It’s amazing that some analysts are still insisting that there is not any torture going on at America’s foreign detention centers.
That is, despite the fact that the number of detainees who claim to have been tortured or abused while in US custody seems to grow every week. In the past, there have been allegations by Bangladeshis, Afghanis, and Brits. Last week, it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammad who insisted that he had been tortured while in American custody. This week, it’s David Hicks, a British citizen who has been in Guantanamo for over five years. Here’s a cut from a recent article about him in The New York Times:
He said [that he] was taken to the amphibious assault ship Peleliu, which he knew because of announcements over the public address system. Among the detainees was John Walker Lindh, the American who later pleaded guilty to serving with the Taliban and is now serving 20 years. Commander Gordon said the military would not discuss whether Mr. Hicks was held on ships, but noted that it was a matter of public record that Mr. Lindh was held on the Peleliu.
On board, Mr. Hicks said he could hear other detainees “screaming in pain� when being interrogated.
He said he was later transferred to the amphibious assault ship Bataan, where he said conditions became “drastically� worse. He was fed only a handful of rice or fruit three times a day, the affidavit asserts, and on several occasions, he and other detainees, blindfolded, hooded and handcuffed, were thrown onto helicopters and taken to hangar-like buildings in an unknown location.
They were forced to kneel for 10 hours, during which time “I was hit in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle several times (hard enough to knock me over), slapped in the back of the head, kicked, stepped on, and spat on,� he said. “I could hear the groans and cries of other detainees.�
He was flown back to the ship, and a few days later back to a hangar.
A week or so later, he was flown to Kandahar, where he and other detainees “were forced to lie face down in the mud while solders walked across our backs.�
He was stripped, his body hair shaved and a piece of “white plastic was forcibly inserted in my rectum for no apparent purpose,� he wrote. Soldiers made crude comments about the insertion, he said.
Are Hicks and other detainees lying about what they went through? I doubt it. The fact that there is a very large number of detainees who have alleged such treatment, that they all separately report experiencing similar interrogation procedures, and that these same methods of torture were revealed to have been used at Abu Ghraib suggests that there is systematic and regular abuse being carried out at these overseas detention facilities.