In Their Own Words: Detainees Tell of Degradation of Religious Beliefs at Guantanamo

http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/PDF/detainees/client-stat-051805.pdf

Detainees held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay told their U.S. lawyers about the use of tactics intended to degrade their religious beliefs in a series of interviews that were recently declassified by the U.S. Department of Defense and were published at Human Rights First today. The charges are consistent with other allegations by detainees at U.S.- run facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with Defense Department reports that have already been made public.

Among other things, one of the detainees alleges that an interrogator told him “a holy war was occurring, between the Cross and the Star of David on the one hand, and the Crescent on the other.” Guards allegedly interfered with detainees’ prayers. In another incident, a guard allegedly placed a detainee’s shoes on his Koran. One detainee charges that “copies of the Koran were sometimes thrown on the floor”. These statements were made in interviews, beginning on October 2004, by attorneys at Dorsey & Whitney LLP of their clients, six Bahraini citizens. Before these attorneys’ interview notes were released, they were reviewed and declassified by military personnel in accordance with a court order and military regulations.

“These statements add to the growing number of accounts of interrogation tactics intended to degrade religion and offend the beliefs of detainees. This is a pattern that goes beyond Guantanamo,” said Elisa Massimino, Washington Director of Human Rights First. “Human Rights First calls on the Administration and Congress to investigate further these and other allegations, to reveal the findings of those investigations, and to take all necessary steps to prevent any further degradation of religious belief from taking place. A nation founded on the principle of religious tolerance should never use an individual’s faith as a weapon against him.”

Background

Here is a sample of prior U.S. Government actions and official reports that show the use of tactics intended to degrade or humiliate detainees based on their religious beliefs:

• A memo approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002, authorized interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay that included techniques such as the removal of religious items, forced grooming such as shaving facial hair and removal of clothing. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.12.02.pdf
  
• On June 22, 2004, the Administration acknowledged the use of interrogation techniques such as the removal of religious items, employing female interrogators to induce stress, and forced shaving of detainees’ facial hair and heads. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/documents/062204GTMOslide.pdf
  
• Vice Adm. Albert T. Church found in his Defense Department investigation of detention and interrogation operations two cases in which a female interrogator at Guantanamo “touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees’ religious beliefs.” http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/d20050310exe.pdf

Statements by current or former government employees alleging religious degradation or humiliation include:

• According to former Army Sgt. Erik Saar’s Department of Defense-cleared account of interrogations at Guantanamo in which he participated as a translator, tactics included: a female interrogator’s removing her own blouse, touching herself, rubbing her breasts on a detainee and smearing red ink on him, which she claimed was menstrual blood, in an effort to make the detainee feel religiously impure and amenable to cooperating with the interrogator. Erik Saar Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo (2005) 223-227.
  
• Deputy Assistant Director T.J. Harrington of the FBI Counterterrorism Division complained to the Army’s Provost Major General Donald Ryder in July 2004 of abuses that FBI agents observed at Guantanamo http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/FBI_4622_4624.pdf. Harrington wrote that the agent assigned to Guantanamo observed a female interrogator’s caressing and rubbing of a detainee during Ramadan when contact with females is considered especially offensive in Islam.

Former detainees have made numerous similar allegations of religious desecration. For example, in a lawsuit filed by Human Rights First and the ACLU on behalf of eight former detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, two of the Iraqi former detainees claim that U.S. personnel desecrated copies of the Koran, throwing the holy book on the ground, stepping on it, and having a dog pick it up in its mouth. [link to complaint. http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/etn/lawsuit/PDF/rums-complaint-022805.pdf