‘Hell on earth’ / Brutal torture at Guantanamo Bay described by ex-prisoners (photos)

From torture involving eye extraction, rape and anal examinations, ex-prisoners called it “hell on earth.”

Prisoners were tortured in water baths, sexually assaulted, forced to stay awake for days, and subjected to brutal anal examinations.

It is now believed that as many as 40 prisoners remain there, some of whom have been detained for two decades without charge or trial.

One of them is the organizer of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

New US President Joe Biden announced last month that he is looking for ways to close the infamous prison.

New Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said: “Guantanamo has given us the opportunity to keep our enemies off the battlefield, but now is the time for it to close.”

The detention center opened on a Cuban island in 2002 as part of the response to the September 1 terrorist attacks in the United States, on the detention and interrogation of those accused of terrorism.

The U.S. naval base was a key point in what became known as the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” as the prison held up to 700 inmates at its peak.

The center consists of seven camps as well as secret prison facilities, known as Gitmo.

The military camp leaders based their “reinforced interrogation” techniques – as the CIA called torture in formal terms – on the techniques of the Chinese communists during the Korean War, the New York Times reported in 2008.

These included restraining sleep for several days, keeping prisoners in “stress positions” for long periods, during which the pain became unbearable.

Former prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene details the “brutal” treatment in his book.

“They kept me awake for several days,” he wrote.

“I was forced to stay in a position of pain for several hours. “These are things I would not like to write about, it would be better to forget them.”

“Then I went on a hunger strike for almost two years, because no one told me why I was imprisoned. Twice a day the guards inserted a tube into my nose, down to my stomach to forcefully feed me. “It was horrible, but I was innocent, so I continued my protest.”

The exact details of the brutality in the camp, which gave him world fame, came out in a 2014 US Senate report.

Among them are false executions of prisoners or “Russian roulette” games to intimidate prisoners. Drowning techniques were among the most commonly used, as well as those of forced feeding for prisoners on hunger strike.

The suspects underwent anal examinations with “extraordinary” force, causing the prisoners to sometimes bleed.

One prisoner died of hypothermia after being forced to lie naked on a concrete floor.

Somali Mohamed Saleban Bare spent eight years in prison without knowing what he was accused of.

“Guantanamo Bay is like hell on earth,” he told the media after his release in 2009.

“Some of my friends in prison lost their sight, lost their limbs while many others were left with mental problems,” he says.

Those who gave satisfactory answers were allowed to sleep for a few days and were given one biscuit a day, while the most unfortunate ones were beaten and tortured with electricity.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been described by the media as “Gitmo’s most tortured prisoner”, and recently gave an interview about his 14 years in prison.

He states that he was handcuffed in a dark cell with loud “rap” music to stop him from sleeping. Slahi says he was beaten regularly, sexually assaulted and forced to drink sea water.

While Majid Khan tells how the investigators “threw ice water on his genitals, tied him naked, provoking him in the genitals”.

Murat Kurnaz says that one day he learned that they were given to eat the iguana reptiles found on the island, while when he came out of Gitmo, he was blind in one eye that one of the guards had tried to take him out.

Guantanamo Bay has been regularly condemned by human rights group Amnesty International as a violator of human rights and the US Constitution.

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