I read the interview of a former translator named Erik Saar at Guantanamo Bay. He sat through many interrogations of the prisoners there. He talked about all the different things he witnessed at Guantanamo.Saar told 60 Minutes that most of the men at Guantanamo were not these awful terrorists that people thought. Most of them were forced to fight for the Taliban and had little or no choice in what they had to do.Not all the torture was physical abuse. The interrogators (especially women) would try to get the detainees to do things that were against their religion so they would feel dirty and feel as though they couldn’t pray to their god for strength. I read a story about what a woman did to a prisoner. It was so degrading and I just couldn’t believe some of the things these people did. They mentally beat down the prisoners and used fear instead of trust to get information.Saar also talked about the physical abuse that the prisoners had to go through. He said that some of the detainee’s fingers were bent back until they gave information. Also he remembers seeing a lot of the prisoners with their hands and feet tied together in the fetal position for days at a time, and when they had to go to the bathroom they got it all over themselves. Saar once saw a man being suffocated with duct tape and having it wrapped completely around his head. Personally, I think it’s a bit hypocritical for members of the US Army to be doing these things. The US has this false disposition of being this fair, innocent country when in reality it’s quite the opposite. The US looks down upon people and other groups who do things like this. Why is it ok for us to do it?What I thought was extremely interesting is that they would stage interrogations for when VIPs came. Saar says they would take the prisoners that were the most cooperative and they would repeat past interrogations. They would sit and talk to the prisoners like they were talking to any other human being. Saar said that these “mock interrogations” were completely fake and were no where near what usually went on at Guantanamo. This just shows that they knew exactly what they were doing and they knew it was wrong. There are no excuses for what happened at Guantanamo. And if the people in charge thought that the torture was completely necessary and was what needed to be done, they wouldn’t have covered everything up with the fake interrogations.
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