Motley Moose – Archive

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.

This is the first diary, in which I talk about my husband, Dan, who was a Vietnam Vet who survived torture:

http://www.motleymoose.com/dia…

The second diary, giving the first part of the experiences of Murat Kurnaz, who spent five years, as an innocent man, in captivity.

http://www.motleymoose.com/dia…

The third diary, giving the second part of the experiences of Murat Kurnaz.

http://www.motleymoose.com/dia…

The fourth diary, explaining the experiences of Binyam Mohammed

http://www.motleymoose.com/dia…

Today, I will tell the first part of the story of three British citizens, Rhuhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul.

Rhuhel and Asif Iqbal, friends from high school, and Shafiq Rasul, a slightly older friend, are from Tipton, England. They were taken into custody on November 28th, 2001.

These are excerpts from their combined affidavit:

They were loaded into a container with a bunch of other detainees and transported in the container, to Sherbegan Prison.

According to information they were given later, there were US forces present at the point they were packed into the containers together with almost 200 other prisoners. Asif became unconscious and awoke to find that in an attempt to allow air into the containers Dostum’s forces had fired machine guns into the sides of the containers. Asif was struck in the arm by a bullet as a result. The journey to Sherbegan took nearly 18 hours and the containers were not opened until they reached the prison. All three men remained in the containers amongst the dead and the dying throughout this time. Asif reports that to get water he had to lick the side of the container or wipe a cloth on the top of the container where the condensation had collected and squeeze the drips of water into his mouth. On arrival in Sherbegan of the 200 originally in the container only 20 were alive, some seriously injured.

Conditions at Sherbegan were appalling, Asif says;

“in the first week the only food we got was a tiny portion of bread per day and a very small amount of water. This was to last us the whole day.”

Arrival in Kandahar

Shafiq says:

“The cargo plane had no heating and given the flimsy clothes we were wearing I believe I was close to hypothermia.”

This time Shafiq says:

“I had to run as fast as I could with my legs shackled and I was bent over with a sack over my head. We were taken to another tent. There they cut off all of my clothes and forcefully shaved our beards and heads. I was taken outside. I was completely naked with a sack on my head and I could hear dogs barking nearby and soldiers shouting ‘get’um boy’. Although I couldn’t see I had a sense that there were a lot of soldiers around. I was taken still naked with a sack on my head for a so called cavity search. I was told to bend over and then I felt something shoved up my anus. I don’t know what it was, but it was very painful.”

Tonight, I will leave it there, because I want it to sink into your heart, into your being, what was done to those in that container. 70 years ago my grandpere parachutted behind the lines to organize the French Resistance. He earned a Croix de Guerre. After World War II, we, as a world community, said, “Never Again !” And yet we turn a blind eye.

Can you continue to turn a blind eye ?

Without holding those at the top who authorized and ordered torture inflicted by the US since 9/11 to legal account there will be more and worse torture, with more impunity.

Please stand up and tell your President, tell your Senators, tell your Congessional Representives: “NOT IN MY NAME!” Demand JUSTICE and ACCOUNTABILITY !”

                  In abundant tears,

      Standing for justice and accountability,

                       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

.