Aamer reveals how he was interrogated by a British agent called ‘John’ and describes the process of force-feeding
October 3, 2015 By: LGHR Shaker Aamer No Comment // 6 Views
By Shaker
Aamer
- Shaker Aamer reveals beating were ‘common’ as well as sleep deprivation
- He said a British agent took part in a interrogation in which he was beaten
- British agent called ‘John’ told Aamer: ‘Shaker, you look like a ghost’
I was first detained in Afghanistan
in December 2001 by Afghan villagers, before being turned over
to Northern Alliance irregulars. I was then sold for a bounty
to the United States forces. I was flown by helicopter to
Bagram Air Force Base. I arrived there on or around Christmas
Eve in 2001. I have been detained in US custody continuously
ever since.
I was abused by the US
military from the day I arrived. I had to strip naked in front
of 15 people or more, who were just standing watching me
squat, and frisked at arrival. They put me in a cage with
barbed wire around it. It was in a big hangar, and there were
large cages on either side of a walkway. I had to use a hole
in the ground with two big doors on the top of it as a toilet
and I had to use one hand to clean myself.
There was no water
allowed and all the MPs [military police guards] were watching
me, both male and female. They would point their M-16 rifles
at me while I used the toilet and force me to get up before I
finished. Sometimes they refused to let us use the hole so I
ended up peeing on myself.
Beating was common.
Once, after a few days of sleep deprivation, they took me to
the interrogation room. Intelligence team members started
coming one after another until the room was full, with perhaps
ten or more people there. One of them was a British agent.
Appalling abuse:
Shaker Aamer (pictured) said he was regularly beaten and
suffered sleep deprivation
No escape: Mr Aamer was moved to
Guantanamo Bay on the day his fourth son was born in
the UK
I felt someone grab my
head and start beating my head into the back wall – so hard
that my head was bouncing. I later learned that this was a
special technique that they used called ‘walling’. They were
shouting that they would kill me or I would die.
They would throw cold
water on me, [although] it was the middle of winter. We had
essentially no protection from the cold, since being held in a
cage in the hangar was as cold as being outside.
I thought I was going
to die from hypothermia. Sometimes I was tied up like a hog,
with my wrists tied behind my back, and then a rope tied from
there to my ankles. Another loop would go around my neck, so
that if I struggled I would begin to strangle myself.
I encountered at least
two British agents in Bagram. For some of the time they were
there, I would have been in a cage alone.
At one point I was
forced to stand up for the best part of nine days, in the
Americans’ effort to break me. Anyone coming into the hangar
would have seen this, they could not have missed it. It was
impossible for someone coming into that hangar not to see how
prisoners were being abused.
One of the British
people called himself John. The second British agent gave no
name and said nothing about himself.
I saw John first. I was
being tortured by the Americans and suddenly they started
asking questions about Britain. This would have been sometime
around New Year, in early January 2002. The American
interrogators were going back and forth, clearly coming into
the room with information from the British.
Difficult: Mr Aamer
spoke of his difficulty of being unable to see his
children grow up in the UK
Trapped: Shaker
describes the humiliation of having to strip naked and wear
the orange jumpsuit
The British agent said
something along the following lines: ‘My name is John. You
don’t know me, but I know you. I was watching you for a long
time. I wanted to talk to you about some issues. I have some
questions as I want to close your file.’
He interrogated me for
about an hour, with questions about England. He saw how skinny
I was from my mistreatment and how I had not been allowed to
wash. He remarked, ‘Shaker, you look like a ghost.’
Perhaps three days
after [the walling incident] I saw John again. I cannot be
precise about this timing as the torture I was suffering was
really bad at the time.
Indeed, the abuse had
escalated a great deal, and the interrogators had been telling
me that I had to say what John needed, as he wanted to leave.
I was moved to [the US
base at] Kandahar near the end of January 2002. I was in a
tent there that was roughly four metres square. Again it was
the middle of winter, so it was very, very cold.
