According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahiddin began during 1980, that is after the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the truth, kept secret up to now, is quite different: it was in fact on July 3rd, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive on clandestine aid to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on that very day I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my view aid was going to bring about a Soviet military intervention...
That secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap... The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter roughly the following: "We now have the opportunity to give the USSR its own Vietnam War".

Question:... do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?

At dawn on June 16 [2007], Azizullah went to prayers with his older brother, Mohammed Reza. It was the last time Reza saw his younger brother alive.
At midmorning, Reza received a call on his cellphone from Afghan police saying Azizullah had been wounded, then another saying that he had died, shot by North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops as he sipped a cool drink a few steps from his storefront in a rundown district of Kabul.
"Why? Why?" Reza asked. "They are supposed to protect us, not kill us."

I heard it said that there were a hundred explosions in a single hour in Grozny, the heaviest bombardment... since the Second World War. At least 100,000 civilians remained there, trapped in bunkers or dying in the rubble of their apartments. Every day, dozens of wounded were transported to Atagi. I had never seen anything like the terrible internal wounds - shredded intestines, liver, kidneys and sexual organs reduced to ground meat - caused by the lethal fragmentation bombs.

Chechnya is in the grip of what could be described as an epidemic of cancer... According to the republic’s one working cancer clinic, as many cases were recorded in the first five months of this year as in the whole of 2006. “Today we have 1712 patients, how can you explain that?” said Petimat Khamidova, the head of the clinic.
Khamidova, who has worked in this field for 30 years, said there had never been so many cancer patients before war broke out in Chechnya. “Most frequent are cases of lung cancer, breast cancer, cancer of thyroid gland, skin cancer, gynaecological disorders,” she said. “We used to have very few cases of lung cancer here.”
According to data on lung cancer from the whole of the North Caucasus for 2004, the incidence in Chechnya is more than five times higher than that of other republics.

I wish this child would at least cry and give me something to do. I could comfort him then.
- 'Did they hit you a lot?'
- 'All the time. On the kidneys. Then they put me on the ground and dragged me through the mud by the neck ... They said, "Do you need some help?" And they tortured me with electric current. That's what they meant by helping. They connected the wires and turned a handle, like on a telephone. The more they turned it, the stronger the current that passed through me.'

Smoke billowed over the city. Houses were heaps of rubble, flames leaping from their roofs. Twisted metal, beams and lumps of plaster smouldered in the streets. So many corpses lay decomposing in the streets that the checkpoint soldiers wore handkerchiefs over their faces to block the smell...
I stood before the Presidential Palace, gagging on the stench, unable to move. Scores of burned-out tanks, army personnel carriers and jeeps belonging to the Russians littered the street. Under them lay rotting bodies.

I hesitate to write about the atrocities we saw because I fear that people will think I am exaggerating. I saw dozens of charred corpses of women and children lying in the courtyard of the mosque, which had been destroyed. The first thing my eye fell on was the burned body of a baby, lying in the foetal position. The flesh had burned off the arms and you could see the white of the finger bones. I could not tell if it was a girl or boy. I saw a wild-eyed woman emerge from a burned-out house holding a dead baby. Lorries with bodies piled in the back rolled through the streets on the way to the cemetery.

...at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are acquiescing without a murmur in the torture of children in a present-day European ghetto mendaciously called a 'zone of anti-terrorist operations'. The children of this ghetto will never forget what we have done.

Do you still think you should be supporting this war because of some aim that's being pursued and so things wouldn't get worse? Things cannot get worse. We have lost all sense of the morality and restraint we were taught in less tumultuous times, and something more vile and loathsome than we could ever imagine has erupted from the murkiest depths of our souls.

"After everything I've seen, everything I've done, it became very clear to me that you just can't take radioactive wastes from one nation and just throw it into another nation. It's wrong. It's simply wrong."
Depleted uranium is so cheap and effective - 350 tonnes was used in weapons in the first Gulf War and possibly 500 tonnes in this year's Iraq conflict - that Rokke says the US is reluctant to do proper studies of veterans or Iraqi civilians. "It's the arrogance. Once they acknowledge that there are actual health effects of depleted uranium munitions, then they can't use them any more; the house of cards falls apart."

