Post by RPankn on Feb 6, 2005 18:30:29 GMT -5
Martin Mubanga went on holiday to Zambia, but ended up spending 33 months in Guantanamo Bay, some of the time in the feared Camp Echo. Free at last and still protesting his innocence, he tells the full story to David Rose
Sunday February 6, 2005
The Observer
Martin Mubanga can date the low point of his 33 months at Guantánamo Bay: 15 June, 2004. That sweltering Cuban morning, he was taken from the cellblock he was sharing with speakers of the Afghan language Pashto, none of whom knew English, for what had become his almost daily interrogation. As usual, his hands were shackled in rigid, metal cuffs attached to a body belt; another set of chains ran to his ankles, severely restricting his ability to move his legs. Trussed in this fashion, he was lying on the interrogation booth floor.
The seemingly interminable questioning had already lasted for hours. 'I needed the toilet,' Mubanga said, 'and I asked the interrogator to let me go. But he just said, "you'll go when I say so". I told him he had five minutes to get me to the toilet or I was going to go on the floor. He left the room. Finally, I squirmed across the floor and did it in the corner, trying to minimise the mess. I suppose he was watching through a one-way mirror or the CCTV camera. He comes back with a mop and dips it in the pool of urine. Then he starts covering me with my own waste, like he's using a big paintbrush, working methodically, beginning with my feet and ankles and working his way up my legs. All the while he's racially abusing me, cussing me: "Oh, the poor little negro, the poor little black person." He seemed to think it was funny.'
A few days later, Mubanga said, the same interrogator began to question him in one of the camp's 'hot rooms', where the heating was turned up to almost 100F. 'When you went for interrogation, you never knew whether they were going to take you to a booth where the air conditioning was turned up to the max, so it was really cold, or a hot room,' Mubanga said. 'This made life very difficult, because you only had two T-shirts in your cell, and if you wore just one in a cold room you'd be freezing, but wearing two in a hot room was almost unbearable. The thing was, once you were in there in your chains, it was impossible to take one off.'
After several hours of questioning, Mubanga felt severely dehydrated and begged for a bottle of water. Once again he was lying on the floor: the interrogation booth chair had been removed. As he tried to drink and cool himself by spraying a little water around his face and hair, Mubanga said, the interrogator turned violent: 'The guy started kneeling on me, and I was wriggling backwards to get away from him, trying to get in the line of sight of the CCTV camera so someone might see what was going on. Of course, he didn't want to let me do that, so he stood on my hair. It was painful, but I tried to keep moving. Then he stood on the leg chain, so my shackles dug in really deeply, cutting into my legs. But I just took the pain. I'm looking at him, the pain's getting worse but I wouldn't scream out. I just kept looking at him. From that day on, I refused to talk to any interrogator. I said nothing at all for the next seven months.'
Mubanga, 32, born in Zambia but brought up in London from the age of three, was describing his ordeal in an exclusive interview at a secret location in southern England last Friday - the first by any of the four men who returned to Britain from Guantánamo at the end of last month.
A lifelong Arsenal supporter, amateur boxer and former motorbike courier, he became Camp Delta's poet, dealing with his experiences in a series of vivid, rap-style rhymes, reminiscent of the prison blues from the American Deep South.
Mubanga is a tall man, with a build that remains athletic despite the years when the longest walk he took was the 10 yards from his cell to one of Guantánamo's tiny recreation yards. As he struggles to deal with the shock of his sudden and unexpected release, his words fall from his lips in a rapid, articulate torrent.
For many months after Mubanga was seized in Zambia with the help of British intelligence and sent to Guantánamo, the American authorities maintained that he was a dangerous 'enemy combatant', an undercover al-Qaeda operative who had travelled from Afghanistan on a false passport and appeared to be on a mission to reconnoitre Jewish organisations in New York. But documents obtained by The Observer now reveal that by the end of last October the Pentagon's own legal staff had grave doubts about his status, and had overturned a ruling that he was a terrorist by Guantánamo's Combatant Status Review Tribunal.
Like the other three men who were released last month, Moazzam Begg, Feroz Abbasi and Richard Belmar, Mubanga was held for one night at Paddington Green police station on his return to Britain and questioned. He was released unconditionally, the police having concluded within just a few hours that there was no evidence to sustain charges of terrorism.
His allegations about his treatment at Guantánamo echo similar claims by other freed detainees, and information from American official sources. In December, US civil rights groups obtained more than 4,000 pages of documents under the Freedom of Information Act about the abusive treatment of detainees. They included memos by FBI men who visited Guantánamo, the US internment camp set up on American territory on the island of Cuba in early 2002 which still houses over 500 'enemy combatants' despite attracting international criticism, and reported their concerns to their superiors.
