They blinded me

10/4/2005 12:46:00 PM GMT

Deghayes said the soldiers tortured him using electric shocks Hypocrisy and a disregard for basic human rights and international laws continue to mark the American President’s so-called “war on terror". Bellow are details of one of the most horrific incidents that took place at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where American soldiers tortured and abused prisoners, whom they labeled enemy-combatants. Omar Deghayes is a British resident who has been tortured by U.S. guards at Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an attack in which he was blinded. Deghayes said the soldiers tortured him using electric shocks. They also put him in a room with caged snakes when he was in Pakistan before he was taken later to Guantanamo. Deghayes was first jailed in a U.S.-run jail in Afghanistan, which he likened to a "Nazi camp." And at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Deghayes said the prison guards came to his cell "singing and laughing" before spraying his face with mace and digging their fingers into his eyes while an officer shouted "More! More." Deghayes’ right eye has been blind ever since, he wrote in recently declassified notes. The assault "was the saddest, my eye has gone a milky white color ... After all I have been through in my life to save it," he said. In his prison notes, Deghayes said troops pushed their fingers in his eyes in 2003 because he refused a rectal search -- a controversial procedure at Guantanamo. Among other abuses Deghayes detailed was having his head flushed in a toilet, feces smeared on his face and water forced up his nose with a pressure hose. At the "Nazi camp" in Baghram, he said soldiers kept him naked, threatened him with sodomy, and chained him to a wall with his hands high above his head. Deghayes said that in Pakistan, he was repeatedly subjected to electric shocks and dunked into a tub of water until he nearly drowned. The room "had very large snakes in glass boxes ... with dim lights," he wrote. "They threatened to leave me there, and let the snakes out." The accusations, made by Deghayes’ attorney and human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, finally persuaded British ministers to take up his case. Deghayes’ testimony was recorded during interviews with his attorney at Guantanamo jail in March this year, and has only recently been cleared by U.S. Department of Justice censors. Mr Smith asserted that Deghayes’ testimony is “totally credible”. “He has been treated worse in Guantanamo than any other person I have come across. He is legally trained and tries to help other people there, so the Americans think he’s a trouble-maker. Consequently, he’s suffered for it,” he said. According to Stafford Smith, Deghayes was the victim of mistaken identity. They had established that video footage showing Deghayes in Chechnya was of another man, now dead. The U.S. attorney said that his client had never been to Chechnya. Deghayes was arrested by armed local intelligence officers in Pakistan in April 2002, and was immediately subjected to repeated torture, threats against his wife and children, and violent assaults by the Pakistani interrogators who told him they were holding him at U. S. request. “I underwent systematic beatings every night for three days. Each time, when I was nearly unconscious, I would be thrown back into the cell to await more.” As evidence of torture and widespread brutal and inhuman treatment of detainees mounts, it’s become more urgent than ever that the U.S. brings the Guantanamo prison and any other detention center it runs in any country into full compliance with international law and standards. Many politicians suggested closing them down.