My torture by the US
authorities continued throughout this period in ways that were
similar to what happened in Bagram.
On – I believe – my
fourth day there another British man came. He gave a name
which I have forgotten because I was in the middle of such bad
abuse. I’ll call him Brown. He said he was British and he had
a strong British accent.
All the time I had been
in the tent I was hearing the screams and cries of others who
were being abused. It was not possible for Brown to be there,
or to be there interrogating me, without hearing this and
knowing about our abuse.
He also saw the way I
was. I was in as miserable a state that a human being can be
in. I had been badly beaten on arrival, then kept for four
days and nights on the ground in the freezing cold. He asked
me whether I would like him to interrogate me on behalf of the
Americans. I asked him if he would help me resolve my
situation. He said no, he would not.
I eventually said
whatever anyone wanted to hear. I have no real idea what I
said.
I knew we were going to
Guantanamo. I was waiting for that day [February 14, 2002] as
nothing could be worse than the hell of Afghanistan. When my
number was called I came to the gate. I was in the dust with
my hands behind my back.
Shocking: Aamer
recalled hearing the screams and cries of other men being
interrogated
Agonising: One
Pakistani detainee got bitten by a brown recluse spider, and
he lost a chunk of meat from his thigh as a result, Aamer
said
They covered my head
with a sandbag, and for the first time I was not taken to the
interrogation tents, but to the outside fence where they had
tents to get us ready for the flight.
They shaved my head and
my beard. Then they sprayed me with some kind of chemical and
pushed me towards another tent.
Here, they told me to
take off all my clothes – I complied, though again I refused
to take off my underwear. They told me that I had to take that
off too, or they would do it for me. So I took that off too,
and stood naked there, with eight or nine people around me.
They then gave me an
orange uniform and a jacket and gloves. They took a picture of
me, and then cuffed me, and shoved me hard into the next tent.
Here I found some other detainees with their eyes covered with
goggles and their ears muffled with some kind of headset.
I sat there like that
until nightfall. Not long before the flight, they gave us each
a dry, cold piece of Afghani bread.
About two in the
morning they told us all to get up. They took us one by one
and roped us by the upper arm again. They did it very tight.
My blood flow seemed to pretty much stop during this time. The
detainee behind me collapsed and when he fell to the ground, I
was screaming in pain myself, I felt as if my arm was coming
off.
Eventually we got to
what seemed like a huge plane. We were taken in and forced to
sit on a wooden board. They pulled a waist chain down very
tight on me, as well as a leg chain that was also attached to
my hands. It was configured so that I could barely move an
inch. It was excruciating. We were not long into the flight
before the detainees started moaning, crying, even screaming.
A guard came up to me
and ordered me to open my mouth. I did not know what it was
going to be. But it was a bite of a peanut butter sandwich. It
was a sudden moment unlike all the rest: it seemed like maybe
the most delicious sandwich I had ever tasted. After that, I
sat in great pain. I could see through a small crack at the
top of the goggles and the plane was full of guards with M-16s
who were ready to shoot at any moment.
The back door of the
plane lowered, and light filled the place. It was daytime.
There was screaming, shouting, cursing and from nowhere the
new nightmare started.
Two big guards came and
picked me up. They dragged me along shouting in my ears, ‘Move
it! Move it!’
I was not able to walk!
My legs were not even touching the ground much of the time.
They were running and
shouting. ‘This is your end! You have come to where you’re
going to die! You filthy terrorist! You will never leave this
place!’
They came to some
stairs on to a bus, and my feet were hitting the steel steps.
They started bleeding. They threw me on to the lap of another
detainee and started hitting me around the head and shoulders.
They kept shouting, ‘Don’t move! Look down!’ They repeated
everything over and over, hitting me again and again. There
was no chair, I was on the bus floor by now.
My head was bouncing
back and forth as they hit me. I could not believe what was
happening. A guard kicked me violently in my thigh. I
screamed. He shouted, ‘Shut up! Don’t speak!’