In 1990, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) wrote a report warning about the potential health and environmental catastrophe from the use of depleted uranium weapons. The health effects had been known for a long time. The report sent to the UK government warned "in their estimation, if 50 tonnes of residual DU dust remained ‘in the region’ there could be half a million extra cancers by the end of the century [2000]." Estimates of depleted uranium weapons used in 1991, now range from the Pentagon’s admitted 325 tons, to other scientific bodies who put the figure as high as 900 tons. That would make the number of estimated cancers as high as 9,000,000, depending on the amount used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the 2003 Gulf War, estimates of 2200 tons have been given — causing about 22,000,000 new cancer cases. Altogether the total number of cancer patients estimated using the UKAEA data would be 25,250,000. In July of 1998, the CIA estimated the population of Iraq to be approximately 24,683,313.

The August 2002 report by the UN Human Rights Commission-Sub 2 stated that the use of DU shells and bombs by US-UK in four countries (Iraq, Bosnia, FRY, and Afghanistan) violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the Nuremberg principles of 1945, the Charter of the United Nations, the Anti-Genocide Convention of 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and its Additional Protocol I and II 1977, the Convention Against Torture, the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980, and the UN Human Rights Commission resolution of 1996.
The use of terror weapons such as Depleted Uranium, thermobaric and cluster bombs, the systematic targeting of water supplies and the use of sanctions to compound the impact on the Iraqi people violate the Anti-Genocide Convention, Article 2c, "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part," 2d, as well as the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, particularly Protocol 1, Article 54, "Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited."

... Convinced that the production, sale and use of such weapons are incompatible with international human rights and humanitarian law,
Believing that continued efforts must be undertaken to sensitize public opinion to the inhuman and indiscriminate effects of such weapons and to the need for their complete elimination,
Convinced that the production, sale and use of such weapons are incompatible with the promotion and maintenance of international peace and security,
1. Urges all States to be guided in their national policies by the need to curb the production and the spread of weapons of mass destruction or with indiscriminate effect, in particular nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, fuel-air bombs, napalm, cluster bombs, biological weaponry and weaponry containing depleted uranium;

By illegally using hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq ~ Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world.

I got a direct order from Norman G. Schwarzkopf - and he was ordered by the Pentagon - to assign me to clean up the DU mess [after the first Iraq war]...
We've got to decontaminate. We've got to package these vehicles. And we did this. The 144th maintenance, members of the 32nd, members of the 92nd, Med battalion, members of the 12th, members of the TACOM* staff - and everybody's sick or dead. And medical care is still not being provided...
And the 144th guys are out there, basically in their combat boots and cut off cammies, doing the work, because, hey, nobody told them that this stuff was dangerous, and they need to wear full respiratory and skin protection.

Since DU darkened the land Iraq has seen birth defects which would break a heart of stone: babies with terribly foreshortened limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging tumours where their eyes should be, or with a single eye-like Cyclops, or without eyes, or without limbs, and even without heads.

"We are seeing an astonishing rise in even the rarest of abnormalities' said British trained plastic surgeon Professor Ala. "I can show you a baby born one hour ago if you are strong and not prone to fainting" said Dr. Janeen.
A nurse brought in a small bundle wrapped in cloth - sterile wrappings, baby clothing is just a memory in another formerly internationally renowned hospital. Unwrapped the tiny being, making a little bleating noises, had no eyes, no nose, a sweet little mouth, but no tongue or osophegus, no hands or genitalia. Hopelessly twisted small legs were joined together from the knees upwards by a thick 'web' of flesh. "We see many similar" commented Dr. Janeen.