[Continued in next post]
Sunday February 6, 2005
The Observer
Martin Mubanga can date the low point of his 33 months at Guantánamo Bay: 15 June, 2004. That sweltering Cuban morning, he was taken from the cellblock he was sharing with speakers of the Afghan language Pashto, none of whom knew English, for what had become his almost daily interrogation. As usual, his hands were shackled in rigid, metal cuffs attached to a body belt; another set of chains ran to his ankles, severely restricting his ability to move his legs. Trussed in this fashion, he was lying on the interrogation booth floor.
The seemingly interminable questioning had already lasted for hours. 'I needed the toilet,' Mubanga said, 'and I asked the interrogator to let me go. But he just said, "you'll go when I say so". I told him he had five minutes to get me to the toilet or I was going to go on the floor. He left the room. Finally, I squirmed across the floor and did it in the corner, trying to minimise the mess. I suppose he was watching through a one-way mirror or the CCTV camera. He comes back with a mop and dips it in the pool of urine. Then he starts covering me with my own waste, like he's using a big paintbrush, working methodically, beginning with my feet and ankles and working his way up my legs. All the while he's racially abusing me, cussing me: "Oh, the poor little negro, the poor little black person." He seemed to think it was funny.'
A few days later, Mubanga said, the same interrogator began to question him in one of the camp's 'hot rooms', where the heating was turned up to almost 100F. 'When you went for interrogation, you never knew whether they were going to take you to a booth where the air conditioning was turned up to the max, so it was really cold, or a hot room,' Mubanga said. 'This made life very difficult, because you only had two T-shirts in your cell, and if you wore just one in a cold room you'd be freezing, but wearing two in a hot room was almost unbearable. The thing was, once you were in there in your chains, it was impossible to take one off.'
After several hours of questioning, Mubanga felt severely dehydrated and begged for a bottle of water. Once again he was lying on the floor: the interrogation booth chair had been removed. As he tried to drink and cool himself by spraying a little water around his face and hair, Mubanga said, the interrogator turned violent: 'The guy started kneeling on me, and I was wriggling backwards to get away from him, trying to get in the line of sight of the CCTV camera so someone might see what was going on. Of course, he didn't want to let me do that, so he stood on my hair. It was painful, but I tried to keep moving. Then he stood on the leg chain, so my shackles dug in really deeply, cutting into my legs. But I just took the pain. I'm looking at him, the pain's getting worse but I wouldn't scream out. I just kept looking at him. From that day on, I refused to talk to any interrogator. I said nothing at all for the next seven months.'
Mubanga, 32, born in Zambia but brought up in London from the age of three, was describing his ordeal in an exclusive interview at a secret location in southern England last Friday - the first by any of the four men who returned to Britain from Guantánamo at the end of last month.
A lifelong Arsenal supporter, amateur boxer and former motorbike courier, he became Camp Delta's poet, dealing with his experiences in a series of vivid, rap-style rhymes, reminiscent of the prison blues from the American Deep South.
Mubanga is a tall man, with a build that remains athletic despite the years when the longest walk he took was the 10 yards from his cell to one of Guantánamo's tiny recreation yards. As he struggles to deal with the shock of his sudden and unexpected release, his words fall from his lips in a rapid, articulate torrent.
For many months after Mubanga was seized in Zambia with the help of British intelligence and sent to Guantánamo, the American authorities maintained that he was a dangerous 'enemy combatant', an undercover al-Qaeda operative who had travelled from Afghanistan on a false passport and appeared to be on a mission to reconnoitre Jewish organisations in New York. But documents obtained by The Observer now reveal that by the end of last October the Pentagon's own legal staff had grave doubts about his status, and had overturned a ruling that he was a terrorist by Guantánamo's Combatant Status Review Tribunal.
Like the other three men who were released last month, Moazzam Begg, Feroz Abbasi and Richard Belmar, Mubanga was held for one night at Paddington Green police station on his return to Britain and questioned. He was released unconditionally, the police having concluded within just a few hours that there was no evidence to sustain charges of terrorism.
His allegations about his treatment at Guantánamo echo similar claims by other freed detainees, and information from American official sources. In December, US civil rights groups obtained more than 4,000 pages of documents under the Freedom of Information Act about the abusive treatment of detainees. They included memos by FBI men who visited Guantánamo, the US internment camp set up on American territory on the island of Cuba in early 2002 which still houses over 500 'enemy combatants' despite attracting international criticism, and reported their concerns to their superiors.
[Continued in next post]