WAR ON TERRORISM - LOOKING GLASS NEWS
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"U.S. soldiers cleaned their boots with Qur’an pages"
from Aljazeera.com
Entered into the database on Monday, October 24th, 2005 @ 17:09:52 MST


 

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The U.S. holds about 500 detainees in its detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

A Bahraini detainee held at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba revealed more sexual abuses by the American soldiers there and confirmed Qur’an desecration.

Jumah Al-Dossary, one of six Bahraini detainees the U.S. holds in Guantanamo prison said he was subject of sexual abuse. He also confirmed desecration of the Qur’an, Islam’s Holy Book, by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, The Associated Press reported.

Al-Dossary, 30, said he witnessed U.S. soldiers at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan cleaning their boots with pages they had ripped from the Holy Qur’an.

According to the recently declassified documents issued by his lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan Al-Dossary, the Bahraini detainee was beaten and stamped on by eight U.S. soldiers, as he was recovering from an earlier stomach operation.

Sexual abuse

In September 2002, Al-Dossary was taken to an interrogation room where he found four MPs, one carrying a video camera. Al-Dossary said he was shackled to the floor, stripped naked on orders from a female interrogator, who stripped and squatted over his genitals, chest, and face smearing him with her menstrual blood to force him admit having links to Al-Qaeda network.

On a later occasion Al Dossary says he was forced to watch naked man and woman having sex, then offered sex with the woman if he co-operated with the interrogators, Gulf Daily News reported.

Al Dossary’s accusations of being harshly beaten and stamped on by U.S. guards have been widely reported already.

Now Al Dossary suffers heart problems, and he wakes up screaming from nightmares. He fears he has been driven to mental illness, the paper reported.

After visiting all six Bahraini detainees at Guantanamo jail, Colangelo-Bryan, who has just arrived in the U.S., says the six men fear they will stay there for the rest of their lives.

Force-fed torture

Hunger-strikers at Guantanamo jail accused U.S. guards of repeatedly inserting and removing dirty feeding tubes until the detainee would vomit blood.

According to declassified documents recently released by defense lawyers for three men held at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, the guards used feeding tubes as thick as a finger, as objects of torture.

"They were forcibly shoved up the detainees' noses and down into their stomachs," the lawyers reported to a federal judge in August. "No anesthesia or sedative was provided."

The force feedings resulted in prisoners "vomiting up substantial amounts of blood. When they vomited up blood, the soldiers mocked and cursed at them, and taunted them with statements like `look what your religion has brought you.'"

Yousef al Shehri, a 21 year-old Saudi detainee held at Guantanamo, said guards removed a nasal feeding tube from one prisoner and inserted it into another without cleaning.

Another detainee said that a military doctor put a tube in his nose, down his throat and "kept moving the tube up and down" until he finally "started violently throwing up blood."