Released transcripts allege even more prisoner abuse

LONDON – One Guantanamo prisoner told a military panel that American troops beat him so badly he wets his pants now. Another detainee claimed U.S. troops stripped prisoners in Afghanistan and intimidated them with dogs so they would admit to militant activity.

Tales of alleged abuse and forced confessions are among some 1,000 pages of tribunal transcripts the U.S. government released to the Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit – the second batch of documents the AP has received in 10 days.

The testimonies offer a glimpse into the secretive world of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where about 520 men from 40 countries remain held, accused of having links to Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime or Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. Many have been held for three years.

Whether the stories are true may never be known. And it wasn’t immediately clear how many abuse allegations had been logged from the tribunals or how many of them had been investigated. Dozens of complaints have surfaced from detention missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, but the government couldn’t offer a breakdown Monday.

One detainee, whose name and nationality were blacked out like most others in the transcripts, said his medical problems from alleged abuse have not been taken seriously.

“Americans hit me and beat me up so badly I believe I’m sexually dysfunctional,” he said. “I can’t control my urination, and sometimes I put toilet paper down there so I won’t wet my pants.”

“I point to where the pain is. … I think they take it as a joke and they laugh.”

The tribunal members were charged with determining whether the men were enemy combatants – not with investigating abuse allegations, said a military spokeswoman, Navy Capt. Beci Brenton. She said tribunal members are supposed to forward abuse allegations to the Joint Task Force running the detention mission, which then forwards them to U.S. Southern Command in Miami.

The government had refused to provide the bulk of the testimonies made during the hearings unless reporters traveled to the remote base in eastern Cuba. It was only after the AP’s lawsuit and the tribunals that ended in January that the government released dozens of transcripts.

Stories of false accusations abound. One prisoner said he was in Afghanistan to buy heroin, another said he was a goat herder – and others said they offered false confessions to their captors to make alleged abuse stop.

While most of the prisoners denied the accusations that led to their imprisonment, some freely admitted joining the Taliban but wanted to be charged and tried for their alleged crimes.

“It seems like you are keeping and detaining innocent people,” said one detainee, accused of asking Afghan soldiers for guns to fight Americans.

“All the rules in the United States and in the world, the person is innocent until you prove he is guilty, not innocent. But here, with Americans, the detainees are guilty until proven innocent,” another detainee complained.