Motley Moose – Archive

Sen. Rand Paul is conducting an actual talking filibuster of John Brennan for CIA director over drone strikes.  Gotta say, I don’t agree with him on very much, but this has actually been good so far.

LiveStream of Rand Paul’s Talking Filibuster

On Friday, I told you my husband, Dan’s history, and why I fight against torture.

http://www.motleymoose.com/dia…

On Saturday, I told you the history of Murat Kurnaz, a German of Turkish extraction, and the first part of what he went through

http://www.motleymoose.com/dia…

On Sunday, I continued with telling you what Murat Kurnaz went through.

http://www.motleymoose.com/dia…

Today I will tell the story of

Binyam Mohammed

Binyam was born in Ethiopia, and claimed assylum on the United Kingdom in 1994. He traveled to Afghanistan in June of 2001, and after 9/11, moved to Pakistan. He was arrested at Karachi airport, while enroute to the United Kingdom. Binyam says he was held in prisons in Pakistan, Morroco and Afghanistan, before he was transferred to Guantanamo.

Here is some of what he has been through:

Speaking of his time in the ‘Dark Prison’, Binyam said:

“It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time. They hung me up for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb. There was loud music, Slim Shady [by Eminem] and Dr. Dre for 20 days. Then they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. At one point, I was chained to the rails for a fortnight [two weeks]. The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.”

These are excerpts from his diary, as printed in The Guardian, a London newspaper, from when he was held in a CIA “dark site” in Morocco.

They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor’s scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they’d electrocute me. Maybe castrate me.

They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed … I was just shocked, I wasn’t expecting … Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn’t want to scream because I knew it was coming.

One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. “I told you I was going to teach you who’s the man,” [one] eventually said.

They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. I asked for a doctor.

Doctor No 1 carried a briefcase. “You’re all right, aren’t you? But I’m going to say a prayer for you.” Doctor No 2 gave me an Alka-Seltzer for the pain. I told him about my penis. “I need to see it. How did this happen?” I told him. He looked like it was just another patient. “Put this cream on it two times a day. Morning and night.” He gave me some kind of antibiotic.

I was in Morocco for 18 months. Once they began this, they would do it to me about once a month. One time I asked a guard: “What’s the point of this? I’ve got nothing I can say to them. I’ve told them everything I possibly could.”

“As far as I know, it’s just to degrade you. So when you leave here, you’ll have these scars and you’ll never forget. So you’ll always fear doing anything but what the US wants.”

Later, when a US airplane picked me up the following January, a female MP took pictures. She was one of the few Americans who ever showed me any sympathy. When she saw the injuries I had she gasped. They treated me and took more photos when I was in Kabul. Someone told me this was “to show Washington it’s healing”.

But in Morocco, there were even worse things. Too horrible to remember, let alone talk about. About once a week or even once every two weeks I would be taken for interrogation, where they would tell me what to say. They said if you say this story as we read it, you will just go to court as a witness and all this torture will stop. I eventually repeated what was read out to me.

When I got to Morocco they said some big people in al-Qaida were talking about me. They talked about Jose Padilla and they said I was going to testify against him and big people. They named Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Abu Zubaidah and Ibn Sheikh al-Libi [all senior al-Qaida leaders who are now in US custody]. It was hard to pin down the exact story because what they wanted changed from Morocco to when later I was in the Dark Prison [a detention centre in Kabul with windowless cells and American staff], to Bagram and again in Guantánamo Bay.

They told me that I must plead guilty. I’d have to say I was an al-Qaida operations man, an ideas man. I kept insisting that I had only been in Afghanistan a short while. “We don’t care,” was all they’d say.

I was also questioned about my links with Britain. The interrogator told me: “We have photos of people given to us by MI5. Do you know these?” I realised that the British were sending questions to the Moroccans. I was at first surprised that the Brits were siding with the Americans.

On August 6, I thought I was going to be transferred out of there [the prison]. They came in and cuffed my hands behind my back.

But then three men came in with black masks. It seemed to go on for hours. I was in so much pain I’d fall to my knees. They’d pull me back up and hit me again. They’d kick me in my thighs as I got up. I vomited within the first few punches. I really didn’t speak at all though. I didn’t have the energy or will to say anything. I just wanted for it to end. After that, there was to be no more first-class treatment. No bathroom. No food for a while.

During September-October 2002, I was taken in a car to another place. The room was bigger, it had its own toilet, and a window which was opaque.

They gave me a toothbrush and Colgate toothpaste. I was allowed to recover from the scalpel for about two weeks, and the guards said nothing about it.

Then they cuffed me and put earphones on my head. They played hip-hop and rock music, very loud. I remember they played Meat Loaf and Aerosmith over and over. A couple of days later they did the same thing. Same music.