I woke up to snakes,
spiders and crickets that would come into the cage, apparently
seeking warmth. One Pakistani detainee got bitten by a brown
recluse spider, and he lost a chunk of meat from his thigh as
a result.
I saw that the MPs were
doing so many stupid things that I decided to stand up and do
something about it. I started to speak to the other detainees
and try to raise their spirits. I started looking directly
into the MPs’ eyes; they would shout, but I did not care any
more.
Suddenly, for the first
time, I encountered what I came to learn was called the ERF
team (it stood for Emergency Reaction Force).
Six or so guards came
to my cage and told me to get down on my knees, hands behind
my neck. I complied. They opened the door and rushed towards
me, jamming me into the fence. I got cut in many places and
blood was running down my face. They slammed me down on the
ground, jumped on me, and started kneeing me all over. All the
time, they were shouting that I should stop resisting.
I was doing nothing, of
course, not even moving a finger, but they meant that I should
not resist their regime itself.
An unidentified
detainee walks outside his cell in Camp Delta 4 at the
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba
The world knows that
people have been tortured all over the place, by the US, and
yet the denials continue
They shackled me, and
half-dragged, half-carried me out. I was labelled a leader.
It’s not always a label you want to have.
When a prisoner in
Guantanamo says that he has been tortured, the government gets
up in arms, and demands that we prove it in ways that are
impossible. Or worse, they bring out some Orwellian theory
that claiming torture means that you have to be a member of Al
Qaeda, because apparently only people in terrorist
organisations would allege that they were tortured.
The world knows that
people have been tortured all over the place, by the US, and
yet the denials continue. For me, for a long time, it was just
a way of life. I felt like I was living in a dark hole. I was
in a world of mental and physical destruction. No human being
can go through what some of us have gone through and not go
insane. I know for a good part of my time here in Guantanamo
they did manage to drive me insane.
What do people on the
outside know about torture? I suspect, pretty much nothing.
People may have seen something in a movie, but even then it’s
mostly something physical, where the prisoner is beaten –
leaving marks on the body to prove it. But what I have been
going through, though it has had its physical elements, has
been more like sitting here with the slow drip of water on my
head for ten years.
The drip, drip on my
head gradually becomes a 50 kilogram sledgehammer. The
humiliation, the degradation, the deprivation of everything,
even feelings. Do you have any sense of how horrible that
really is? You have no sense of how you feel about everything
around you until you lose touch with it. Slowly. In some ways
Guantanamo is not a matter of being tortured; it is more
living torture as a way of life. You are in a long, day after
day, night after night, consecutive torture experience.
I swear by my Allah
that there is almost nothing that you see around you in your
every day life that has not been used as an instrument of
torture in this unholy place. Everything you can imagine has
been used in ways that I hope you cannot imagine. They even
use the humble apple. The stem of an apple is nothing but a
tiny piece of rubbish, but they will demand it from you, and
if you do not hand it over at once, you will be FCE’d,
[subjected to an assault by the Forcible Cell Extraction team,
as the ERF is now known] and most likely sprayed with gas.
How are you going to
feel when the FCE team comes at you with a full crew? Six MPs
wearing full protective gear, looking like Darth Vaders from
the film Star Wars, crouching behind their Plexiglas shields.
The OIC (the captain of the camp). The Assistant OIC. The
Watch Commander. The Observer Guard with his clipboard, who
will write down the time of everything that happens to the
second. The Camera Guard, who will film this full-scale
assault on one small detainee who is apparently such a threat
to this overwhelming force. The Corpsman [paramedic] who is
there to make sure the detainee stays alive. The navy
personnel who come along just to watch.
So there are 15 or 18
military people all there for one thing. This assault may take
an hour and a half to prepare, while all that time the
detainee is in his cell, awaiting his fate. And this for what?
A gun? No. A knife? No. A piece of metal? No. All for an apple
stem. Or a packet of salt, a packet of pepper. Or the wrapper
from an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat).
It’s all for a little
piece of trash.
