A young Canadian prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay has said in legal documents that US interrogators repeatedly threatened to rape him and Canadian government visitors told him they were powerless to do anything.The claims were part of an affidavit sworn by Omar Khadr, 21, who is charged in the Guantanamo war court with murdering a US soldier with a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan when Khadr was 15. Khadr has long claimed that American interrogators in Bagram, Afghanistan, had abused him after his capture in July 2002 and at the Guantanamo Bay US Naval base in Cuba, where he was taken to a few months later.
The previously undisclosed allegations of the rape threats were part of a nine-page affidavit released by the US military on Wednesday, with some of the names and details blacked out. “On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped, or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped,” said Khadr in the document.
| No proof of any of this, of course, but proof isn't necessary when you're an al-Qaeda boy selling codswallop to progressive rubes ... |
Khadr said he was often shackled for hours during interrogations and denied use of a bathroom, forcing him to urinate on himself. “While my wounds were still healing, interrogators made me clean the floors on my hands and knees. They woke me up in the middle of the night after midnight and made me clean the floor with a brush and dry it with towels until dawn. They also made me carry heavy buckets of water,” he said.