For 18 months, there was not one night when I could sleep well. Sometimes I would go 48 hours without sleep. At night, they would bang the metal doors, bang the flap on the door, or just come right in.

They continued with two or three interrogations a month. They weren’t really interrogations, more like training me what to say. The interrogator told me what was going on. “We’re going to change your brain,” he said.

I suffered the razor treatment about once a month for the remaining time I was in Morocco, even after I’d agreed to confess to whatever they wanted to hear. It became like a routine. They’d come in, tie me up, spend maybe an hour doing it. They never spoke to me. Then they’d tip some kind of liquid on me – the burning was like grasping a hot coal. The cutting, that was one kind of pain. The burning, that was another.

In all the 18 months I was there, I never went outside. I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors, unless you count the pictures they showed me.    

On 23 February 2009, almost seven years after his arrest, Mohamed was repatriated from Guantanamo to the UK, where he was released after questioning.

The US government has refused to release that documents and photographs that would allow Binyam to prove when his scars ocurred.

In a statement released through Reprieve, Binyam Moh
amed said

‘I am not asking for vengeance; only that the truth should be made known, so that nobody in the future should have to endure what I have endured.’

No human being should have this done to them.

Please help stand up for Binyam, tell your President, tell your Senators, tell your Congressional Representatives, “Not in My Name”, and demand that those responsible are held accountable.

Please contact your senators and the White House and tell them that John Brennan, who defended torture, should not be ther next head of the CIA, the agency who inflicted much of the torture since 9/11

         Hugs,

         For Dan,

         Heather

Dear Friends,

This is a series of diaries written about torture written from the perspective of the one enduring it, with as many first hand accounts as I can find.

  On Friday, I told the story of my husband who was a Vietnam vet who survived torture.

http://www.motleymoose.com/dia…

  Yesterday, I told the first part of the story of Murat Kurnaz, who was born in Germany of Turkish decent. He was imprisoned at Peshawar, Kandahar, and then at Guantanamo.

http://www.motleymoose.com/sho…

Murat Kurnaz

Mr. Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, had always lived in Germany, and was of Turkish descent. In Germany, those of Turkish descent having a much more difficult time becoming German citizens even those born in Germany. In 2001, he decided to learn more about his religion, Islam, in preparation for his Turkish wife joining him, so he traveled to Pakistan to learn from peaceful Imams. Enroute back to Germany, on December 1, 2001, he was taken off a bus in Pakistan, and taken to a prison in Peshawar, Pakistan, then to Kandahar, Afghanistan, and, finally to Guantanamo Bay, where he remained until August 4th, 2006.

What I share now are excerpts from his book “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo.” These are the things that have been done to fellow human beings.

Today, I continue Mr. Kurnaz’s story, with excerpts from his book “Five Years of My Life”. These excerpts are from his time at Guantanamo.

He was young, around my age, maybe nineteen or twenty. He lay on the ground making soft noises.

…

He didn’t have any legs. His wounds were still fresh.

I sat in my cage, hardly daring to look, but every once in a while I had to look in his direction. The stumps of his legs were full of pus. The bandages wrapped around them had turned red and yellow. Everything was bloody and moist. He had frostbite marks on his hands. He seemed hardly able to move his fingers. I watched as he tried to get up. He crawled over to the bucket in his cage and tried to sit on it. He had to go to the toilet. He tried to raise himself up with his hands on the chain-link fence, but he didn’t make it. He couldn’t hold on with his swollen fingers. Still, he tried, until a guard came and hit his hands with his billy-club. The young man fell to the ground.

Every time he tried to hoist himself onto the bucket, the guards came and hit him on the hands. No one was allowed to touch the fence –  that was an iron law. But a young man with no legs? They told him he wasn’t allowed to stand up. But how could he have done that without any legs? He wasn’t even allowed to lean on the fence or to crawl onto the bucket.

…

The bandages wrapped around Abdul’s stumps were never changed. When he took them off himself, they were full of blood and pus. He showed the bandages to the guards and pointed to his open wounds. The guardsw ignored him. Later, I saw how he tried to wash the bandages in his bucket of drinking water. But he could hardly move his hands, so he wasn’t able to. And even if he had, where would he have hung them up to dry? He wasn’t allowed to touch the fence. He wrapped his stumps back up in the dirty bandages.

Abdul wasn’t the only prisoner who had parts of his body amputated. I saw other such cases in Guantanamo. I know of a prisoner who complained of a toothache. He was brought to a dentist, who pulled out his healthy teeth as well as the rotten one. I knew a man from Morocco who used to be a ship captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.

The general’s goal was to completely deprive us of sleep, and he achieved it.

