30/06/2006
Salon has removed the veil over Army documents linking Guantánamo interrogators to military school that instructs U.S. soldiers how to resist torture. In a July 2005 article on the New Yorker, Jane Mayer introduced evidence linking the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school at Fort Bragg, N. C., and real-world interrogators, strengthening the suspicion of many Human rights organisations who have repeatedly raised concern over a possible connection between interrogations serving the American President George W. Bush’s so-called "war on terror" and a secretive military survival school that provides elite U.S. troops with courses on ways to resist torture. Citing documents embedded among 1,000 pages obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Act, Salon said that U.S. guards and interrogators working at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, where repetitive scandals of abuse and torture of detainees drew calls from various politicians and human rights groups to close down the prison camp, received training at the hands of U.S. Army school that trains soldiers to survive torture. SERE instructors taught U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo prison their methods and techniques, according to a March 2005 sworn statement by the former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo, produced as part of an investigation by Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt into accusations including "degrading and abusive" treatment of detainee Mohammed al-Khatani, the alleged September 11 20th hijacker. "When I arrived at GTMO," reads the statement, "my predecessor arranged for SERE instructors to teach their techniques to the interrogators at GTMO ... The instructors did give some briefings to the Joint Interrogation Group interrogators." "This is the missing link," declared Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. "It is proof that the SERE training was in fact used, for a time at least, as a basis for interrogations at Guantánamo." "That is what I inferred had happened," said retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, former commanding general of the Southeast Regional Army Medical Command. "But I have never seen this documented anywhere." The statement also said that Fort Bragg was the incubator of the abuse that was transferred from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib jail near the Iraqi capital- a further evidence of the systematic nature of torture Washington uses to extract information from suspects it detains as part of its "war on terror." The interrogations chief affirmed that SERE instructors taught techniques to interrogators at Guantánamo sometime before his arrival, when the Pentagon was developing some of the inhuman interrogation techniques that later surfaced in April 2004 abuse scandal in Iraq. Bush’s administration currently holds about 450 detainees at its Guantanamo jail in Cuba, part of its so-called campaign to root out terrorism following September 11 attacks in 2001, some have been held for nearly three years without charges or access to attorneys. And on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government violated the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. military code of justice when it ordered a military tribunal to prosecute Salim Ahmed Hamdan, whom it alleges is the former driver for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The court declared 5-3 that the trials for 10 suspects violate U.S. military law and the Geneva conventions. Pressure on the U.S. President over the Guantanamo prison intensified recently following news that three prisoners there had committed suicide- the first people to have died at the U.S. military base in Cuba since the prison was established nearly five years ago.
SOURCE: AlJazeera.com |
