Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some
2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners
in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding
harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside
and outside Guantanamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;"
"detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with
deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated ... through injection
with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners;
and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation,
all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and
was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

More
significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time
place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad
deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to
the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantanamo.

The force is
officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency
Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantanamo, it is known to the
prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force. Despite President Barack
Obama's publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture --
and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces' actions
illegal -- IRFs remain very much active at Guantanamo.

IRF: An Extrajudicial Terror Squad

The
existence of these forces has been documented since the early days of
Guantanamo, but it has rarely been mentioned in the U.S. media or in
congressional inquiries into torture. On paper, IRF teams are made up
of five military police officers who are on constant stand-by to
respond to emergencies. "The IRF team is intended to be used primarily
as a forced-extraction team, specializing in the extraction of a
detainee who is combative, resistive, or if the possibility of a weapon
is in the cell at the time of the extraction," according to a
declassified copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta
at Guantanamo. The document was signed on March 27, 2003, by Maj. Gen.
Geoffrey Miller, the man credited with eventually "Gitmoizing" Abu
Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons and who reportedly ordered
subordinates to treat prisoners "like dogs." Gen. Miller ran Guantanamo
from November 2002 until August 2003 before moving to Iraq in 2004.

When
an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear,
which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to "Darth Vader"
suits. Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to
restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg. According to
the SOP memo, the teams are to give verbal warnings to prisoners before
storming the cell: "Prior to the use of the IRF team, an interpreter
will be used to tell the detainee of the discipline measures to be
taken against him and ask whether he intends to resist. Regardless of
his answer, his recent behavior and demeanor should be taken into
account in determining the validity of his answer."The IRF team is
authorized to spray the detainee in the face with mace twice before
entering the cell.

According to Gen. Miller's memo: "The physical
security of U.S. forces and detainees in U.S. care is paramount. Use
the minimum force necessary for mission accomplishment and force
protection ... Use of the IRF team and levels of force are not to be
used as a method of punishment."

But human rights lawyers, former
prisoners and former IRF team members with extensive experience at
Guantanamo paint a very different picture of the role these teams
played. "They are the Black Shirts of Guantanamo," says Michael Ratner,
president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has
represented the most Guantanamo prisoners. "IRFs can't be separated
from torture. They are a part of the brutalization of humans treated as
less than human."

Clive Stafford Smith, who has represented 50
Guantanamo prisoners, including 31 still imprisoned there, has seen the
IRF teams up close. "They're goons," he says. "They've played a huge
role."

While much of the "torture debate" has emphasized the
so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" defined by the twisted
legal framework of the Office of Legal Council memos, IRF teams in
effect operate at Guantanamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has
regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang
beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging
their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head,
banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them -- sometimes
leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.

The
IRF teams "were fully approved at the highest levels [of the Bush
administration], including the Secretary of Defense and with outside
consultation of the Justice Department," says Scott Horton, one of the
leading experts on U.S. Military and Constitutional law. This force
"was designed to disabuse the prisoners of any idea that they would be
free from physical assault while in U.S. custody," he says. "They were
trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and
ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify" the beatings.

So
notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by
prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: IRF-ing prisoners
or to be IRF-ed.

Former Guantanamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who
witnessed IRFings, described "the seemingly harmless behaviors that
brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke." Yee said he
believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do
invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners' "private areas" and Korans
to "rile the detainees," saying it "seemed like harassment for the sake
of harassment, and the prisoners fought it. Those who did were always
IRFed."

"I'll put it like this," Stafford Smith says. "My clients are afraid of them."

"Up
to 15 people attempted to commit suicide at Camp Delta due to the
abuses of the IRF officials," according to the Spanish investigation.
Combined with other documentation, including prisoner testimony and
legal memos, the IRF teams appear to be one of the most significant
forces in the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo, worthy of an
investigation by U.S. prosecutors in and of themselves.

The IRF-ing of Omar Deghayes

Perhaps
the worst abuses in the Spanish case involve Omar Deghayes, whose
torture began long before he reached Guantanamo, and intensified upon
his arrival.

A Libyan citizen who had lived in Britain since
1986, in the late 1990s, Deghayes was a law student when he traveled to
Afghanistan, "for the simple reason that he is a Muslim and he wanted
to see what it was like," according to his lawyer, Stafford Smith.
While there, he met and married an Afghan woman with whom he had a son.

