“I Said This Under Torture”

AP gets the latest documents released to the ACLU. These may be the most damaging proof yet that we are being lied to about what is happening to these prisoners in our name. This is coming from actual US government transcripts of the “military tribunals” at Guantanamo. The prisoners are asking the presiding Tribunal officers for help and escape from their torture and the false confessions they elicited.

A 24-year-old detainee said he confessed to giving a militant group the names and serial numbers of security personnel assigned to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai but “I said this under torture.” He described how an American interrogator “threatened me with a gun to my mouth, to try to make me say something.”

The tribunal president asked him about the alleged torture, established it was purportedly carried out at a U.S. facility in Kabul by an American, then moved on to other questions.

Another Muslim prisoner from Uzbekistan talked of abuse he had suffered and how he was given a Bible – not a Quran.

The testimonies also brought up allegations that interrogators – hastily recruited after the Sept. 11 terror attacks – may have manipulated the confessions.

“When I was in the Kandahar prison, the interrogator hit my arm and told me I received training in mortars,” a man said, referring to the U.S. detention camp in western Afghanistan where the Taliban rose to power.

“As he was hitting me, I kept telling him, no I didn’t receive training. I was crying and finally I told him I did receive the training. My hands were tied behind my back and my knees were on the ground and my head was bleeding. I was in a lot of pain. … At that point, with all my suffering, if he had asked me if I was Osama bin Laden, I would have said yes.

“What is my crime? Because of the United States, my hand is handicapped. I can’t work.”