Sorry, then, if I
cannot describe everything that ever happened to me in the
4,000 days and nights I have been here in Guantanamo Bay, in
perfect chronological order, with details of each sordid
incident, or each horror I have endured. Life is not like
that.
I cannot say precisely
how many times I have been taken for interrogation in the past
12 years, but there have been hundreds, and hundreds, and
hundreds of times. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
hours. I have spent more time in interrogation than I will
ever spend talking to my wife, or any of my children, in our
entire lives.
When they built the
more permanent prisons in Guantanamo Bay, the PR line was this
was now much better – a ‘state-of-the-art prison’, they said.
In truth, it was far worse.
In the ceiling were two
halogen lights. Sometimes they would be so dim that you could
barely see your hand; when they were turned up, they would
rapidly transform the room into a sauna. Underneath the back
window was a hole-in-the-ground toilet, and a metal sink.
Above your head on the door side of the cell was a six-by-six
air conditioning vent.
There was no way to
avoid what they wanted to do. If you had your head the door
end, the air conditioning would blast at your face to freeze
you to death; if you turned the other way around, you faced
the constant stench of the toilets, which had an inadequate
drainage.
One of the two halogen
lights could bear down on you wherever you were. The guards
could come along and flash lights into your eyes through the
door, to make sleeping even less possible.
Tools: One of the
force-feeding tubes used by the camp doctors to feed
prisoners on hunger strike
Tied down: The
specially made chair used to force-feed detainees like
Aamer, when they went on hunger strike
A sad sight: Pick a
face: A small chart used at the detainee hospital for
patients to indicate their pain level
Then there was the
exhaust fan, a huge noisy thing that was a unique tool for
driving you crazy. It was so loud that you could not talk with
anyone else or hear them, and it pulled lots of foul smells
into the cell. Everything inside the cell was controlled by
the MPs outside it – the air, water, light, toilet,
temperature, smell, noise, your whole environment. They could
do almost anything they could imagine, all bad, from outside
your cell door.
The MPs would put a
bowl of Pinesol disinfectant by the vent, or spray it directly
in, so that it would almost suffocate the men in the cells,
particularly if you had an asthma problem. I suffer from
bronchial asthma. I never used to go anywhere without my
inhaler. When I got put through the Guantanamo technique, or
when I got sprayed, I would see death 50 times before I was
able to breathe properly again.
After air, what is the
second most important thing to a human being? Water. What
could they possibly do other than just deny you water to
drink? Certainly they could completely shut off the water to
your cell. There would be nothing in the tap, nothing in the
toilet, so you can’t wash for prayer, you can’t flush the foul
smells away down the toilet.
Or, if they wanted to,
they could leave the water running 24/7, making a noise to
prevent you from sleeping. Or, they could operate the water
spout so each time you pressed it, the water would only come
for a micro-second.
In December 2005, the
practice of using ‘restraint chairs’ to force-feed us was
introduced.
Prisoners would be
strapped into the chairs – marketed by their manufacturer as a
‘padded cell on wheels’ – and restrained at the legs, arms,
shoulders, and head. A tube the thickness of a finger was
forcibly inserted up the nose and down into the stomach.
Large quantities of
liquid formula was pumped through the tube. This would often
be more than the stomach could hold and the effect was
sometimes a painful bout of nausea, vomiting, bloating, and
shortness of breath.
We would be kept
strapped to the chairs for a period after ‘feeding’ to prevent
us from purging the formula, or to allow for more feeding if
we were sick. To begin with, they would insert the tube and
leave it in.
This caused long-term
discomfort. However bad this regime was, later one of the US
generals announced they were going to change the routine in
order to make it less ‘convenient’ (his word) for us: the
tubes would be inserted and pulled out twice a day, which was
far more painful.
This was done to try to
‘dissuade’ us from our right to non-violent protest at our
mistreatment. In my view, it was barbaric.
I have been visited
three times by the British in Guantanamo Bay. [They] asked me
what I could tell them about a number of people in the UK.
