A British resident released from the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in October is alleging he was tortured there, as well as at Bagram Air Base and Kandahar Airfield, where he says interrogators threatened to rape his then 5-year-old daughter.
“That was the hardest thing, the hardest thing that I ever hear,” Shaker Aamer told the BBC in an interview released Monday. “’If you don’t start talking, we will rape your daughter and you will hear her crying daddy, daddy.’ That was completely inhumane. It was worse than the beating as well, worse than everything, just thinking of my daughter, and I just sat there silent completely.”
{mosads}After being detained at Guantánamo for 13 years, Aamer, a Saudi Arabian citizen, was released and returned to his wife and four children in Britain.
Aamer was captured in Aghanistan in 2001 and transferred to Guantánamo in 2002. He was alleged to have been a close associate of Osama bin Laden’s and a “recruiter, financier and facilitator with a history of participating in jihadist combat,” according to military files published by The New York Times.
But he was never charged with a crime and has maintained he was in Afghanistan volunteering to open schools for girls.
In his new interview, Aamer did admit to previously attending talks in London given by radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada.
After being captured in Kabul, he was taken to Bagram, where he said his head was slammed into a wall.
After Bagram, he was taken to Kandahar. There, he said he was kept awake for nine days, denied food, drenched in freezing water and forced stand on concrete in the winter for 16 hours a day.
“They have something called ‘welcoming party’ where they really beat you up so that while you are still on the concrete, on the airport, before even they move you to check you and process your case,” he said. “They did it for two, three hours and truly, truly, that’s one of the times where I felt like I’m not going to live that night.”
At Guantánamo, Aamer said he was beat, pinched, poked in the eye, dragged, bombarded with white noise and loud music, and kept in solitary confinement for more than two years.
A Pentagon spokesman told the BBC it does not condone torture and that Aamer was lawfully detained.
Aamer compared Guantánamo to the prison in the Harry Potter novels.
“They’ve got an island in Harry Potter, it says Azkaban, where there’s no happiness,” he told The BBC. “They just suck all your feelings out of you, and you don’t have no feelings any more. And truly that’s how I felt all the time. This is Azkaban. This is not from this world because that’s what they tried.”
In a separate interview with British channel ITV, Aamer said President Obama would be a “hero” for closing the detention facility.
“If he really wants to establish justice, if he really wants to live by his word, he’s not going to need to wait for the whole United States of America to support him,” Aamer said of Obama.
Obama has promised to close the facility since his first campaign for the presidency. He’s been repeatedly blocked by Congress, which again this year barred detainees from being transferred to the United States.
In recent months, the White House has hinted Obama would be willing to use executive action to close the facility by the end of his term, but a plan to close it has yet to be released.