Newly Released Gitmo Detainee Speaks To ABC: I Was Tortured

[babylonsister]

EXCLUSIVE: Recently Released Gitmo Detainee Talks to ABC News
Held Seven Years, Former Aid Worker Tells ABC News He Was Tortured
By JAKE TAPPER, KAREN TRAVERS, and STEPHANIE Z. SMITH
June 8, 2009


For 7½ years, Lakhdar Boumediene was known simply by a number: "10005."

These were the digits assigned to him when he arrived at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, swept up in a post-Sept. 11 dragnet and accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. and British Embassies in Sarajevo.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Boumediene said the interrogators at Gitmo never once asked him about this alleged plot, which he denied playing any part it.

"I'm a normal man," said Boumediene, who at the time of his arrest worked for the Red Crescent, providing help to orphans and others in need. "I'm not a terrorist."

The 43-year-old Algerian is now back with his wife and two daughters, a free man in France after a Republican judge found the evidence against Boumediene lacking. He is best known from the landmark Supreme Court case last year, Boumediene v. Bush, which said detainees have the right to challenge their detention in court.

That decision was a stunning rebuke of the Bush administration's policies on terror suspects. It set up a ruling by District Court Judge Richard Leon, a former counsel to Republicans in Congress appointed to the bench by Bush, that there was no credible evidence to keep Boumediene detained.

After what Boumediene described as a 7½ year nightmare, he is now a free man. Boumediene: "I don't think. I'm sure" about torture.

more/video at link...

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=7778310&page=1

[leveymg]

1. "Oddly, no one at Gitmo ever asked him about the alleged plot to blow up the embassies in Sarajevo"

Oddly, indeed.

Oddly, Boumediene said no one at Gitmo ever asked him about the alleged plot to blow up the embassies in Sarajevo. They wanted to know what he knew about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, he recounted, which was nothing.

Boumediene said it was in his interest to lie to the interrogators, who would reward the detainees if they admitted guilt.

"If I tell my interrogator, I am from Al Qaeda, I saw Osama bin Laden, he was my boss, I help him, they will tell me, 'Oh you are a good man,'" he said. "But if I refuse ? I tell them I'm innocent, never was I terrorist, never never, they tell me. 'You are, you are not cooperating, I have to punch you.'"

SNIP

On January 17, 2002, Boumediene's hands and feet were placed in shackles, and he was put on a military plane en route to Guantanamo Bay. It was a time of high anxiety, and the Bush administration was taking no chances.

Two weeks later, in his State of the Union address, President Bush touted the arrests in Bosnia to show early progress in the war on terror.

"Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy," Bush said in his address. To this day, officials of the Bush administration have provided no credible evidence to back up that accusation.

Boumediene said the interrogations began within one week of his arrival at the facility in Cuba. But he thought that his cooperation, and trust in the United States, would serve him well and quicken his release.

The truth had nothing to do with torture, and vis-a-versa.

[babylonsister]

2. More proof that torture was used to try to draw a line between

Iraq and OBL, war justification. You're right, who cared about the truth?

[leveymg]

3. If he really knew anything about al Qaeda, they would have waterboarded him

Waterboarding destroys brain cells through oxygen deprivation. But that was reserved for "high-value" detainess, like Abu Zubaydah and KSM, who really did know (too much) about AQ, such as the fact that it was working with the intelligence services of the US, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey to carry out terrorist attacks against the Russians in Chechnya and Bosnia.

AZ recruited and trained at least six of the 9/11 hijackers, and KSM was the connection with Atta and several others. Almost all of them were originally employed in the secret terror war against the Russians for control over the oil and natural gas region of Caspian Sea and southern former Soviet Union, a covert war in which the US has not officially acknowledged its role to this day.

Memory alteration and erasure. That's the real purpose of waterboarding. There are lots more effective ways of making someone talk or forcing a false confession.