One of the British men released from Guantanamo Bay said through his lawyer Friday that US authorities beat him, interrogated him at gunpoint and subjected him to "inhuman conditions" during his detention.
Louise Christian, Tarek Dergoul's attorney, said his family believed his experiences had damaged him psychologically.
He was among five Britons returned home from the US Navy base in Cuba and released this week.
He is the second of the group to publicly describe conditions at the camp, where former fellow detainee Jamal al-Harith said earlier he had suffered beatings, humiliation and interrogation for up to 12 hours at a time. Families of all the freed men, who were not charged, have said they were innocents caught up in the US war on terrorism.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell told a British television network it was "unlikely" abuses were taking place at Guantanamo. "Because we are Americans, we don't abuse people who are in our care," he said, according to a transcript released by ITV.
Christian said Dergoul had begun telling her and his family about "the horrific things which happened to him during detention at Bagram (US air base in Afghanistan), Kandahar and Guantanamo Bay." He alleged "gross breaches of human rights" and demanded that the 640 detainees still in Guantanamo be freed immediately, she said.
US authorities say prisoners at the camp are suspected of links to Afghanistan's fallen Taliban regime or the al-Qaeda terror network. The US military repeatedly has denied that Guantanamo prisoners have been mistreated.
Dergoul described "botched medical treatment, interrogation at gunpoint, beatings and inhuman conditions" and condemned the US and British governments, Christian said.
"Tarek finds it very difficult to talk about things and his family believe his mental health has been severely affected by the trauma he has suffered," she said.
She declined to give any further details and said Dergoul, 26, of east London, would not be speaking to journalists any time soon because of health problems.
He reportedly flew to Pakistan in 2001 to learn Arabic after giving up his job caring for the elderly and was allegedly captured in Afghanistan. His family has insisted he has no links to terrorism and said he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Al-Harith told Britain's ITV network that interrogators at Guantanamo had applied intense psychological pressure, telling him that authorities in Britain would seize his family's home and all their money, turning them onto the street if he did not admit he was involved in terrorism.
"He was obviously trying some mind game but I said `I don't believe you,'" said al-Harith, 37.
Many detainees were given regular injections, after which "they would just sit there like in a daze and sometimes you would see them shaking," he said.
He said he was beaten and put in isolation because he refused injections and was sometimes forcibly given unidentified drugs.
Al-Harith said he had never had any ties to terrorism and would seek compensation from the US government for his two years at Guantanamo.
The five detainees were flown back to Britain on Tuesday. Al-Harith was freed after several hours of questioning and the others were released on Wednesday.
Powell told ITV that charges of abuse were unwarranted and that it was "not in the American tradition to treat people in that manner."
He said the prisoners' long detentions were justified.
"They were picked up in very dangerous circumstances, and we had to protect ourselves by bringing these people to Guantanamo to see what they knew about terrorism and see if they were responsible for any of the kinds of things that have been happening in the world," ITV's transcript quoted him as saying.
Britain and the United States are continuing discussions about the remaining four Britons at the camp. Britain has insisted its nationals either receive fair trials or be returned home.
FORUM: The Solomon Islands’ move to bar Taiwan, the US and others from the Pacific Islands Forum has sparked criticism that Beijing’s influence was behind the decision Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feletei Teo said his country might pull out of the region’s top political meeting next month, after host nation Solomon Islands moved to block all external partners — including China, the US and Taiwan — from attending. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders’ meeting is to be held in Honiara in September. On Thursday last week, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele told parliament that no dialogue partners would be invited to the annual gathering. Countries outside the Pacific, known as “dialogue partners,” have attended the forum since 1989, to work with Pacific leaders and contribute to discussions around
END OF AN ERA: The vote brings the curtain down on 20 years of socialist rule, which began in 2005 when Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer, was elected president A center-right senator and a right-wing former president are to advance to a run-off for Bolivia’s presidency after the first round of elections on Sunday, marking the end of two decades of leftist rule, preliminary official results showed. Bolivian Senator Rodrigo Paz was the surprise front-runner, with 32.15 percent of the vote cast in an election dominated by a deep economic crisis, results published by the electoral commission showed. He was followed by former Bolivian president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga in second with 26.87 percent, according to results based on 92 percent of votes cast. Millionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina, who had been tipped
Outside Havana, a combine belonging to a private Vietnamese company is harvesting rice, directly farming Cuban land — in a first — to help address acute food shortages in the country. The Cuban government has granted Agri VAM, a subsidiary of Vietnam’s Fujinuco Group, 1,000 hectares of arable land in Los Palacios, 118km west of the capital. Vietnam has advised Cuba on rice cultivation in the past, but this is the first time a private firm has done the farming itself. The government approved the move after a 52 percent plunge in overall agricultural production between 2018 and 2023, according to data
ELECTION DISTRACTION? When attention shifted away from the fight against the militants to politics, losses and setbacks in the battlefield increased, an analyst said Recent clashes in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubaland region are alarming experts, exposing cracks in the country’s federal system and creating an opening for militant group al-Shabaab to gain ground. Following years of conflict, Somalia is a loose federation of five semi-autonomous member states — Puntland, Jubaland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle and South West — that maintain often fractious relations with the central government in the capital, Mogadishu. However, ahead of elections next year, Somalia has sought to assert control over its member states, which security analysts said has created gaps for al-Shabaab infiltration. Last week, two Somalian soldiers were killed in clashes between pro-government forces and