…

Days and nights without sleep. Blows and new cages. Again, the stabbing sensation of a thousand needles throughout my entire body. I would have loved to step outside my body, but I couldn’t.

…

I know longer knew what block I was in. Sometimes, I would start quivering for no reason. The movement of my hands, arms, and legs seemed to be taking place in a dream.

…

Sometimes I heard ringing sounds that weren’t there. Other times I heard a low hum in my ear that refused to go away.

…

When I could no longer get up, they sent in the IRF team, who said they would hit me for as along as it took for me to get up and go with them to the next cell. But I was too weak. All I could feel was a buzzing in my head like a siren. They picked me up, and my knees buckled. During the last days of this treatment, they had to carry me around. They’d take me from one cage to the next, then to Jack, and then to another cage. I can only remember bits and pieces of this.

In the end they gave up –  probably because it was simply too much work for the guards to carry me around all the time. Over time, it was as if they were the ones getting punished. I was allowed to sleep, and when I woke up, the other prisoners helped me calculate how long this treatment had lasted. Three weeks. I went three weeks without sleep. At this point, I weighed less than 130 pounds.

I was put in a solitary confinement cell like any other, fitted out with corrugated metal sheeting. I had never been to India, and I was surprised that it wasn’t cold. I immediately realized that something was wrong. There wasn’t any air! The air conditioning unit over the door wasn’t humming, and that was the only supply of air here. They had turned off the air conditioning.

…

Suddenly the peephole opened. Tear gas streamed into my cell.

“Quiet! You’re not allowed to talk!”

August 24th, 2006: Kurnaz is released and flown to the US Air Base in Ramstein, Germany. He remained under surveillance of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution until December 2006.

January 23, 2007: The EU Parliament’s Special Investigations Committee Concerning the CIA releases its final report, which includes Kurnaz’s descriptions of being tortured. The report states:”As early as 2002 the intelligence agencies of the US and Germany concluded that Murat Kurnaz had no connections to either AlQaeda or the Taliban, and did not represent a terrorist threat.

These are not okay ways to treat fellow human beings, and make no mistake, these are fellow human beings.

The people who were responsible MUST be held accountable, legally accountable.

We must show those in Washington that we will accept nothing less.

Please, contact your senators and the White House and tell them that John Brennan, who defended torture, should not be the next head of the CIA, the agency which inflicted much of the torture.

Thank you for doing the hard work of reading this diary.

I will bring another story of what the detainees have actually been through tomorrow.

      Standing for justice and accountability,

                          For Dan,

                          Heather

.

Yesterday I shared with our Moose community the story of my husband, Dan who was a Vietnam vet who survived torture.

http://www.motleymoose.com/sho…

Today I will share the story of one of the former Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Murat Kurnaz

Mr. Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, had always lived in Germany, and was of Turkish descent. In Germany, those of Turkish descent having a much more difficult time becoming German citizens even those born in Germany. In 2001, he decided to learn more about his religion, Islam, in preparation for his Turkish wife joining him, so he traveled to Pakistan to learn from peaceful Imams. Enroute back to Germany, on December 1, 2001, he was taken off a bus in Pakistan, and taken to a prison in Peshawar, Pakistan, then to Kandahar, Afghanistan, and, finally to Guantanamo Bay, where he remained until August 4th, 2006.

What I share now are excerpts from his book “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo.” These are the things that have been done to fellow human beings.

Today I will share some of his experiences in Kandahar, tomorrow the rest of his journey.

In Kandahar:

Did they have a lie detector? I asked myself. The man was holding something in his hands. It looked like two irons that he was rubbing together. Or one of those machines used to revive people who have heart attacks. Before I realized what was happening, I felt the first jolt.

It was electricity. An electric shock. They put the electrodes to the soles of my feet. There was no way to remain seated. It was as though my body was lifting itself off the ground of its own accord. I felt the electric current going through my whole body. There was a bang. It hurt a lot. I felt warmth, jolts, cramps. My muscles cramped up and quivered. That hurt, too.

… I heard screams.

They were my screams

On the table, there was a shallow, blue plastic bucket about 20 inches in diameter, full of water.

…

I knew what was coming.

They pushed my head into the plastic tub.

It’s like bobbing for apples, I thought.

…

I wasn’t afraid, but I was very nervous. I didn’t know whether I was going to survive.

…

Someone grabbed me by the hair. The soldiers seized my arms and pushed my head underwater.

…

They pulled my head back up.

“Do you like it?”

“You want more?”

“You’ll get more, no problem.”

When my head was back underwater, I felt a blow to my stomach. I had to exhale and cough. I wanted to breathe back in but forced my self not to, and I supressed the urge to cough. Still, I inhaled a bit of water and could hardly hold my breath.

