because, let's face it, it would be the politically prudent approach.  After all, he argues, we have "more urgent" issues to address. 

Jane Hamsher thinks otherwise.

These are not "political offenses," these are crimes. And despite the propensity of those who committed them to wrap themselves in the flag and claim they did it for America, there is no way to justify anal rape as an expression of anything other than extreme sadism....

Can we stop casting this as vengeance? Can we stop painting people who believe that something terrible was lost during the last eight years, something moral and decent and good at the core of the American soul, as little more than "angry" and "vindictive?" And can we stop assuming that there is something magnanimous about a "bipartisanship" that exists only when both sides agree to walk into the next room and pretend that the pile of wreckage we leave behind, the one that nobody wants to look, isn't still on fire?...

We don't live in a box, and this isn't all about making ourselves feel good. We inflicted a lot of pain on the world, and they are looking to see how we deal with it. We owe them, and ourselves, more than a "group hug."

Amen to that.

For heart-shattering excerpts from Pvt Neely's report, as well as information about Neely himself, see NION here.

Makes you really wonder about extraordinary rendition and why the Bush administration thought it was needed if this is how the prisoners at Guantanamo were being treated.

More here at Memeorandum.

RECENT RELATED BUCK NAKED POLITICS POSTINGS

What is "Extraordinary Rendition," and Why is it so Horrible?

The Obama Administration's First Civil Liberties Test: FAIL? (Commentary Round-Up)

A Failure to Differentiate: Obama's Policy on Extraordinary Rendition versus the Other Kind (Scott Horton Explains)

Will Obama Administration Consider Preserving CIA Renditions as Anti-Terrorism Weapon?

Lieberman Makes a Funny Joke About Waterboarding

ALSO

The Torture Administration

Former Interrogator Still Tormented by Recollections of Practices Used in Iraq

Iraq Detainees Held in Small Crates

Hitchens: 'If Waterboarding Isn't Torture, There's No Such Thing as Torture'

Another Expert Explains Waterboarding to Congress (Updated)

Military Interrogator: Torture isn't Operationally Effective

US Military & Intelligence Officials Weigh in on Torture Issue (Deaf Ears Dept) (12-6-07)

Is Waterboarding Torture? Part 5: Schooling the Senate

General Says Rumsfeld Misled Congress re: Abu Ghraib

Comments

[sir jorge]

so much information! wow, i never knew