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tv   Documentary  RT  September 29, 2013 5:29pm-6:01pm EDT

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president did not keep his promise. two years later one ton and now is still operating. could shutting the door on their detention center really and the trauma of one timeout. and can the closing of a prison really liberate those that once held captive. it's not that i feel lonely if i am lonely for him and could possibly understand what i have experienced in guantanamo when i talk about it you ask who is most scum no one is able to imagine.
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and the flag flew over camp delta and guantanamo bay cuba where you know the detainees are housed. to honor all those service members and civilian who have lost their lives during the war and terrorism and those who continue to fan the ideals of freedom and democracy throughout the world so i really appreciate that because i very much enjoyed serving my country. it's painful and it makes me sad that there are those who think my service is not honorable. if anyone googles my name torture will come out because my name was put in books of all types which of course have in its title torture that the torture team the road torture the trail to torture out and all these kinds of things people think i must be the torture lady.
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i am. beyond. i mean nine eleven a lot of people were killed that day i want to make sure somebody was held accountable. how dare anyone on this planet. do that. within our borders ammi i did state prosecutor points an accusatory finger at your chest and calls you a criminal and tells you that you have betrayed your oath and you have betrayed your country naz your d.s. disclose a list of names if i want i know better. and he has paid a terrible price. there's a lot of reasons for believing. there is no easy answer. downtown what has caused a lot of arctic for a lot of the. world
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war when a plane strikes the pentagon it tries to kill people in the pentagon. it's very personal. and it sounds corny to say it was my duty but i felt like i couldn't retire without at least offering to deploy. and i volunteer to go anywhere.
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it's very scary that there is these people out here that just want to destroy our way of life our culture our values then and now i understand why i mean how do you when hearts and minds how do you stop this if you don't understand your enemy. in autumn two thousand. and one turkish boy who grew up in germany decided to travel to pakistan to explore his muslim roots. work on the year two thousand and one changed my life. and i traveled to pakistan because i wanted to learn a lot of what islam in a short time would. like some pakistan had always interested me. i was also curious to see another country.
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and i realized the war had broken out in afghanistan. rates continue around the taliban trenches north of the pakistani government i didn't really think much of it myself i was just nineteen back them. and didn't know much about the worlds. well i wasn't particularly interested in politics either. for the it was just before my return trip to germany i had bought a lot of presents to take home a focus for going on it was just before christmas. police stopped the bus came up to me and to ask questions and. i presented my passport
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and they told me to get off the bus. that was my last time as a free man pakistani police handover the americans taken to kandahar air base for interrogation. and they wanted to turn me into a terrorist they wanted me to admit that i was a member of al qaeda and the taliban and that i fought with them who at that time i didn't even know what al qaeda is i said i'm not a terrorist and that is why i will not sign that and then they hung me from the ceiling by my handcuffs. they put a chain around them and pulled me up so that i was completely. i was hired with my full body weight off the ground into a new month another man was hanging their skin all over his body had term blow that . he was dead and they left him hanging there.
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the interrogator asked me again to sign. when i said no he just gave a hand signal. and they pulled me up again. i hung like that for five days. almost every day and night i felt how he was being treated on that list. i always immediately knew if he was being punished you know when he was doing fine soft. these are have a moderate economy and he says yeah. but i thought i cried for three days. i said i can go on like this but here's the point
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you may need. communism not getting me anywhere i have to do something. be so i went to the police. his mother told us that when i read her not us had turned towards old radical islam this creates an expire first of all under one hundred to determine whether the morale turnout is actually intended to fight the american answer. this one where there was a great commotion within all the security agencies tomorrow it's become sort of especially after we learned that a group of suicide bombers in hamburg the hamburg cell had masterminded the nine eleven attacks a total. harm done so we put out all our feelers. we got the intelligence that were to occur not us always wanted to fight khan and had bought a combat suit and army boots that incriminating testimony that mainly came from his
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mother. as he was said to have condoned the terrorist attacks on the united states. was a. kind of man's. the name's. everyone. first. we have. i kept seeing groups of people being taken away. in the bone and they were never seen again. before they blindfolded me
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they said they were taking me to my execution. in february two thousand and two diane beaver arrives that guantanamo to work as a legal advisor to the camp's commanders. very strange claim those are detainees would show up wherever they came from there maybe these people you know whether their bodyguards of osama bin ladin are whatever their role is maybe there are pieces of information that are going to make a difference. and i sat in on hundreds and who knows maybe a thousand interrogations i don't know i saw so many it's a mind game it's trying to elicit information. of variety of different ways and playing on a person's ego playing on a person's love of family love of country. not
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to me when i arrived there i had no idea why i was it was very hot. they finally uncovered my eyes. took me to a small cage. looking like a dog cage only smaller. there were no toilets nothing. the on the lights were on twenty four seven and it doesn't you know what on the generators ward so loudly. so they're saying i could never really sleep. it was more like fainting from exhaustion will be in one month on the for me the thoughts. in my nurse enjoying my first interrogation stay ask me about mohamed atta. the stitching does the guy who flew one of the planes into the towers. mines and
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they said that's your friend from hamburg was on work before you live close to hamburg why food from homeworks all. up so you probably went to the same fitness center on. law. and in and around for a few when they didn't like my answer so they put me in solitary confinement.
