Guantanamo Testimonials

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story.

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Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.

  Harper’s

It makes for fascinating reading? But it does actually clearly paint exactly the picture you’ve imagined about the prisoners and the guards themselves according to the information that was leaked out of Guantanamo and the prison camps in Iraq.

Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

The Guantanamo Testimonials Project is a research effort by the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas “to assess the effects of the U.S. war on terror on human rights in the Americas.”