Guantanamo ex-guards report hearsay

Several people have sent me this Associated Press article about a Baby Huey-looking guy, Brandon Neeley, who claims to have been a guard at Guantanamo. For two days now, I’ve been reading his testimony and the testimony of another supposed Guantanamo guard, Terry C. Holdbrooks, Jr. that has been posted on the UC Davis Human Rights Project on Guantanamo.

First, I probably don’t need to say this, but Neeley is the president of the Houston chapter of IVAW;

Neeley seems to be fairly forthright in his testimony, to the apparent chagrin of the interviewer who is hoping for stories of children imprisoned at Gitmo, sexual abuse of prisoners, torture stories of waterboarding, the fingerprints of Rumsfeld and Bush on detainee abuse. To his credit, Neeley gives them none of that.

Much of what Neeley claims as abuse, is just guards protecting themselves in uncertain situations. Neeley claims that doctors ‘sexually abused” detainees by giving them anal inspections without lube, for example. Another case is his medical assessment of one medic’s physical therapy of the war wound of an injured detainee. Judging from his complete lack of communication skill he demonstrates in his IVAW profile, I doubt he’s qualified to judge medical procedures.

Here’s part of an interview he did with Courage to Resist in which some prisoners told him that most of them weren’t guilty of anything (like those guys on “Cops” who scream “I didn’t do nuthin'”) and Neeley accepts this as gospel. One of the guys who told him that was David Hicks – the first detainee convicted at Guantanamo (he pleaded guilty);

Many of the supposed “atrocities” Neeley gives the interviewer are things he “heard about” but never witnessed.

The same goes for Holdbrooks. Holdbrooks claims to have converted to Islam one night while fraternizing with a detainee – nothing wrong with that, right? Holdbrooks claims that the problem with Guantanmo and the abuse that goes on there is a result of the US being a Christian nation – if we’d all convert to Islam, we’d see the errors of our barbaric culture.

Holdbrooks’ disdain for his fellow soldiers is apparent. He’s a real weasel who says that the troops are all loutish brutes (or brutish louts, whichever you prefer) as well as the American public, in general. Of course, he excludes himself from that crowd because he’s converted to Islam, and thus, much more enlightened than us Christians;

Some of the torture stories Holdbrooks clings to are the result of him balancing CNN and al jazeera stories to arrive at what he calls a “happy medium”. The abuse stories he claims to have witnessed are the result of forcing detainees to eat and forcing flu shots on them. Neeley also recounts a story of a medic forcing a detainee to drink his Ensure.

It seems to me that many of the supposed torture and abuse that makes it to the media is all hearsay. Even James Gilligan, the commenter here that calls himself “Winter Soldier”, who worked at Guantanamo, admits that he only heard of waterboarding in his Winter Soldier testimony;

I have not seen water boarding, but I have heard from military police who have done it, and were less th[a]n convinced that this was a means of extracting viable intelligence and not just inhumane torture.

The oddest story I came across (and it sounds familiar, so forgive me if one of us wrote about it previously) is about Marine Sergeant Heather N. Cerveny, who in her testimony claims that she is the “Regional Defense Counsel Chief for the Marine Corps’ Western Region, Camp Pendleton, California”. Now, I’m pretty sure she’s not the “Counsel Chief” as a sergeant, since military lawyers are all officers, usually captains or above in rank. Sergeants are gods, but the military doesn’t put them in charge of captains.

Aside from her inflated resume`, Sergeant Cerveny claims that while she spent a whole seven days in Guantanamo, some sailors in a bar admitted to her that they committed atrocities.

On September 23, 2006, she spent an hour-long conversation at a bar with sailors working for the Joint Task Force at the Naval Detention Facility. In the course of this conversation, the guards described to Sgt. Cerveny routine mental and physical abuse of detainees. Acting on instructions from her superiors, Sgt. Cerveny signed a two-page sworn affidavit detailing this abuse on October 7, 2006 and submitted it to the Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General.

Now, this a picture of Sergeant Cerveny;

She’s probably the first fairly attractive woman in the history of the world to whom sailors bragged about their macho antics. Men in bars, especially sailors in bars, are never known to have told a lie to young, single woman in all of history. Now, not only is Sergeant Cerveny’s testimony hearsay, it turns out that the sailors were repeating stories they had heard – the good sergeant was signing an affidavit as a witness to at least third-hand knowledge of events. And it sounds to me as if the defense counsels sent her in to the bar to “fish” for atrocity stories using her relative good looks to get the testosterone levels elevated in the bar.

But , of course, since it puts the troops in a bad light, it’s considered gospel. the truth is; most of us have been treated worse by our drill sergeants than the detainees have been treated.

Thanks to Tankerbabe, Yankee Mom and my personal Morrocco Mole (who prefers to remain anonymous) for the links.

Category: Iraq Veterans Against the War, Liberals suck, Terror War, Usual Suspects