"Yasser tearfully described that when he reached the top of the steps 'the party began…They started to put the [muzzle] of the rifle [and] the wood from the broom into [my anus]. They entered my privates from behind.'...Yasser estimated that he was penetrated five or six times during this initial sodomy incident and saw blood 'all over my feet' through a small hole in the hood covering his eyes."

–Physicians for Human Rights, Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact

Waterboarding. It’s all we seem to discuss when comes to American torture. Whenever you see people discussing "enhanced interrogation" on your TV, chances are they’ll be throwing around the same tired arguments, all revoling around waterboarding. Why, of all the things we’ve done to our suspected (and not-so-suspected) terrorist detainees, is waterboarding the issue? Why confine the rapidly dwindling debate to that single technique? We’ve engaged in a lot of other practices that qualify universally as torture. Are sleep deprivation or "Palestinian hanging" not controversial enough? Is solitary confinement too mundane?

How about sodomy? Is that something we consider unremarkable?

"This is highly consistent with the events Amir described, including a traumatic injury and subsequent scarring process. Examination of the peri-**** area showed signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having been sodomized with a broomstick."

–Physicians for Human Rights

That’s right, sodomy. Forcible **** penetration. The documentation of this and other forms of sexual humiliation is too extensive to be denied or pawned off on a couple of redneck privates. And we know now that sexual humiliation techniques were among those discussed and approved by the National Security Principals Committee, a White House group including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John "History will not judge this kindly" Ashcroft.

I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about forcible **** rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ***. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be ****ing mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.

The next time I hear some idiot refer to Jack Bauer in defense of torture, I want to ask him what he thinks of Jack Bauer rogering terrorists with a broomstick. You’ve never seen that in the hours of not-so-subtle pro-torture TV drama we’ve seen since 2001, have you? Never saw Andy Sipowicz cornhole a skell on NYPD blue? Or Michael Chiklis on The Shield making a suspect drink his pee? Me neither. Something tells me that might have hurt their ratings.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/22497

Wow, thats never happened to me before. Broomstick handles? Guns?

I wonder what he might have done, that people thought he deserved THAT kind of treatment. Was his intension to maim, or hurt, or kill others? Or, many?

Makes ya think about cause and effect.. or karma? *shruggs*

Im at a loss.

Wonder why God allowed THAT to happen.

Because in Bush and Cheneys White House, God was only an excuse, not a savior!

Agreed. But still, we have a guy with his a$$ ripped up.

I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the United States of America. And to the republic, for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.............

Yep, know it well, said it every day in school proudly.

Jack Bauer rogering terrorists with a broomstick. I'll have to look for that next season. Question, why do we spend so much effert trying to defend these people? If they were picked up and locked up they were most likely some place, or some where, with some one they should not have been around. I know If I'm in a war zone and hear gun fire ansd explosions I'm going the oppsite way. Gulty by the company you keep. If you are hanging out with murders, bombers, and rapests don't be so supprized to find yourself along with them. It's what my parent taught me and I haven't mannaged to be rogered by anyone. Maby we should consider how these people behaved before we judge how they are treated. Besides after there jail sentance is over with they get to return home, unlike so many of our brave men and women.

JUST SEND THEM OVER TO MICHEAL JACKSONS FOR A SLEEP OVER................

more than liekly they confessed to something I am sure under torture

If they truly believed in God then they wouldnt have done the things they did

Apparently you haven't read many of the reports on the detainees.

The majority are never charged, but tortured, and later released anyway. Some were detained due to family members pasts or affiliations. Some because their "travels" were suspicious, or the one business man who had $5000 to buy office equipment.... held and tortured for 5 years before released, lost his business, family, money.... because he had $5000 in cash.

Yep, let's just torture and kill them all! God can sort them out!

I bet just about anyone would confess to anything under this type of torture.

Reply to Bestinshow. The main stream media grant them self’s an others a licenses to lie. This is what you are repeating. As I understand it there has been two Geneva
Conventions spilling out rules of war and needier gave these detains any protection. Why do you suppose that was?

A year after the American Army left South Vietnam, the Evil Empire in crested support to the North by three hundred per cent, the Demo. Cut support by fifty percent to the south which lead to the collapse of South Vietnam.

That was then, this is now. All this talk about atrocities is the same thing but that’s
what the Demo. Do.

Detained At 14, Tortured and Released At 21

El-Gharani was treated with appalling brutality. After being tortured in Pakistani custody, he was sold to US forces, who flew him to a prison at Kandahar airport, where, he said, one particular soldier “would hold my *****, with scissors, and say he’d cut it off.



Guantánamo’s Youngest Prisoner Released To Chad
June 06, 2009 -- The long ordeal of Mohammed El-Gharani, Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, has finally come to an end. Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents him, reports today that he has been sent back to Chad.