I am sorry to have to
say that the British have also played an active role working
with the US to continue my arbitrary, torturous and abusive
detention. My US interrogators tell me what the British say
about me. Obviously the US interrogators may be lying when
they do this.
But I understand that
the British agents have made false assertions against me to
justify my continued illegal and arbitrary detention, and my
continued torture.
One allegation is that
I am an Al Qaeda member, who was part of the London Al Qaeda
cell.
This is emphatically
false and yet in addition to being used against me in secret
to keep me detained, it has apparently been repeated in
public.
The Mail on Sunday
first exposed the horrors of Guantanamo Bay to a shocked
world in 2002 and has long been campaigning for Mr Aamer’s
release
Guards watch on at
the heavily fortified prison, which has been held by the
United States since World War II
The UK Security
Services have also suggested that I was a recruiter for Al
Qaeda in London. This is emphatically false and yet, again, in
addition to being used against me in secret to keep me
detained, it has been repeated in public.
Perhaps the worst
aspect of all this, from the very start, has been the way that
the United States has wrecked my family, and tormented my
wife, my children and me in more ways than one can imagine.
My only contact for
many years was the occasional letter or postcard. This has,
itself, been traumatic. The interrogators have used these
letters against me – if I did not ‘co-operate’ (for which, you
should read, ‘say what they wanted’), I did not get my mail,
or I did not get the photos of my children.
Indeed, one time they
put me in an interrogation room with pictures of my children
that I had not seen on the walls. They certainly did not do
this out of kindness: they did it so they could threaten me
that if I did not ‘co-operate’ I would not only not get the
pictures, but never see my children again.
Bizarrely, they have
censored even the letters that my children have written to me.
I could not imagine what my little children might have written
that could possibly be a threat to US national security.
This is all very
disorientating, because it makes me worry or speculate that
somehow my children might be writing things that could get
them into trouble.
I have spent my whole
time in Guantanamo worrying about the impact of all this on my
wife, first: I was very active in our marriage, cooking and
doing other things around the house.
The concerns I have for
my children are obvious: for years I had no contact with them
at all, and even now I have only the most minimal contact, and
that (I fear) may be worse than none at all.
What are they to make
of it all? What are they to make of the terribly confusing
things they must hear about me – that I am meant to be some
kind of terrorist, that I have been cleared for release for
several years, but that I am not home? Every day I am worried
to death about the impact of all of this on their fragile and
growing psyches.
When the British have
come to interrogate me, they have been totally unhelpful with
respect to my family. They have known about the way in which
my family life is being destroyed, but they have told me that
they would do nothing.
My poignant visit to jail to tell him: You
are free
By
Professor Ramzi Kassem
It was not my first
time walking up the dusty path to the gate of Camp Echo at
Guantánamo. Over the past decade, in nearly forty trips to the
prison, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve walked
that way, heading to or from meetings with shackled clients.
But this was no
ordinary client meeting. I had come to inform my client Shaker
Aamer that, after fourteen years in captivity without charge,
trial, or fair process, he was about to be set free and
returned to his wife and their four children in Britain.
News had broken that
morning that the U.S. Defense Secretary had forwarded
notification to Congress of the U.S. government’s intent to
transfer Shaker to Britain. Under U.S. law, that notification
begins a thirty-day countdown. At the end of that period,
around October 24th, the path will be clear to Shaker’s
release. His return home could take place anytime on or after
that date.
Innocent: Despite
claims that he belonged to Al Qaeda, Shaker Aamer has always
denied any involvement in terrorism, and has never been
charged with a crime
Still, the routine
remained all too familiar. The soldiers riffled through my
legal papers then ‘wanded’ me for metal contraband before
escorting me through another set of clanking iron gates to one
of the plywood shacks where attorney-client meetings take
place in Guantánamo.
Shaker was sitting,
shackled by one ankle to a steel loop jutting out of the
shack’s flooring. He wore jumpsuit pants in signature
Guantánamo orange. He had taken off the top, however, because
of the tropical heat, and was in a sleeveless white
undershirt. His beard thick and dark, his long hair braided
neatly and resting over his right shoulder, Shaker also
sported a knitted white Muslim prayer cap, off to the side.
