London – One prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told a military panel that American troops beat him so badly he now wets his pants. Another detainee claimed that U.S. troops stripped prisoners in Afghanistan and intimidated them with dogs so they would admit to militant activity.
Stories of alleged abuse and forced confessions are among 1,000 pages of tribunal transcripts the U.S. government released to The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit – the second group of documents The AP has received in 10 days.
The testimonies offer a glimpse into the secretive world of Guantanamo Bay, where about 520 men from 40 countries remain held, accused of having links to Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime or Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. Many have been held for three years.
Whether the stories are true may never be known. And it wasn’t clear how many abuse allegations had been logged from the tribunals or how many of them had been investigated.
One detainee, whose name and nationality were blacked out like most others in the transcripts, said his medical problems from alleged abuse have not been taken seriously.
“Americans hit me and beat me up so badly I believe I’m sexually dysfunctional. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep with my wife or not,” he said. “I can’t control my urination, and sometimes I put toilet paper down there so I won’t wet my pants.”
The tribunal president promised to take up the man’s medical complaint, but in five pages of questioning never brought up the alleged abuse.
The panel members were charged with determining whether the men were enemy combatants – not with investigating abuse allegations, said a military spokeswoman, Navy Capt. Beci Brenton. She said tribunal members are supposed to forward abuse allegations to the Joint Task Force running the detention mission, which then forwards them to the U.S. Southern Command in Miami.
In a statement Sunday, the Pentagon said many of the men have been trained to lie. U.S. troops treat detainees humanely, and “U.S. policy condemns and prohibits torture,” the statement said, adding that authorities take claims of abuse seriously.
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 goatherd, and others said they gave 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 said an interrogator “threatened me with a gun to my mouth, to try to make me say something.”
The testimonies also brought up allegations that interrogators – hastily recruited after the Sept. 11 terrorist 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.”