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sigrid lumber tour. was able to build a most sophisticated robot. fortunately don't amount to anything tim's mission to teach music creation why it should care about humans and. this is why you should care only. they would. argue. the full. truth conditions for reaching such political solution and if. the solutions. feel loose and search for justice should individuals including government officials
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be legally held to account for starting aggressive force like in iraq is it fair to push their officials be given immunity from prosecution if they're not held accountable then who is ultimately responsible. stories others refuse to notice. the faces changing the world. so picture of today's news. from around the globe. dropped. to fifty. the two things that work is separation from your bias and a lack of sleep. and so the detainees then becomes to rely on the
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interrogator and hopefully then at some point the detainees will become so compliant that detainees will tell you the things that you're asking about and you'll get the intelligence information that you need. i'm going to say i spent an entire year on my own. home alone when you're alone for so long but i'm more. beefeaters and you realize how many things you could have done better in life when we knew regret not having done them for us mark on this you remember almost every person you treated badly. and every heart you broke or worth. most as a child i wanted to be rich so i could drive fast cars. because
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of i enjoy drinking a lot sometimes it made me violent both rudy. or i also took drugs. that's how i once lived. off the in my search for answers i turned to the qur'an and decided to live a religious life as. i know at least one of his interrogations and i may have seen more. he wasn't an innocent guy you know i'm sorry you know the cover story of i just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time but i'm really this religious guy just doesn't cut it. it was a very intense time many people felt certain there would be another attack against america and so that's the intensity of trying to work as hard as you could to do
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your part to save american lives. a part of me wanted to participate in this war on terror contribute to. a new if i didn't volunteer for. it was a good chance that i could be sent to afghanistan and enough to go to. you know was a better chance of me coming all my life from guantanamo to my family. and be a third reason would be it's a career enhancing it looks good for on the record that you participated in some way in this global war on terror and you got the medals to go with their ribbons to go with it and it helps you get promoted to the next big rate and i felt i had a role to play in ensuring that we complied with the rule of law the law of war the they asked me questions like if i had
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seen a some of bin laden. and i told them that they were of course i've seen them on t.v. like everyone else. that made them. we definitely have people who know things they aren't talking they're resisting every effort we've tried the normal methods so now we need something else. in afghanistan they were doing many more severe things handcuffing someone above their head for hours and hours. any time you restrain somebody for long periods of time particularly over their head and your organs collapsed on each other and you eventually died because of that. and so the interrogators to get mo as well as myself are thinking oh my gosh. you know you can't you can't anyway it's
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a it's unprofessional to do something like that. washington demanded better results from military interrogations but interrogators that one time obey felt that they were given no proper guidelines as to what was permitted to achieve those results diane beaver was put in charge of drafting a memo on enhanced interrogation techniques. everyone understood the torture wasn't allowed and obvious forms of torture such as cutting a cutting off a finger or electrocute any of those obvious things that you know you couldn't do death threats and things like that and so what was allowed. for example if someone said oh we have a pistol we know it's not loaded and we'll point it at somebody said no that would be illegal. but if we build a special chair. and put the detainees in
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a special chair what does that mean. what about stress positions what about making them bend in an awkward position and they can't get up until. i see. so. there can be a gray area. when you're being asked for legal advice but i did my best to look at the sources of the law that might apply. i certainly wasn't an expert. i had called around asking for help and no one would help me and so right away you don't have to be too clever to know no one wants to touch it. and. we've research it now we have to put pen to paper and so my legal staff and i were it was very little sleep over those four days but we started putting
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a memo together and rewriting and looking at it and weigh the references and alternately we're happy with what we came up with in october two thousand and two diane be very concludes in a classified memo that the proposed interrogation methods comply with u.s. and international law ten days later secretary of defense rumsfeld authorizes eighteen of the twenty two techniques including stress positions removal of clothing and the use of detainee phobias like fear of dogs. rumsfeld does not authorize some of the harshest methods that included death threats and waterboarding and. ok well now we have the decisive piece of paper let's go we need you know start up interrogations again now that we have guidance and policy guidance from the very top of the department of