“Where is Osama?”

“Who are you?”

I tried to speak but I couldn’t.

“More!”

I felt blows to my stomach and against my back. I swallowed some water. It was a strange feeling. I don’t know whether the water went to my lungs. It became harder and harder to breathe, the more they hit me in the stomach and pushed my head underwater. I felt my heart racing. They didn’t let up. I tried to answer their questions when I managed to get a fresh breath of air, but all I could manage was “yes” and “no.” I was choking. I felt like I was going to vomit, then I coughed and spat. I was dizzy and nauseous.

When they pushed my head under water again and me in the stomach, I imagined myself screaming underwater.

Habe allahu we ne emel weki!

I would have told them everything. But what was I supposed to tell them?

It wasn’t a room, just a pen enclosed by aluminum and chain-link fence. Hanging from a beam was a hook like the ones used in butcher shops. A chain dangled from the ceiling.

The soldiers took the chain and ran it underneath my handcuffs. They looped the chain over the hook like a block and tackle and fed it into a winch. I was hoisted up until my feet no longer touched the ground. They clamped the chain to the beam and then left without a word, shutting the corrugated door behind them.

The cuffs cut off the blood to my hands. I tried to move.

…

I knew they were going to leave my hanging there until I couldn’t take it any more. After a while, the cuffs seemed like they were cutting my wrists down to the bone. My shoulders felt like someone was trying to pull my arms out of their sockets.

At some point, I began rocking myself back and forth in the hope that would get my blood flowing. But every movement hurt, no matter how tiny. Especially in my wrists and elbow. The best thing was just not to move and resign yourself to the pain.

At some point, hours later. someone came and let me down. A doctor examined me and took my pulse. He was wearing a uniform like the other soldiers, but he had a badge of rank on his shoulders, and a patch on his chest said: “Doctor.”

“Okay,: he said.

The soldiers hoisted me back up.

Three times a day. the soldiers came with the doctor and lowered me.

…

My hands had swollen. In the beginning, I’d felt pain in them. Later on, I lost all feeling in my arms and hands. I still felt pain in other parts of my body, like in my chest around my heart.

When they hung me up backwards, it felt as though my shoulders were going to break. They bound my hands behind my back and hoisted me up. I could remember seeing something like that in a movie once – only in the film, it was Americans being strung up by the Vietnamese with their hands behind their backs until they died.

…

I didn’t recognize the man. He was hanging as I was from the ceiling. I couldn’t tell whether he was dead or alive. His body was mostly swollen and blue, although in some places it was pale and white. I could see a lot of blood in his face, dark streams of it. His head lolled to one side. I couldn’t see his eyes.

…

No one came to lower the man next to me. They had forgotten him. He just hung there in the same position. I thought about the prisoner with the blanket wrapped around his head. They didn’t seem to care whether we died.

…

I watch his chest for a while. Nothing moved.

…

I was strung up for about five days.

These are some of the things that were done in your name. I will continue Murat Kurnaz’s story tomorrow, and then on Thursday I will share the statement of one of those held prisoner in Abu Ghraib.

It is extremely important that those responsible, from the highest to the lowest are held accountable, legally accountable.

It is extremely important that those who defended torture, like John Brennan, not be put in charge of an agency who has inflicted much of the torture, like the CIA. Please contact your senators and the White House and let them know that John Brennan should NOT be the new head of the CIA.

Torture is not what Dan fought for. It is not what Dan gave his physical health for. It is not what Dan gave his mental health for.

Please, I need YOUR help. We need to stand up and show those in power in Washington that we will settle for nothing less than independent investigations and prosecutions. We MUST take that responsibility.

         With gratitude and respect,

                    Hugs,

         Standing for Justice and Accountability,

                   For Dan,

                   Heather

.

I have been asked to write about why the fight against torture and for accountability is so important to me, so I thought I bring you the series of diaries I have written on “Why I Fight Against Torture”. Aside from this first dairy, it gives the first hand account of what has been done to real live human beings by or assisted by the United States since 9/11.

It is VERY important that we stand up and tell the President and the senators on the committee who will hold the confirmation hearings that Mr. Brennan, who defended the torture authorized by the Bush Administration should not be the next head of the CIA, the organization which committed much of the torture inflicted by the US since 9/11.

On the diary :

My husband, Dan, was a Vietnam Vet who survived torture. He came home with injuries that lasted for the rest of his life. Dan had scars all over his body, where they had cut him, and a trench in the back of his neck, where they had beaten him. His toenails had to be taken off three times when he got back to the US, because the bamboo poisoning was so bad where they had inflicted pain to get him to give them the answers they wanted. Even after the third removal of all of his toenails, the infection was so insidious that it came back and stayed for the rest of his life.