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Freed detainee describes `hell' in Guantanamo camp

"The whole point of Guantanamo was to get to you psychologically. The beatings were not nearly as bad as the psychological torture."

Jamal al-Harith, former Guantanamo Bay detainee

One of five Britons released from the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said he suffered beatings, humiliation and interrogation for up to 12 hours at a time during two years' detention.

In an interview with the Daily Mirror headlined "My Hell in Camp X-Ray," Jamal al-Harith said punishment beatings were handed out by guards known as the Extreme Reaction Force who "waded into inmates in full riot gear, raining blows on them."

Al-Harith, a 37-year-old convert to Islam, arrived in Britain on Tuesday night on a military flight with four other men who were immediately arrested and taken to a London police station. They were freed on Wednesday without charge.

Al-Harith was not arrested, however; he was held at the Northolt air base for a few hours and then freed.

"He has been detained as an innocent person for a period of two years. He has been treated in a cruel, inhumane and degrading manner," his lawyer, Robert Lizar, told reporters.

The US military repeatedly has denied that Guantanamo prisoners have been mistreated. The US government says the roughly 640 prisoners are at Guantanamo because of suspicions they have links to Afghanistan's fallen Taliban regime or the al-Qaeda terror network.

The water and food was foul at Guantanamo, and sometimes as punishment, water taps in the cells would be turned off, al-Harith said in the interview published yesterday.

"They would shut off the water before prayers so we couldn't wash ourselves according to our religion," al-Harith told the paper. "We were only allowed a shower once a week at the beginning and none at all in solitary confinement. This was tough because you are supposed to be clean when you pray."

The article said "vice girls" were used to torment the most religiously devout detainees, who had not seen "unveiled" women.

"The whole point of Guantanamo was to get to you psychologically. The beatings were not nearly as bad as the psychological torture," al-Harith was quoted as saying.

He was regularly interrogated by FBI and CIA agents, and later Britain's MI5, the newspaper said.

"On 40 occasions, he was [put] in chains, which were bolted to the floor, for up to 12 hours at a time," the account said.

Al-Harith describes a stay in an isolation unit known as an ISO, where those accused of misbehaving were kept in solitary confinement with just a mat and towel.

The paper says al-Harith went to Pakistan weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US to learn about Muslim culture. Al-Harith was in Quetta near the Afghan border when the US bombings against the Taliban began. He paid a driver to take him to Turkey, but was stopped in Afghanistan by an armed gang who accused him of being a spy after they saw his British passport and jailed him, the newspaper said.
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