Brits freed from X-Ray allege torture

• NY Times: Greg Powell, a lawyer for one of the freed men, Ruhal Ahmed, 21, from Tipton, said Thursday that Mr. Ahmed was on his way to meet his family. Mr. Powell said he had met his client in a London jail and found him in good health, but said the treatment by the Americans had amounted to “torture.”

  “What I have learned from him is, Guantánamo Bay is a kind of experiment in interrogation techniques and methods,” he said. “And they do have extremely interesting stories to tell about what went on there.”

• USA Today: Dergoul was freed first Wednesday night. Max Clifford, spokesman for his family, said he would be taken to a private place to be reunited with his family.

  He said Dergoul was in a mentally fragile condition and was having difficulty walking.

  “Physically he is not in a very good condition,” said Clifford. Clifford said Dergoul had told his family he had been traveling in Afghanistan when he was captured and was in “the wrong place at the wrong time.”

• Reuters: Speaking for two of the men, Gareth Peirce, a lawyer, said that the police had been “compounding two years of injustice”.

  Ms Peirce said she was concerned that her clients could suffer long-term trauma
  as a result of their experience. She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Their story is an extraordinary one. They have emerged from an extraordinary and terrifying ordeal that would profoundly affect the strongest individual.”

LA Times: All four men who were arrested on their return to Britain from U.S. military detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were released Wednesday without charge, police said.

A fifth man, Jamal Harith, had not been arrested when the group arrived Tuesday at Northolt Royal Air Force Base west of London, and he was freed within hours. The four released Wednesday had been identified as Rhuhel Ahmed, Tarek Dergoul, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul.

Tony Blair will undoubtedly be expected to explain why these British citizens were allowed to languish for two years in Camp X-Ray when an interrogation of a few hours duration in Bitain was sufficient to convince prosecutors that they were not “security risks.” Over 600 prisoners remain in the American gulag in Cuba.

The European Parliament, which passed a resolution yesterday calling for the release of some 20 Europeans held in the Guantánamo Bay facility without charges, had this to say: ….relations with the United States were “invaluable and could be a force for good in the world,” but said President Bush’s decision to detain prisoners outside U.S. territory risked damaging those ties.

It said Washington’s fight against terrorism “cannot be waged at the expense of basic shared values, such as the respect for human rights and civil liberties – a situation that is currently happening at Guantanamo Bay.” (Guardian)

So low have the Americans sunk under this administration that they are lectured about human rights and civil liberties on the world stage. Pathetic.

cross-posted at UnFairWitness