I always thought it was Moazamm who was videoconferenced in but I stand corrected. It was one of the tipton three: Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal or Rhuhal Ahmed. Their detailed accounts are in the public domain which you can access on the CCR website: http://ccrjustice.org/tipton-three.
For me, one of the most distressing accounts of our war crimes came in a training session I attended in the fall of 2005. One of the tipton three had just been released from Guantanamo a few months earlier and he was video conferenced into our training session. He spoke about how he and hundreds of men were rounded up and placed in metal shipping containers on an airport runway in Afghanistan. The men who were crammed into these containers and left to boil under the hot sun were screaming for air... they were screaming for their lives. What they got in return were bullets fired into the metal containers and the military personnel yelled "here we will give you some air holes." The man was a British citizen, he saw both American and Afghan forces at the base and knew from the voices that that Americans forces were involved in the massacre. When he was finally released from the metal container that he had been held in most of the almost 100 men were dead. The conditions were the same for the men held in the other containers, most were dead. Now the evidence of those war crimes is being destroyed.
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Friday, December 12, 2008
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Moazzam is an amazing man, and has an amazing account. Even though he was held in total solitary confinement at GTMO for years, Moazzam told me (the interview is here: http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000790.html) that as bad as GTMO was, the most awful horrors he encountered were beforehand, in American custody at Bagram and Kandahar, where prisoners were beaten to death in front of him, and he heard a woman screaming under apparent torture who he was led to believe was his own wife.
Our nation has done so much to be proud of. Some day, I hope we can look back at all this as an aberration, rather than as a harbinger. Of course, those responsible need to be brought to account. I'm not holding my breath.
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