This was exactly how he wore his cap when we first met in that
shack, almost four years earlier, in October 2011.
Shaker stood up to
shake my hand and we exchanged customary holiday greetings as
it was Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday on the Muslim
calendar. I sat down, inhaled deeply, paused, and said, in
Arabic: ‘Shaker, finally, the end of your ordeal seems near.’
I then explained that morning’s news and its implications as
clearly as I could.
Shaker sat silently
with a blank stare on his face. After a few, long seconds, he
began to tell me about his prison-issued shoes, how they were
falling apart, held together only by duct tape. He took off
and held up the black sneakers, unraveling the tape. They were
tattered and dismembered as a beggar’s. The Guantánamo prison
administration had not replaced them since 2010.
It dawned on me that my
news of his impending release didn’t register; it simply
washed over him, leaving no trace. After fourteen endless
years, the only normal reaction would be to grasp onto
something he knew to be concrete and real: the problem of
these shoes in this prison.
I decided to interrupt
his disquisition about the shoes. ‘Shaker,’ I said, ‘please
listen to me carefully.’ And I repeated everything I had
shared earlier. Shaker looked at me, his eyes wide, and asked:
‘Are you being serious right now?’ Then an impossibly large
smile lit up his face and his gaze suddenly grew distant. A
door had finally swung open, and he was looking ahead at
everything that lay beyond.
Laughing at his own
earlier digression, Shaker quipped that the Guantánamo prison
administration now had no choice but to issue him new
shoes—they couldn’t possibly risk embarrassment by letting him
return to the United Kingdom with these hideous things on his
feet!
Support: Human rights
activists and MPs, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
have been campaigning for the release of Shaker Aamer
He also expressed hope
that it would be a British plane—not an American military
plane—that would take him home. The last thing Shaker wants is
to relive his terrifying flight to Cuba over a decade ago,
where he was chained in a painful position, blindfolded,
ear-muffed, and cold.
Shaker shared with me
that he hadn’t slept properly in almost an entire month, the
uncertainty of his situation gnawing away at his rest. The
night before our morning meeting, he had barely slept two
hours.
In the morning, the
soldiers moving him from his cellblock to Camp Echo insisted
on conducting a groin search for the first time in weeks. One
guard asked Shaker if he wanted to ‘refuse’ his legal meeting
in order to avoid the humiliating search. Shaker wondered if
the prison administration wanted to keep the news from him by
preventing our meeting.
We spent the remainder
of our time together contemplating Shaker’s return home.
Overjoyed though he felt, like many past clients, Shaker was
discovering that the prospect of life after Guantánamo is not
free of worry. Naturally, Shaker is anxious as well. He knows
that his reintegration into his family’s life and into society
at large will be challenging at times.
Shaker and his family
will need time and privacy to overcome that challenge and
slowly begin to rebuild their lives together. Shaker hopes
that the good people of Britain will understand his desire to
avoid publicity as he takes his first tentative steps as a
free man and embarks on the lengthy process of getting
reacquainted with his loved ones.
Of course, Shaker is
infinitely grateful to his supporters in Britain and beyond,
and to his legal team, for all that they have done over
these long years in the name of justice, and for everything
they will continue to do to ensure his prompt return home.
He hopes to thank everyone directly, in due time. But, once
he is finally released, Shaker asks for everyone’s patience
and forbearance as he and his family take the time they need
to heal and adjust, away from the spotlight.
As I looked at Shaker
and thought of all the years he had spent in captivity, all he
had lost, the horrendous abuse he had survived, how mightily
he had struggled to preserve his dignity, one thing became
obvious. Shaker Aamer should get to leave Guantánamo and go
home on his own terms. It’s the least we can do for him.
Ramzi
Kassem is a professor at the City University of New York
School of Law. With his students, he represents Shaker Aamer.
http://freedetainees.org/2015/
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