After
9/11, Deghayes was detained in Lahore, Pakistan, for a month, where he
allegedly was subjected to "systematic beatings" and "electric shocks
done with a tool that looked like a small gun."

He was then
transferred to Islamabad, Pakistan,where he claims he was interrogated
by both U.S. and British personnel. There, the torture continued; in a
March 2005 memo written by a lawyer who later visited Deghayes at
Guantanamo, he described a particularly ghoulish incident:

"One
day they took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes.
The room was all painted black-and-white, with dim lights. They
threatened to leave me there and let the snakes out with me in the
room. This really got to me, as there were such sick people that they
must have had this room specially made."

Deghayes
was eventually moved to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he was
beaten and "kept nude, as part of the process of humiliation due to his
religion." U.S. personnel placed Deghayes "inside a closed box with a
lock and limited air." He also described seeing U.S. guards sodomize an
African prisoner and alleged guards "forced petrol and benzene up the
anuses of the prisoners."

"The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films," Deghayes said.

When Deghayes finally arrived at Guantanamo in September 2002, he found himself the target of the feared IRF teams.

"The
IRF team sprayed Mr. Deghayes with mace; they threw him in the air and
let him fall on his face ... " according to the Spanish investigation.
Deghayes says he also endured a "sexual attack." In March 2004, after
being "sprayed in the eyes with mace," Deghayes says authorities
refused to provide him with medical attention, causing him to
permanently lose sight in his right eye. Stafford Smith described the
incident:

"They brought their pepper spray and held
him down. They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes
and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes.

"Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks, but he gradually got sight back in one eye.

"He's
totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all
white and milky -- he can't see out of it because he has been blinded
by the U.S. in Guantanamo."

In fact, Stafford Smith
says his blindness was caused by a combination of the pepper spray and
the fact that an IRF team member pushed his finger into Deghayes' eye.

The
Spanish investigation into Deghayes' torture draws much from the March
2005 memo, which described several acts of abuse of Deghayes at the
hands of the IRF teams. (The memo refers to IRF by its alternative
acronym ERF):

ERF-ing Omar -- The Feces Incident

On
one of the ERF-ing incidents where Omar was abused, the officer in
charge himself came into the cell with the feces of another prisoners
[sic] and smeared it onto Omar's face. While some prisoners had thrown
feces at the abusive guards, Omar had always emphatically refused to
sink to this level. The experience was one of the most disgusting in
Omar's life.

ERF-ing Omar -- The Toilet Incident

In
April or May 2004, when the Guantanamo administration insisted on
taking Omar's English-language Quran, he objected. The ERF team came
into Omar's cell and put him in shackles. He was not resisting. They
then put his head in the toilet, pressed his face into the water. They
repeatedly flushed it.

ERF-ing Omar -- The Beating

In
one ERF-ing incident, Omar was shackled by three American soldiers in
their black Darth Vader Star Wars uniforms. The first was going to
punch Omar, but before he could, the second kneed Omar in the nose,
trying to break it. The third queried this, and the second said, "If
his nose is broken, that's good. We want to break his ******* nose."
The third soldier then took him to hospital.

ERF-ing Omar -- The Drowning

The
ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure.
He was totally shackled, and they would hold his head fixed still. They
would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream
for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present, and they
would join in. Omar is particularly affected by the fact that there was
one nurse who "had been very beautiful and kind" to him to [sic] took
part in the process. This happened three times.

ERF-ing Omar -- Tango Block

Omar
was out on the Tango block rec yard when 15 ERF soldiers came, with two
other soldiers in the towers, armed with guns. They grabbed him (and
others) and sprayed him.

They then pulled him
up into the air and slammed his face down, on the left side, on the
concrete. They had someone from the hospital there, and she just
watched. She then came up to him and asked whether he was OK. He was
taken off to isolation after that.

A medical examination
cited in the Spanish investigation confirmed that Deghayes suffered
from blindness of the right eye, fracture of the nasal bone and
fracture of the right index finger, as well as post-traumatic stress
disorder and "profound" depression.

Evidence Destroyed?

At
the Pentagon, an official paper trail should exist that documents the
IRF-ing of Deghayes. What's more, according to Gen. Miller's SOP memo,
all of the actions of the IRF teams were to be videotaped as well.

After
a prisoner was IRF-ed, "The medical personnel on site will conduct a
medical evaluation of the detainee to check for any injuries sustained
during the IRF," and, "all IRF Team members are required to submit
sworn statements." These statements, reports and video were "to be kept
as evidence."

