Guantanamo Detainee Gives Torture Details at Tribunal Proceeding
President Bush says the United States does not torture. He denies that we outsource detainees to countries known for torture. Today, at a military tribunal proceeding at Guantanamo, a detainee, backed by his lawyer, said differently:
Mohammad, as he said he prefers to be called, has proclaimed his innocence and has stated in court documents that he made false confessions after being extrajudicially transferred to a Moroccan prison where he was beaten, strung up by his arms and cut on the chest and penis with scalpels.
"This is four years of interrogation, highly intensive ... torture, and you still don't have the right name," he told the tribunal's presiding officer, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann. "The man you are looking for is not here."
The defendant compared Kohlmann to Adolf Hitler and prosecutors to vampire slayers. He calmly criticized the tribunals as "crap" that set a bad example for the world and poked fun at their formal name, commissions. "This is not a commission. It's a con mission. It's a mission to con the world," he said.
His lawyer says:
Mohammad was sent from Morocco to a secret facility known as the "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan and then brought to Guantanamo, his lawyer says. He is the first British resident to appear before the tribunals President George W. Bush created after the Sept. 11 attacks to try foreigners for terrorism. British citizens held at Guantanamo were all sent home.
He is accused of conspiracy as a member of al Qaeda who allegedly got explosives training and discussed dirty bombs with José Padilla in Pakistan. The Bush administration has ruled against charging Padilla, a onetime Broward County resident now in federal custody in South Florida, with similar charges.
In a grisly U.S. Supreme Court brief, his civilian defense attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, claimed that Muhammad confessed to anything he thought his captors wanted to hear -- after the United States handed him off for questioning to Morocco, where interrogators sliced his genitals with a scalpel.
Muhammad, who lived in London for seven years after fleeing his country, says he never joined al Qaeda, and was in Pakistan on a religious journey to shake a drug habit before he was outsourced for interrogation under a CIA policy called ``rendition.''
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