Ex-Briton Prisoner Reveals Torture in US Jails

“I was dragged into an isolation room, my hands shackled from behind to my ankles, and a suffocating hood placed over my head,” Moazzam Begg said in his25 -page testimony to an American tribunal hearing, which has been seen and revealed by The Independent.

“I was struck about the head several times, then left in that manner on the floor for several hours, only to be interrogated again,” he said in the first detailed account to emerge since his release.

Begg is one of four Britons who were freed last week from infamous Guantanamo along with Feroz Abbasi,24 , Richard Belmar,25 , and Martin Mubanga,32 .

All four men were held by anti-terrorism police upon arrival in London on Tuesday, January25 , for questioning for nearly 24 hours before being released without charge.

Begg was imprisoned in Bagram in February 2002 with an “enemy prisoner of war” identity.

In further passages of his testimony, he recalls seeing US interrogators using a series of illegal practices to extract confessions from detainees at Bagram.

He said that included “sleep deprivation; racial and religious taunts; being chained to a door for hours – with a suffocating plastic sandbag as a hood; arm twisting and forced bowing; and several beatings.”

Begg complained that during his one-year detention in Afghanistan he was “forced to share a bucket as a latrine with several others; forcibly stripped naked and photographed in front of several people; forced to take communal showers in freezing cold water, denied natural light and fresh food.”

Under Duress

Begg further said he was “coerced” into making and signing false confession at Guantanamo on 13 February 2003 by the same US interrogators who tortured him at Bagram airbase.

He added that the confession, which described him as a member of Al-Qaeda network, was made against a backdrop of “threats of summary trials, life imprisonment and execution.”

The false confession led to Begg being one of the first six Guantanamo detainees designated for trial as terrorists by US President George W. Bush later in2003 .

Begg also charged that his US captors had threatened his family, killed fellow detainees and interrogated him more than 250 times, the mass-circulation British daily said.

On January2 , The Observer said that British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith said one of his two clients, Begg and Belmar, was tortured using “strappado”, a technique in which prisoners are left suspended from a roof bar with handcuffs.

A former Afghan police colonel accused US forces of torturing and sexually abusing him while in several US-run detention centers across Afghanistan.

Human Rights Watch said last year that the US forces in Afghanistan were setting a terrible example in arbitrarily detaining civilians, using excessive force during arrests and mistreating detainees.

In June, the Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled “The Road To Abu Ghraib” linking the abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo to the policies adopted by Bush in his so-called war on terror.