At CNN.com, Jennifer Fenton interviews a former guard at Guantanamo Bay detention center. He tells a number of anecdotes of abuse, here is one:
The IRF team opened the cell door and the one team member carrying a riot shield threw it off to the side. “And whatever little speed he could gather from that short distance he jumped up in the air and came down with his knee right in the middle of the back of [the detainee] and landed right on top of him.”
The other four men started punching the detainee. “Then someone on the inside called the female MP… in there to hit him. And she did,” Neely said.
When it was all over the detainee was in a pool of blood unconscious, according to Neely. The detainee was taken by ambulance to the main hospital in Guantanamo. The detainee was later released from Guantanamo Bay without charge, Neely said.
Like so many of the 750 total detainees at Gitmo, this poor guy was released when they realized they had insufficient evidence of his guilt. Documents about detainees, as the ACLU blog talks about here, showed many were held for “dubious” reasons. But let us not forget, Obama is continuing to deprive detainees of habeaus corpus rights. Just this month, Gitmo detainee Abdul Qader Ahmed Hussein and Karim Bostan were told they will not get a fair trial and the government will not be required to present evidence of their guilt in a court. This of course comes with the news that the Obama administration had full knowledge of the torture and abuse of detainees in US-supported Afghan prisons long before the UN report condemning it was released to the public. That report found that prisoners are hung from the ceilings by their wrists, severely beaten with cables and wooden sticks, have their toenails torn off, are treated with electric shock, and even have their genitals twisted until they lose consciousness, among other abuse. Not a problem for President Barack “Looking-Forward-Not-Backward” Obama.