Brits in Gitmo

A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists.

The reason, the prisoner says, was that he was caught reciting the Koran at a time when talking was banned.

[...]

But it is clear the disturbing claim is only the tip of the iceberg. Under the rules the United States military has imposed for defence lawyers who visit Guantanamo, Stafford Smith has not been allowed to keep his notes of meetings with prisoners, and will not be able to read them again until they have been examined and de-classified by a government censor.

He cannot disclose in public anything the men have told him until it too has been been de-classified, on pain of likely imprisonment in the US.

Stafford Smith has drawn up a 30-page report on the tortures which Begg and Belmar say they have endured, and sent it as an annexe with a letter to the Prime Minister which Downing Street received shortly before Christmas. For the time being - possibly forever - the report cannot be published, because the Americans claim that the torture allegations amount to descriptions of classified interrogation methods.

[...]

Stafford Smith asks Blair in his letter 'to approach the plight of my clients with renewed vigour'. Asked by The Observer whether he planned to do this last week, a Downing Street spokesman declined to comment.

In a second letter, to the Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons, Stafford Smith suggests that Britain's complicity in abusive techniques at both Guantanamo and Afghanistan, where Begg and Belmar were held before being taken to Cuba, is wider than previously thought.

Guardian article

They may be classified, but they aren't unknown.