Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed.
The disclosures, made in an interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March, who has been too traumatized to speak until now, prompted demands on Saturday night by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos available immediately.
They say that if the contents are as shocking as Dergoul claims, they will provide final proof that brutality against detainees has become an institutionalized feature of America's war on terror.
In the wake of the furore over the abuses photographed at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has continued to insist they were the work of a few rogue soldiers, and not a systemic problem.
The disclosures come as the top American commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, announced he has barred all coercive interrogation practices, including forcing prisoners into stress positions for long periods and disrupting their sleep, except in very rare circumstances.
British military police made four arrests over allegations that British troops abused Iraqi prisoners. All four men were later released without charge, pending further interviews. It is the case of Dergoul, however, that is likely to be the most damaging. The 26-year-old, from Mile End in east London, spent 22 months at Guantanamo Bay from May 2002. Yesterday he told The Observer of repeated assaults by Camp Delta's punishment squad, known as the Extreme Reaction Force, or ERF.
Dergoul tells of one assault by a five-man ERF in shocking terms: "They pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed.
"They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows."
After their release, Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, the so-called Tipton Three from Staffordshire, told of similar ERF attacks.
Meanwhile US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the use of unconventional interrogation methods in Iraq to gain intelligence about the growing insurgency, ultimately leading to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the New Yorker magazine reported on Saturday.
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