More Details On Guantanamo Are Made Public

An Australian Intelligence agent stood by as a naked U.S. marine wearing a condom threatened Mamdouh Habib with rape, the former Guantanamo Bay inmate alleges. In a new book, Habib says he saw the words "Allah Akbar"' [God is great] written on the condom to compound his humiliation.

Habib recounts in excruciating detail the torture he says he was subjected to by Pakistani and Egyptian security agencies after his arrest in early October 2001, and describes the grim reality of life in Guantanamo Bay, where he was subsequently imprisoned. The book rejects the Australian government repeated claims that Habib was well treated during his years in Guantanamo.

According to early reports of his book, Habib says he was denied clothes except for a pair of shorts, and allowed only one blanket. He was given an orange uniform only when taken for interrogation, during which he would be shackled to the floor. He was held in a cage-like cell and forced to drink "yellow water" from a tap in the cell.

Habib writes he was "heavily drugged, deprived of sleep for weeks, beaten, given electric shocks, repeatedly injected with a needle in the same place so that it became terribly painful, left naked in freezing rooms for hours on end in isolation and threatened with rape." He also claims US guards raped detainees and were sexually active with each other.

The mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and violation of human rights laws there have been well documented. By 2008 there had been at least 4 suicides and hundreds of suicide attempts in Guantanamo that are of public knowledge. Amnesty International has said the apparent suicides "are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention" and called the prison "an indictment" of the Bush administration's human rights record.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in that the Guantanamo captives were entitled to the protection of the constitution. Given the Bush administration's flagrant disregard of constitutional law over the last eight years, justice for the detainees won't be forthcoming until next January at the earliest.