The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase

Such is the turnover of stories in the news that genuinely shocking claims –- such as those made by Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes in a dossier released by his family two weeks ago –- often become tomorrow’s fish and chip paper without anyone having really paid attention.

As part of an attempt to refute claims by parts of the US administration –- and in particular by Sandra Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs –- that the five British residents (including Deghayes), whose return to the UK was requested by the British government, were “still considered to be a significant threat,” Deghayes’ family was moved to issue a harrowing dossier of allegations made by Deghayes to one of his lawyers in Guantánamo.

In addition to previously reported claims –- that he was “left blinded in one eye after a soldier plunged his finger into it,” that he “had human excrement smeared on his face,” and that he was threatened with being returned to Libya, where Libyan intelligence agents (brought to Guantánamo by the CIA) told him he would be killed –- the dossier also contains previously unreported allegations, including claims that he was sexually abused –- although he added that he “can not bear to relive the details until he is released,” and explained, “It is very distressing and sad to go through and remember again” –- and allegations that he was subjected to electric shocks in Pakistani custody in Lahore, where, he said, “The more I scream they will laugh and do it again… my screams all in vain.”

After being transferred to the US-run prison at Bagram airbase, where he and others were transported “in a torture position,” Deghayes explained that he was chained in a cage with his hands stretched above his head, “causing suffocation,” that he went without food for 45 days, and that he was subjected to water torture: “They hold me naked in the night, freezing cold, and throw buckets of water and fill the bucket and throw [it] again. I shiver and shake badly and try to sit down to gain warmth. They kick and punch and say stand up until I fall to the ground in weakness.”

Following his transfer to Guantánamo, Deghayes said that he was “beaten on his first day,” relived his experiences of the Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) teams who blinded him and “repeatedly beat him up,” and explained that detainees were given “mystery injections.” He also said that an FBI interrogator –- who called himself Craig –- told him that he would face execution, and that he would not get a proper trial. “Many times,” he said, “one FBI interrogator by the name of Craig said, ‘Omar, it is nothing like the law you studied in the UK. There will never be a proper court and lawyers etc. It would be only a military tribunal to determine your future and your life. Your best choice is to cooperate with me.’”

Most shocking of all, however, are Deghayes’ claims that, in Bagram, he saw one prisoner who “was beaten until blood dripped on the cell floor and he was left ‘paralysed and mentally damaged,’” that he also “witnessed a prisoner shot dead after he had gone to the aid of an inmate who was being beaten and kicked by the guards” (“The American,” he explained, “said he tried to take the gun”), and that he was also nearby when another prisoner was beaten to death: “One by the name of Abdaulmalik, Moroccan and Italian, was beaten until I heard no sound of him after the screaming. There was afterwards panic in prison and the guards running about in fear saying to each other the Arab has died. I have not seen this young man again.”

Two murders in Bagram –- those of a man named Mullah Habibullah and a taxi driver named Dilawar –- are relatively well known and have received a respectable amount of media coverage (Dilawar’s story, for example, was the subject of a recent award-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, by Alex Gibney, whose previous film was “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”). These –- and an additional, unreported murder, mentioned by three other British detainees, Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar and Jamal Kiyemba –- are covered in my book The Guantánamo Files, but the third murder described by Deghayes’ compatriots –- of a young Afghan who tried to escape –- do not correspond with those described by Deghayes.

Is the world, I wonder, so inured to murders in US custody in Afghanistan that two additional, and previously unreported murders –- of a prisoner who remains anonymous to this day, and of a Moroccan who was at least remembered by his first name –- are incapable of raising even a ripple of outrage?

Omar Deghayes as a child with his late father, Amer. It was the death of Amer, a prominent trade union activist killed by Colonel Gaddafi, that prompted Omar’s family to flee to Britain from Libya in the 1980s. (Photo from Cageprisoners).

For further information on Omar, visit the website of the Save Omar campaign, which has campaigned relentlessly for his release, and has made him a cause celèbre in his home town of Brighton.

As published on American Torture.