WASHINGTON, Oct 7: Guards at the US military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, regularly beat terrorism detainees and bragged about it, says a Marine.
“I was shocked and outraged to find that beatings are continuous and open,” said Lt Col Colby Vokey, the Marine Corps’s defence coordinator for western United States.
Col Vokey, a lawyer for one of the prisoners, said he had come across the allegation in a sworn statement from a Marine sergeant.
The sergeant, a woman paralegal, worked at the US Navy station in Cuba last month. Officials at the court where she submitted a two-page affidavit released the statement but blacked out her name.
“This is offensive,” Col Vokey said. “I don’t want my fellow Marines treated this way if they are ever captured.” He forwarded the sergeant’s statement to the inspector general’s office at the Department of Defence, saying the abuse alleged in the affidavit was ‘offensive and violates United States and international law’.
In the statement, the sergeant said that on Sept 23, she met a group of men at a bar on the Guantanamo base who identified themselves as guards. The woman said she spent about an hour talking with them.
A 19-year-old sailor referred to only as Bo ‘told the other guards and me about him beating different detainees being held in the prison’, the sergeant said in her statement.
“One such story Bo told involved him taking a detainee by the head and hitting the detainee’s head into the cell door. Bo said that his actions were known by others” but that he was never punished, the statement said.
Other guards ‘also told their own stories of abuse towards the detainees’ that included hitting them, denying them water and ‘removing privileges for no reason. Five others in the group admitted hitting detainees’ and that included ‘punching in the face’, the affidavit said.
“From the whole conversation, I understood that striking detainees was a common practice,” the sergeant wrote. “Everyone in the group laughed at the others’ stories of beating detainees.”
In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Lt Cmdr Chito Peppler, told reporters that officials were ‘reviewing this affidavit and will investigate these allegations fully’.
