my apologies, the cut function was being extremely uncooperative the first time I posted this...

Daily Kos Diarist Chacounne is running a series entitled: Why I fight against Torture.


Prologue:Omar Khadr's US Lawyer is Re-Assigned

There’s young man in Guantanamo Bay Detention facility, a young man who has been there since he was 15 years old, almost seven years. His name is Omar Khadr. He is a Canadian born in Toronto, Ontario, During that time, and that he has been tortured:

( Trigger Warnings. Extreme Trigger Warnings. This was done in our names. )

Why I fight Against Torture Part Two

Murat Kurnaz

Mr. Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, had always lived in Germany, and was of Turkish descent. In Germany, those of Turkish descent having a much more difficult time becoming German citizens even those born in Germany. In 2001, he decided to learn more about his religion, Islam, in preparation for his Turkish wife joining him, so he traveled to Pakistan to learn from peaceful Imams. Enroute back to Germany, on December 1, 2001, he was taken off a bus in Pakistan, and taken to a prison in Peshawar, Pakistan, then to Kandahar, Afghanistan, and, finally to Guantanamo Bay, where he remained until August 4th, 2006. {He wroet a book about his experiences and teh following is an excerpt:

In Kandahar:

Did they have a lie detector? I asked myself. The man was holding something in his hands. It looked like two irons that he was rubbing together. Or one of those machines used to revive people who have heart attacks. Before I realized what was happening, I felt the first jolt.

It was electricity. An electric shock. They put the electrodes to the soles of my feet. There was no way to remain seated. It was as though my body was lifting itself off the ground of its own accord. I felt the electric current going through my whole body. There was a bang. It hurt a lot. I felt warmth, jolts, cramps. My muscles cramped up and quivered. That hurt, too.

... I heard screams.

They were my screams

MORE

Why I fight against torture Part Three Murat Kurnaz's story continued. The following is an excerpt from his book:

He was young, around my age, maybe nineteen or twenty. He lay on the ground making soft noises.
...
He didn't have any legs. His wounds were still fresh.

I sat in my cage, hardly daring to look, but every once in a while I had to look in his direction. The stumps of his legs were full of pus. The bandages wrapped around them had turned red and yellow. Everything was bloody and moist. He had frostbite marks on his hands. He seemed hardly able to move his fingers. I watched as he tried to get up. He crawled over to the bucket in his cage and tried to sit on it. He had to go to the toilet. He tried to raise himself up with his hands on the chain-link fence, but he didn't make it. He couldn't hold on with his swollen fingers. Still, he tried, until a guard came and hit his hands with his billy-club. The young man fell to the ground.
Every time he tried to hoist himself onto the bucket, the guards came and hit him on the hands. No one was allowed to touch the fence - that was an iron law. But a young man with no legs? They told him he wasn't allowed to stand up. But how could he have done that without any legs? He wasn't even allowed to lean on the fence or to crawl onto the bucket.
...
The bandages wrapped around Abdul's stumps were never changed. When he took them off himself, they were full of blood and pus. He showed the bandages to the guards and pointed to his open wounds. The guardsw ignored him. Later, I saw how he tried to wash the bandages in his bucket of drinking water. But he could hardly move his hands, so he wasn't able to. And even if he had, where would he have hung them up to dry? He wasn't allowed to touch the fence. He wrapped his stumps back up in the dirty bandages.MORE

Updated: Why I Fight Against Torture: Part Four

Today I will share the story of Omar Khadr:

Omar was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Much has been said about his family and his childhood. It is complicated, and to get the entire background I recommend the Wikipedia article, which has lots of links to the relevent original documents and news articles. I also highly recommend the book "Guantanamo's Child" by Michelle Shephard.
In the end, Omar was captured by US troops in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002, after a firefight during which a grenade was thrown. The grenade killed Sgt. Christopher Speer and allegedly blinded Sgt. Layne Morris in one eye. Omar is accused of throwing that grenade, but documents surfaced last year which cast doubt that he was the one who threw the grenade. He was severely injured in the firefight, including major wounds to his chest and at least one eye.
Omar was 15 years old when he was taken into custody.
...

Around the time of Ramadan in 2003, an Afghan man, claiming to be from the Afghan government, interrogated me at Guantanamo. A military interrogator was in the room at the time. The Afghan man said his name was "Izmarai" (Lion), and that he was from Wardeq. He spoke mostly in Farsi, and a little in Pashto and English. He had an American flag on his trousers. The Afghan man appeared displeased with the answers that I was giving him, and after some time both the Afghan and the military interrogator left the room. A military official then removed my chair and short-shackled me by my hands and feet to a bolt in the floor. Military officials then moved my hands behind my knees. They left me in the room in this condition for approximately five to six hours, causing me extreme pain. Occasionally, a military officer and the interrogators would come in and laugh at me. MORE