The Guantanamo Guidebook

Posted in terrorism, torture on February 12th, 2011

British Channel 4 engaged the Team Delta Cadre to recreate the Guantanamo Bay interrogation experience.

At the production company’s request, along with Team Delta’s normal approach to interrogation, the cadre also reenacted several specific events reported to have occurred at Guantanamo.

In most cases these reenacted events were counter productive to the interrogation plan developed by Team Delta – a plan that had learned 80% of the requested intelligence within the first few hours of capture.

Prisoner 73 on his experience: Total deprivation of sleep, food and water, exposure to extreme heat and cold, up to 20 minutes in stress positions, up to 2 hours listening to white noise… plus any other interrogation technique deemed acceptable by the interrogation team’ By any standards the waiver I signed for “Guantanamo Guidebook” was special, and two weeks later when I was lying naked, shaved, shackled in a ball on the floor, alone with a hood over my head, listening to white noise with a cold fan at my back, I realized just how superficial the term ‘informed consent’ can be.

Two weeks earlier I had received an e-mail looking for students who would be willing to participate in a Channel Four documentary investigating US interrogation practices for Terror detainees held in Cuba.

I was to be one of seven male volunteers from various backgrounds – three Muslims: a father of two, a youth worker, and a recent graduate; plus Britain’s fittest Fireman, a triathlete, Britain’s Thai Kickboxing Champion and me, a plucky Oxford undergraduate finalist in philosophy and politics.

The test was to see how we fared in a simulation of up to 60 hours under a team of retired US army interrogators, led by a founding member of Delta Force, who used the techniques officially sanctioned for Guantanamo detainees to extract information about us and make us confess to the scenarios we had acted out with the production company the week before. We were to withhold information and endure.

Watch the full documentary now (playlist).
Warning-Might be graphic: Human torture experiment on voluntary citizen.

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New Secret Prisons Discovered in Afghanistan

Posted in US government on November 29th, 2009

bagram_prisonIn January of 2009, one of the first actions taken by President Obama was to issue directives banning the use of secret prisons and torture facilities by the CIA. He failed to ban the use by the military. As it turns out the military still operates secret torture prisons in Afghanistan.

Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base (New York Times)

The prisoners are held in tiny concrete cells. They are lit 24 hours a day by a single bulb. Detainees are only taken from their cells twice a day. Then their only relief from the solitary confinement is the interrogations.

Under the Third Geneva Convention on the treatment of Prisoners of War; imprisonment in premises without daylight is forbidden, prisoners of war must have the right to legal advice, and prisoners of war are entitled to the same treatment given to a country’s own forces, including total surface and cubic space of dormitories, fire protection, adequate heating and lighting, and separate dormitories for women. .

Interviews With Detainees Transcription (New York Times)

2 Afghan Teenagers allege abuse at U.S. site (Washington Post)

Bagram Prison Exposed

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