As of early 2005, there were reportedly 500 hours
of video; the ACLU attempted to force their release, but they never
have been produced.

"Where are those tapes?" asks CCR President
Michael Ratner. In some cases, the answer may well be that they never
existed or no longer do. "When an IRFing took place a camera was
supposed to be present to capture the IRFing," said Army Spec. Brandon
Neely, who was on one of the first IRF teams at Guantanamo. "Every time
I witnessed an IRFing a camera was present, but one of two things would
happen: (1) the camera would never be turned on, or (2) the camera
would be on, but pointed straight at the ground."

Neeley recently
gave testimony to the University of California, Davis' Guantanamo
Testimonials Project. He also described one IRF-ing where the video of
the incident was destroyed.

Regarding the videos, Stafford Smith
says, "There are some things I can't talk about, but I will confirm
there is photographic evidence. I am absolutely confident that if all
of the photographs were revealed to the world, they would provide
irrefutable physical evidence that the prisoners had been" abused by
the IRFs.

As for the "sworn statements" by IRF team members, a
review of hundreds of pages of declassified incident reports reveals an
almost robotic uniformity in the handwritten accounts, overwhelmingly
composed of succinct portrayals of operations that went off without a
hitch. Almost all of them contain the phrases "minimum amount of force
necessary" and the prisoner "received medical attention and evaluation"
before being returned.

"All internal investigations of Gitmo so
far have completely whitewashed the IRF process," says Horton. "They
did so for obvious reasons."

"The IRF program was supported by
advice secured from the Justice Department suggesting that
insubordinate behavior could be cited to justify a departure from
guidelines against physical force. It has a conspiratorial odor to
it," says Horton. "In fact the use of IRFs was illegal, a violation of
Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention] and a violation of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice, which forbids the use of unnecessary
force against prisoners."

While Spain will probably pursue the
role the IRF teams played in the torture of its citizens or residents,
its scope goes far beyond those specific incidents.

"I have seen detainees IRF'ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication."

Deghayes' treatment at the hands of the feared IRF teams mirrors that of several other released Guantanamo prisoners.

David
Hicks, an Australian citizen held at Guantanamo, said in a sworn
affidavit, "I have witnessed the activities of the [IRF], which
consists of a squad of soldiers that enter a detainee's cell and
brutalize him with the aid of an attack dog ... I have seen detainees
suffer serious injuries as a result of being IRF'ed. I have seen
detainees IRF'ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication."

Binyam
Mohamed, released in February, has also described an IRF assault: "They
nearly broke my back. The guy on top was twisting me one way, the guys
on my legs the other. They marched me out of the cell to the
fingerprint room, still cuffed. I clenched my fists behind me so they
couldn't take [finger]prints, so they tried to take them by force. The
guy at my head sticks his fingers up my nose and wrenches my head back,
jerking it around by the nostrils. Then he put his fingers in my eyes.
It felt as if he was trying to gouge them out. Another guy was punching
my ribs, and another was squeezing my testicles. Finally, I couldn't
take it any more. I let them take the prints."

A report prepared
by British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, documents the alleged
abuse of a Bahraini citizen, Jumah al Dousari by an IRF team. Before
being taken to Guantanamo, al Dousari was widely known to be "mentally
ill." On one occasion, the IRF Team was called into his cell after al
Dousari allegedly insulted a female soldier. Another prisoner who
witnessed the incident described what happened:

"There
were usually five people on an ERF team. On this occasion there were
eight of them. When Jumah saw them coming, he realized something was
wrong and was lying on the floor with his head in his hands. If you're
on the floor with your hands on your head, then you would hope that all
they would do would be to come in and put the chains on you. That is
what they're supposed to do.

"The first man is meant to go in
with a shield. On this occasion, the man with the shield threw the
shield away, took his helmet off, when the door was unlocked ran in and
did a knee drop onto Jumah's back just between his shoulder blades with
his full weight. He must have been about 240 pounds in weight. His name
was Smith. He was a sergeant E-5. Once he had done that, the others
came in and were punching and kicking Jumah. While they were doing that
the female officer then came in and was kicking his stomach. Jumah had
had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in
the operation.

"The officer Smith was the MP sergeant who was
punching him. He grabbed his head with one hand and with the other hand
punched him repeatedly in the face. His nose was broken. He pushed his
face, and he smashed it into the concrete floor. All of this should be
on video. There was blood everywhere. When they took him out, they
hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood. We all saw it."