A Saudi resident and Chadian national, El-Gharani was just 14 years old when he was seized by Pakistani forces in a random raid on a mosque in Karachi, but was treated appallingly both by the Pakistanis who seized him, and by the US military. I provided a detailed explanation of the abuse to which he was subjected in an article last year, “Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child,” which I condensed for an article in January, when I explained:

As with all but three of the 22 confirmed juveniles who have been held at Guantánamo, the US authorities never treated him separately from the adult population, even though they are obliged, under the terms of the UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict) to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

Instead, El-Gharani was treated with appalling brutality. After being tortured in Pakistani custody, he was sold to US forces, who flew him to a prison at Kandahar airport, where, he said, one particular soldier “would hold my *****, with scissors, and say he’d cut it off.” His treatment did not improve in Guantánamo. Subjected relentlessly to racist abuse, because of the color of his skin, he was hung from his wrists on numerous occasions, and was also subjected to a regime of “enhanced” techniques to prepare him for interrogation — including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions — that clearly constitute torture. As a result of this and other abuse, including regular beatings by the guard force responsible for quelling even the most minor infractions of the rules, El-Gharani has become deeply depressed, and has tried to commit suicide on several occasions.

In January, over seven years after his initial capture, El-Gharani finally had his case reviewed in a US court, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to ask a court why they were being held. Judge Richard Leon, who had granted the habeas petitions of five Algerian prisoners in November, ruling that the government had failed to establish a case against them, was, if anything, even more dismissive of the claims against El-Gharani.

In his habeas petition, El-Gharani insisted, as he had throughout his detention, that he “traveled to Pakistan from Saudi Arabia at the age of 14 to escape discrimination against Chadians in that country, acquire computer and English skills, and make a better life for himself,” and that he “remained there until his arrest,” although the government claimed that he “arrived in Afghanistan at some unspecified time in 2001,” and was “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces,” for a variety of reasons, including claims that he received military training at an al-Qaeda-affiliated military training camp, fought against US and allied forces at the battle of Tora Bora, and was a member of an al-Qaeda cell based in London.

Noting that the government’s supposed evidence against El-Gharani consisted of statements made by two other prisoners at Guantánamo, and that, moreover, these statements were “either exclusively, or jointly, the only evidence offered by the Government to substantiate the majority of their allegations,” Judge Leon stated that “the credibility and reliability of the detainees being relied upon by the Government has either been directly called into question by Government personnel or has been characterized by Government personnel as undermined,” and dismissed all the claims, reserving particular criticism for the claim that El-Gharani had been a member of a London-based al-Qaeda cell.

As I wrote in January,

This was, indeed, the most extraordinary allegation, as El-Gharani was just 11 years old at the time, and, as his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, explained in his book The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay, “he must have been beamed over to the al-Qaeda meetings by the Starship Enterprise, since he never left Saudi Arabia by conventional means.”

Leon’s verdict was marginally less colorful, but no less devastating. “Putting aside the obvious and unanswered questions as to how a Saudi minor from a very poor family could have even become a member of a London-based cell,” he wrote, “the Government simply advances no corroborating evidence for these statements it believes to be reliable from a fellow detainee, the basis of whose knowledge is — at best — unknown.”

Despite this long-overdue court victory, El-Gharani’s suffering in Guantánamo did not come to an end. In April, he was finally allowed to call one of his relatives in Chad, but took the opportunity to call the Arabic broadcaster al-Jazeera instead, telling them, as Reuters described it, that “he had been beaten with batons and teargassed by a group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets after refusing to leave his cell.” He explained, “This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day,” and added, “Since Obama took charge he has not shown us that anything will change.”

El-Gharani’s return to Chad is not without its problems. He is currently being held by the security services, although they have stressed to his lawyers that it is just a formality and that they fully understand the horrors he has been through. More troubling is the fact that, although he has extended family in Chad who will take care of him, he cannot be reunited with his parents, because they live in Saudi Arabia. Representatives of Reprieve are expected to fly out to Chad this weekend, to help with his rehabilitation, but in the meantime El-Gharani himself has said only that he is, of course, delighted to be free, and is looking forward to undertaking an education, to make up for the lost years and lost opportunities while he was held in Guantánamo.

As Zachary Katznelson, Reprieve’s legal director, explained to me in a telephone conversation this evening, “Reprieve is delighted that, after seven long years of unjust, illegal incarceration, Mohammed is finally out of Guantánamo Bay. A federal judge looked at his case in January, and found that there were never any valid grounds to hold him. He should have been released long ago, but we’re glad that justice has finally been served.”

Note: For another article about prisoners, see: Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda?

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22926.htm

One nation with an inVisible god, with liberty and justice only for those to believe in that god... Couldn't help myself.

This kind of treatment makes us no better than those we claim to be fighting against. How can we claim a moral high ground and condone these actions? The only people who support this are mindless sadistic zombies who think the US the greatest country in the world and has the right to prove it by any means necessary.

Big lies, Dam lies and dirty lies too.