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defense. as interrogations in guantanamo were said to be conducted according to government approved guidelines the situation in iraq deteriorated and in two thousand and four images of torture and abuse in abu ghraib leaked to the public. and believable what purpose did that serve it wasn't eliciting information. i mean you know this is sadistic in this is not the product of a professional anything the usually jovial jodee rumsfeld was grim as he was sworn in and promptly took responsibility for what he called a catastrophe he was interrupted by a heck of a risk calling for his head. this terrible to because the army is will and has been tarnished and will be tarnished for a very long time is difficult to recover from something like this. the political
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upheaval didn't affect the every day life. over the course of his five year in prison meant the means of eliciting information steadily increased in intensity before them sometimes they interrogated me for more than twenty four hours. thirty . years that there were and. then the americans and asked me what i had done in germany. or something. useful you and then quiet about phone numbers and other information the stuff that only people in germany could know about so i was convinced of the americans had been in touch with the german police cruisers and.
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in june two thousand. active duty i knew it was time to get out because i had accomplished as much as i could and i wanted to have have a dog i wanted to. have my own house and those kinds of things where i didn't have to worry about would i be deployed what do do i. in the summer of that same year matt diaz was deployed for a six month tour of duty in guantanamo. because of the embarrassment at abu ghraib there was more focus on going to animal as well. my mission while i was down there became to make sure that another abu ghraib didn't happen. my job was to star trek relegation of abuse going back to the beginning of the camp. no matter how they characterize the conflict. we're to treat detainees or those we
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detain. humane. what i observed that we were still not complying with the law of war. in the name diane beaver came up because she wrote the original memo to request these enhanced interrogation to each one of the interrogators was concerned about the techniques that were authorized and so to know what sentence for reference. the people that were there clearly were not the worst the worst and not everybody should have been there clearly they were just at the wrong place at the wrong time . and sold to the u.s. or turned over to the u.s. for about eight. or nine months was one of them. you know my job is to a comport with the law make sure my commanders much in a command complies with the law so on that professional level of course i got to
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care because that's my job but on a personal level i mean i'm a human being i don't i don't get joy out of seeing other human being suffer. the more i looked into it the more i realized that it doesn't matter what you advise your commanders. those concerns i'm going to leave the island is not going to go up the chain. so my role to advise commanders on the proper way forward basically futile it's not going to get anywhere. that's was the moment that i decided ok that was something i had to do. there's just no way i'm going to do it through proper channels was my thought process and to do it surreptitiously. they kept interrogating me like this for years and years so i told them i'm through with you if you want to hear it again just rewind the tapes you already have and listen to it again nothing's changed.
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they punished me they barely fanned me. they didn't give me water. they tried everything but i didn't say anything anymore. and. and.
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sympathize with the seat of the uprising but we do not train and we do not smuggle weapons or send a sniper we do not do any of these things. this point being an expensive car saloon. clueless a new fashion show. also designer bags and shoes in the best shop windows. but. luxury is
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a school. is a lost cause. as a. consequence when archie. wealthy british so. markets. find out what's really happening to the global economy. there are no holds barred look at the global financial headlines in two kinds of reports.
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and. i. i'm going to. have.
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the latest news and a look back at the week's top stories here on r t the olympic torch is lit in the game's ancient birthplace of greece and begins the longest journey in the history of the winter olympics that will take it all the way to soft two thousand and fourteen. a rare notable court and hope at the u.n. general assembly that's up to the security council passed a unanimous resolution on syria over its chemical weapons and a potentially historic first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for us in relations. the british government's health care cuts drive tens of thousands onto the streets of manchester just as the leading party prepares for its annual get together. and a russian court orders all the greenpeace activists arrested for trying to scale an oil plot.

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