Force Feeding as a Form of Torture

The
IRF teams were also used to force-feed hunger-striking prisoners at
Guantanamo, including in August 2005. Deghayes was among the hunger
strikers, writing in a letter, "I am slowly dying in this solitary
prison cell, I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into
my own hands, and die for a principle?"

While the U.S. government
portrayed a situation where the hunger strikers were being given
medical attention, lawyers for some of the men claim that the tubes
used to force feed them were "the thickness of a finger" and "were
viewed by the detainees as objects of torture."

According to
attorney Julia Tarver, one of her clients, Yousef al-Shehri, had a tube
inserted with "one [IRF member] holding his chin while the other held
him back by his hair, and a medical staff member forcibly inserted the
tube in his nose and down his throat" and into his stomach. "No
anesthesia or sedative was provided to alleviate the obvious trauma of
the procedure." Tarver said this method caused al-Shehri and others to
vomit "substantial amounts of blood."

This was painful enough,
but al-Shehri, described the removal of the tubes as "unbearable,"
causing him to pass out from the pain.

According to Tarver,
"Nasal gastric (NG) tubes [were removed] by placing a foot on one end
of the tube and yanking the detainee's head back by his hair, causing
the tube to be painfully ejected from the detainee's nose. Then, in
front of the Guantanamo physicians ... the guards took NG tubes from one
detainee, and with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the
nose of a different detainee. When these tubes were reinserted, the
detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from the other detainees
remaining on the tubes." Medical staff, according to Tarver, made no
effort to intervene. This was one of many incidents where IRF teams
facilitated such force-feeding.

Aside from hunger strikes, other
forms of resistance were met with brutal reprisal. Tarek Dergoul, a
prisoner interviewed by Human Rights Watch, described how IRF teams
beat him because he "often refused to cooperate with cell searches
during prayer time. One reason was that they would abuse the Quran.
Another was that the guards deliberately felt up my private parts under
the guise of searching me."

Dergoul said, "If I refused a cell
search, MPs would call the Extreme Reaction Force, who came in riot
gear with plastic shields and pepper spray. The Extreme Reaction Force
entered the cell, ran in and pinned me down after spraying me with
pepper spray and attacked me. The pepper spray caused me to vomit on
several occasions. They poked their fingers in my eyes, banged my head
on the floor and kicked and punched me and tied me up like a beast.
They often forced my head into the toilet."

Jamal al-Harith
claims he was beaten by a five-man IRF team for refusing an injection:
"I was terrified of what they were going to do. I had seen victims of
[IRF] being paraded in front of my cell. They were battered and bruised
into submission. It was a horrible sight and a frequent sight. ... They
were really gung-ho, hyped up and aggressive. One of them attacked me
really hard and left me with a deep red mark from my backbone down to
my knee. I thought I was bleeding, but it was just really bad bruising."

The IRF-ing of Army Sgt. 1st Class Sean Baker

Ironically,
perhaps the most well-publicized case of abuse by this force was not
inflicted on a Guantanamo prisoner, but on an active-duty U.S. soldier
and Gulf War veteran.

In January 2003, Sgt. Sean Baker was
ordered to participate in an IRF training drill at Guantanamo where he
would play the role of an uncooperative prisoner. Sgt. Baker says he
was ordered by his superior to take off his military uniform and put on
an orange jumpsuit like those worn by prisoners. He was told to yell
out the code word "red" if the situation became unbearable, or he
wanted his fellow soldiers to stop.

According to sworn
statements, upon entering his cell, IRF members thought they were
restraining an actual prisoner. As Sgt. Baker later described:

They
grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and, unfortunately, one of the
individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me
while I was face down. Then he -- the same individual -- reached around
and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor.
After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity
because I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic
and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise,
which was 'red.' ... That individual slammed my head against the floor
and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out:
'I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.'

Sgt. Baker
said his head was slammed once more, and after groaning "I'm a U.S.
soldier" one more time, "I heard them say, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' you
know, like ... he was telling the other guy to stop."

According to CBS:

Bloodied
and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first
thought was to get hold of the videotape. "I said, 'Go get the tape,' "
recalls Baker. " 'They've got a tape. Go get the tape.' My squad leader
went to get the tape."

Every extraction drill
at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill
would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and
said, "There is no tape."

