Another example:
"Americans hit me and beat me up so badly I believe I'm sexually dysfunctional. I don't know if I'll be able to sleep with my wife or not," 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 president promised to take up the man's medical complaint, but in five pages of questioning, never brought up the alleged abuse.
The Navy's official response? Freddie Prinze, redux: "It's not my job."
The panel 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.
More allegations by the detainees:
"When I was in the Kandahar prison, the interrogator hit my arm and told me I received training in mortars," a man said, referring to the U.S. detention camp in western Afghanistan where the Taliban rose to power.
"As he was hitting me, I kept telling him, no I didn't receive training. I was crying and finally I told him I did receive the training. My hands were tied behind my back and my knees were on the ground and my head was bleeding. I was in a lot of pain. ... At that point, with all my suffering, if he had asked me if I was Osama bin Laden, I would have said yes.
"What is my crime? Because of the United States, my hand is handicapped. I can't work."
The detainees were not allowed to have civilian lawyers at the hearing - only military lawyers. Their requests for witnesses to appear on their behalf went unheeded.
In more than 3,500 pages of testimonies, the only witnesses are other detainees.
As one detainee puts it:
He compared his detention at Guantanamo to the 1998 Hollywood movie "The Siege," in which Arabs are indiscriminately hunted down and detained in New York City after a terrorist attack.
"I was shocked, thinking am I in that movie or on a stage in Hollywood? Is this really happening? Sometimes I laugh at myself and say when does that movie end?" he says.
Another puts it this way:
"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."
