From: 60 Minutes
An innocent man held as a terror detainee for years tells Scott Pelley, in his first U.S. television interview, how Americans tortured him in Afghanistan and then at Guantanamo Bay.
… He told 60 Minutes that American troops held his head underwater.
“They used to beat me when my head is underwater. They beat me into my stomach and everything,” he says.
“They were hitting you in the stomach while you’re head was underwater so that you’d have to take a breath?” Pelley asks. …
Kurnaz says the Americans used a device to shock him with electricity that made his body go numb. And he says he was hoisted up on chains suspended by his arms from the ceiling of an aircraft hangar for five days.
“Every five or six hours they came and pulled me back down. And the doctor came to watch if I can still survive to not. He looked into my eyes. He checked my heart. And when he said okay, then they pulled me back up,” Kurnaz says. …
At Guantanamo Kurnaz says he endured endless months of interrogations, beatings at the hands of soldiers in riot gear, and physical cruelty which included going without sleep for weeks and solitary confinement for up to a month in cells that were sealed without ventilation or were set up to punish him with extreme conditions.
“It’s dark inside. No lights. And they can punish you in isolation by coldness or by the heat. They have special air conditioners over there. Very strong. They can turn it very cold or very hot,” Kurnaz says.
Ashamed
When I grew up I learned about the Hungarian revolution, Czech spring (when Russia invaded and stopped blossoming democracy). There was the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, the Gulag, the Russian invasion of Afganistan, etc.
It was easy to tell who the bad guys were. We could trumpet to the world, and to the oppressed communist countries, that even though we are mighty, we use might for right. We’re the good guys. You can trust us. We’d never invade you. We believe in freedom and the rule of law. As the start of the old TV program Superman would say, “Truth. Justice. And the American Way.”
Now I can’t say that we’re the good guys. We invaded Grenada and Iraq, overthrew governments (even elected ones), bombed Libya (the wrong country!), supported dictators. We imprison people without due process. We torture people. We break international law. (We are trying a kid who was 15, a child soldier, who our own soldiers said wasn’t the guy who threw the grenade. Even holding a child soldier without representation that long is against international law.) And now the guy on 60 minutes: keeping him three and a half YEARS after our own government says he’s innocent.
We can’t tell anyone that we’re the good guys anymore. It makes me so sad I want to weep.