BAHRAIN, 22 October 2005 — One of six Bahraini detainees being held at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay detention center was the subject of sexual abuse and witnessed at least one act of Qur’an desecration by US soldiers while being held in Afghanistan, according to a new report.
Bahraini detainee Jumah Al-Dossary who is being held there claimed that he was subjected to sexual abuse and that he witnessed US soldiers at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan desecrate the Qur’an by cleaning their boots with pages they had ripped from it.
Al-Dossary, according to the recently declassified report issued by his lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, claimed that he was reportedly beaten and stamped on by eight guards as he was recovering from an earlier stomach operation.
Al-Dossary, aged 30 now and father to an 11-year-old girl, said that in early September 2002 he was taken to an interrogation room where four MPs, with one carrying a video camera, handcuffed and shackled him to the floor before stripping him naked on orders from a female interrogator present in the room.
He claimed that the female interrogator stripped and squatted over his genitals, chest, and face smearing him with her menstrual blood in an attempt to have him admit links to Al-Qaeda and 9/11 attacks.
US Denies Feeding Tube Misuse
The chief doctor at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay denied allegations by hunger striking prisoners that feeding tubes have been misused as a form of punishment, according to an affidavit released Thursday.
In a statement filed in federal court in Washington, Dr. John Edmondson said that only doctors or nurses are allowed to remove or insert feeding tubes and they use a lubricant and offer an anesthetic to the hunger-striking prisoner to ease any pain.
His statement was a response to affidavits filed with the court from defense lawyers, who said that prisoners alleged that troops force-fed them with dirty feeding tubes and violently inserted and withdrew the tubes as punishment.
— With additional input from AP.
