New Documents Reveal “Effort to Create a Gitmo Inside the United States”
Newly released military documents show a US Naval officer warned the Pentagon in 2002 that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a US military brig. The detainee, Yaser Hamdi, was one of two US citizens held on a Navy brig in South Carolina for years without charge after the Sept. 11 attacks. The documents show that the US military exported the brutal interrogation techniques from Guantanamo prison to the US jail housing Hamdi and Jose Padilla. The techniques included sleep and sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation and death threats. Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU said, "These documents are the first clear confirmation of what we’ve suspected all along, that the brig was run as a prison beyond the law. There was an effort to create a Gitmo inside the United States.” |
