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Films of Subduing of Guantâo Prisoners Becoming an Issue
Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed. The disclosures, made in an interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March, who has been too traumatised to speak until now, prompted demands last night by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos available immediately. ...Dergoul tells of one assault by a five-man ERF in shocking terms: âThey pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. âThey tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.â After their release last March, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, the so-called Tipton Three from Staffordshire, told of similar ERF attacks. Rasul said they led to a new verb being coined by detainees: âto be ERFedâ. That, he said, meant being slammed against a floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and beaten up by five armed men. However, it is Dergoul who now reveals that every time the ERFs were deployed, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that happened. Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, the Guantanamo Joint Task Force spokesman, confirmed this last night, saying all ERF actions were filmed so they could be âreviewedâ by senior officers. All the tapes are kept in an archive there, he said. He refused to say how many times the ERF squads had been used and would not discuss their training or rules of engagement, saying: âWe do not discuss operational aspects of the Joint Task Force mission.â The Observer can also now disclose that a British military interrogator posted to the now notorious Abu Ghraib abuse jail raised the alarm about maltreatment of detainees by US troops as long ago as last March. While ministers insisted last week that the three Britons working in the jail did not see any of the systematic and sadistic abuse, an unnamed lieutenant - a debriefer trained to deal only with co-operative witnesses - made an official complaint to US authorities after seeing what he considered to be ârough handlingâ of prisoners. ... In London, Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, said: âThe Government must demand that these videos be delivered up, and the truth of these very serious allegations properly determined once and for all. âThe videos provide an unequalled opportunity to check the veracity of what Mr Dergoul and the other former detainees are saying.â Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-17 |
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