JURIST - Paper Chase: Guantanamo detainees claim US prisoner transfers exposed them to torture

[JURIST] Recently-released US military tribunal hearing records [US DOD documents] and other documents indicate at that least seven prisoners at the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay were transferred abroad to jurisdictions practicing torture before their arrival at the base, with three detainees claiming they were actually tortured in those jurisdictions, according to Wednesday's Boston Globe. The inmates who said they were actually tortured were interrogated in Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt. One of the seven, Australian national Mamdouh Habib [JURIST report], was later released. Another, Ethiopian Binyam Ahmad Muhammad [charge sheet, PDF], is currently on trial before a military commission, and has said that his confession to conspiring to use a "dirty bomb" against the US was forced from him by interrogators in Morocco; last year he claimed he was tortured [JURIST report] in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan before arriving in Cuba. The Boston Globe has more.

In December, a report [text] released by New York-based Human Rights Watch said eight detainees at Guantanamo had told their lawyers in separate "consistent accounts" that they were flown to Afghanistan in 2002-2004 following arrests in Asian and Middle Eastern countries and were held at a secret prison where they were chained to walls and deprived of food and water [JURIST report]. Prison guards included Afghans and Americans in civilian clothes, and HRW suggested that the facility "may have been operated" by Central Intelligence Agency personnel.

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