The New York Times
later reported that the military "says it can't find a videotape that
is believed to have been made of the incident." Baker was soon
diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. He began suffering seizures,
sometimes 10 to 12 per day.

"This was just one typical incident,
and Baker was recognizable as an American," says Horton. "But it gives
a good flavor of what the Gitmo detainees went through, which was
generally worse."

IRF-ing Continues Under Obama

On
Jan. 7, 2009, a prisoner named Yasin Ismael threw a shoe in frustration
at the inside of a cage to which he had been confined. The guards
accused Ismael of attacking them and called in an IRF team.

According
to his attorneys, "The team shackled him, and he put up no resistance.
They then beat him. They blocked his nose and mouth until he felt that
he would suffocate and hit him repeatedly in the ribs and head. They
then took him back to his cell. As he was being taken back, a guard
urinated on his head. Mr. Ismael was badly injured, and his ear started
to bleed, leaving a large stain on his pillow."

Less than two
weeks later, on Jan. 22, newly inaugurated President Obama issued an
executive order requiring the closure of Guantanamo within a year and
also ordered a review of the status of the prisoners held there,
requiring "humane standards of confinement" in accordance with the
Geneva Conventions.

But one month later, the Center for
Constitutional Rights released a report titled "Conditions of
Confinement at Guantanamo: Still In Violation of the Law," which found
that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour,
said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since
Obama was elected, including "beatings, the dislocation of limbs,
spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to
toilet paper and over-force feeding detainees who are on hunger
strike," according to Reuters.

"Certainly in my experience there have been many, many more reported incidents of abuse since the inauguration," Ghappour said.

While
the dominant media coverage of the U.S. torture apparatus has portrayed
these tactics as part of a "Bush era" system that Obama has now ended,
when it comes to the IRF teams, that is simply not true. "[D]etainees
live in constant fear of physical violence. Frequent attacks by IRF
teams heighten this anxiety and reinforce that violence can be
inflicted by the guards at any moment for any perceived infraction, or
sometimes without provocation or explanation," according to CCR.

In
early February 2009, at least 16 men were on hunger strike at
Guantanamo's Camp 6 and refused to leave their cells for "force
feeding." IRF teams violently extracted them from their cells with the
"men being dragged, beaten and stepped on, and their arms and fingers
twisted painfully." Tubes were then forced down their noses, which one
prisoner described as "torture, torture, torture."

In April,
Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guantanamo prisoner from Chad managed
to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating: "This treatment
started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I've
been subjected to it almost every day," he said. "Since Obama took
charge, he has not shown us that anything will change."

Al-Jazeera reported:

Describing
a specific incident, which took place after change in the U.S.
administration, al-Qurani said he had refused to leave his cell because
they were "not granting me my rights," such as being able to walk
around, interact with other inmates and have "normal food."

A
group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets entered his
cell, accompanied by one soldier carrying a camera and one with tear
gas, he said.

"They had a thick rubber or
plastic baton they beat me with. They emptied out about two canisters
of tear gas on me," he told Al-Jazeera.

"After I stopped talking, and tears were flowing from my eyes, I could hardly see or breathe.

"They
then beat me again to the ground, one of them held my head and beat it
against the ground. I started screaming to his senior 'see what he's
doing, see what he's doing' [but] his senior started laughing and said
'he's doing his job.'"

In another incident after
Obama's inauguration, prisoner Khan Tumani began smearing excrement on
the walls of his cell to protest his treatment. According to his
lawyer, when he "did not clean up the excrement, a large IRF team of 10
guards was ordered to his cell and beat him severely. The guards
sprayed so much tear gas or other noxious substance after the beating
that it made at least one of the guards vomit. Mr. Khan Tumani's skin
was still red and burning from the gas days later."

The CCR has
called on the Obama administration to immediately end the use of the
IRF teams at Guantanamo. Horton, meanwhile, says "detainees should be
entitled to compensation for injuries they suffered."

As the
abuse continues at Guantanamo, and powerful congressional leaders from
both parties and the White House fiercely resist the appointment of an
independent special prosecutor, the sad fact is that the best chance
for justice for the victims of U.S. torture may well be an ocean away
in Madrid, Spain.

"The Obama administration should not need
pressure from abroad to uphold our own laws and initiate a criminal
investigation in the U.S.," says Vince Warren, CCR's executive
director. "I hope the Spanish cases will impress on the president and
Attorney General Eric Holder how seriously the rest of the world takes
these crimes and show them the issue will not go away."