Given the contamination that we found during the war, and we confirmed after the war in research in 1994 and '95, absolutely nobody should come within 25 metres, or climb on, or crawl in, or get anywhere near, depleted uranium destroyed or contaminated equipment, buildings or structures without full respiratory and skin protection. And if they don't, if they have that and there's whole areas that are totally contaminated because of the size of the battle, no wonder these people are sick...
Within those areas where the destroyed or contaminated equipment is, unless that is physically removed and totally disposed of properly, the disaster is for eternity. You cannot have contaminated equipment in terrain where people can inhale, ingest or get uranium contamination into a wound. You can't have women and children run in their back yard where uranium penetrators - each one solid uranium 238, not coated, not tipped, up to 4500 grams in mass- are laying. Who in their right mind would allow any women or child or anybody to play in their sand box or swing on their swing set with solid uranium contamination all over their back yard?

‘I only discovered indirectly in September 1991 that depleted uranium had been used on the battlefield. I was horrified. When scientists conduct experiments using this material, we dress like astronauts. Our soldiers had no protection. And this attack could have potentially exposed the entire population of the Gulf region. Soil samples from Iraq show radiation levels more than 17 times the acceptable level.’ [Asaf Durakovic, Clinical Professor of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University in Washington]
Dr Durakovic began to campaign on behalf of his patients but soon ran into a brick wall. No-one wanted to listen to his story. The records and lab samples of his patients were repeatedly lost. The two doctors who did the tests were fired. His car was sabotaged on two occasions and he began to receive anonymous threats.

After the Americans destroyed our village and killed many of us, we also lost our houses and have nothing to eat. However, we would have endured these miseries and even accepted them, if the Americans had not sentenced us all to death. When I saw my deformed grandson, I realized that my hopes of the future have vanished for good, different from the hopelessness of the Russian barbarism, even though at that time I lost my older son Shafiqullah. This time, however, I know we are part of the invisible genocide brought on us by America, a silent death from which I know we will not escape.

Professor Asaf Durakovic... is one of the world’s leading experts on radiation, and sees a familiar pattern. ‘Any doctor who becomes involved in this [depleted uranium] is pressurized, fired; records and samples go missing...’
Ray Bristow, of the British Gulf Veterans and Families’ Association, echoes Durakovic: ‘Dosimeters (which read radiation levels) issued to troops were at first denied as being issued at all, then we were told the records were lost, then that the readings were all normal – but no-one was allowed to see them. Medical records of Gulf War vets regularly go missing.’

In Jefferson County, Indiana, the Pentagon has closed the 200-acre (80-hectare) proving ground where it used to test-fire DU rounds. The lowest estimate for cleaning up the site comes to $7.8bn, not including permanent storage of the earth to a depth of six metres and of all the vegetation. Considering the cost too high, the military finally decided to give the tract to the National Park Service for a nature preserve — an offer that was promptly refused. Now there is talk of turning it into a National Sacrifice Zone and closing it forever. This gives an idea of the fate awaiting those regions of the planet where the US has used and will use depleted uranium.

The cover-up started with the infamous Los Alamos memorandum sent to our team in Saudi Arabia during March 1991. This memo told us to be sure no matter what we did or reported that we should only report information so DU could always be used. A letter sent to General Leslie Groves during 1943 is even more disturbing. In that memorandum dated October 30, 1943, senior scientists assigned to the Manhattan Project suggested that uranium could be used as an air and terrain contaminant. According to the letter sent by the Subcommittee of the S-1 Executive Committee on the "Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon" to General Groves (October 30, 1943) inhalation of uranium would result in "bronchial irritation coming on in a few hours to a few days". This is exactly what happened to individuals who inhaled DU dust during Operation Desert Storm.

Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, "For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed." She adds, "the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive."
Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: "Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned- out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground."
"Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults," Caldicott wrote. "My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities," she wrote in her book, "Nuclear Power is not the Answer"(The New Press).

Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government's own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Bristow and Purcell Lee arrived home ‘to find we had been called traitors by a senior Cabinet Minister [for going to an international conference on depleted uranium in Baghdad]’ and that their homes had been raided by Ministry of Defence Police. All computers, discs and files had been removed in search of a document which showed that the Medical Director of MAP was liaising with Porton Down Chemical Weapons Establishment over concern that DU was a contributory cause of the veterans’ plight. For eight years MAP refused to countenance such a scenario and were still denying it to the veterans themselves. In June this year, when the plight of Australian Gulf veterans was commanding extensive media coverage, all computer discs and files relating to Gulf War illnesses were stolen from the home of campaigner Philip Steele. Nothing else was missing.

We did all this work. We put everything together... And we had the best education and training program, with video support, that could be produced for the Department of Defence. And actually, I had officers from England, Australia, Canada, and Germany involved. NATO countries all approved this stuff [referring to the training program on DU.]
Well, the stuff all got shelved because they didn't want the troops to know the health and environmental effects of the uranium munitions. Because, when I did to work as the army's expert, I reached one simple conclusion. I can't clean it up; and I can't provide medical care; and the army will not dedicate the amount of time necessary for education and training to make sure people can safely operate it.

When I went and as the director of the DU project, my total intention was to ensure that the military could use uranium munitions in combat, simply because the job is to kill and destroy. And what I found out, when I did their research, is that you can't use them because you can't clean up and you can't do the medical. I reached that conclusion and I told him so. I can guarantee you that they didn't like that conclusion coming from their expert. They were really, really unhappy.

The problem you have with uranium munitions is that it contaminates air, water, and soil. It causes immediate health effects, within 72 hours. And there's no question about it, because it happened to me and my staff, and my team, and the friendly-fire casualties. And they refused to provide medical care for the U.S. casualties. And they're not doing it now [in the current War in Iraq].
On April 14th, last week, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy Secretary of Defence, in charge of deployment medicine for the United States Department of Defence, deliberately and wilfully stated to the world that they will not clean up uranium contamination in the Gulf, caused by Gulf War II, and they will not provide medical care.

Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.
But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped.
In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll.

US tanks fired 5,000 DU rounds, US aircraft many tens of thousands and UK tanks a small number of DU rounds. The tank ammunition alone will amount to greater than 50,000 lb of DU...if the tank inventory of DU was inhaled, the latest International Committee of Radiological Protection risk factor...calculates 500,000 potential deaths. (1st Gulf War, April 1991)

The [US government's] Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body ... Uranium does cause cancer, uranium does cause mutation, and uranium does kill. If we continue with the irresponsible contamination of the biosphere, and denial of the fact that human life is endangered by the deadly isotope uranium, then we are doing disservice to ourselves, disservice to the truth, disservice to God and to all generations who follow.

Dr. Keith Baverstock, a senior radiation advisor who was on the staff of the World Health Organization, co-authored a report in November 2001, warning that the long-term health effects of depleted uranium would endanger Iraq’s civilian population, and that the dry climate would increase exposure from the tiny particles blowing around and be inhaled for years to come. The WHO refused to give him permission to publish the study, bowing to pressure from the IAEA. Dr. Baverstock released the damning report to the media in February 2004. Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of the UN Environment Program’s Post-Conflict Assessment Unit in Geneva, shares Baverstock’s anxiety about depleted uranium but UNEP experts have not been allowed into Iraq to assess the pollution.

On August 4, 1995, a hundred thousand Croat soldiers, a hundred and fifty tanks, two hundred troop transports, more than three hundred pieces of artillery, and forty missile launchers attacked the Serb population of the Krajina. More than 150,000 Serbs were forced to leave this region which they had inhabited for centuries. The worst atrocities of the war were committed: the Croat forces killed the elderly who could not flee, and burned 85% of the abandoned houses.
Clinton called the offensive 'useful'. His Secretary of State said: "The retaking of the Krajina could lead to a new strategic situation which might be favorable for us."

I got a pre-publication copy of the Amnesty report on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. So I immediately read through this report and it was sloppy, it was inaccurate -- even its statement of applicable law. It did not seem to me that it had gone through the normal quality control process. As for the allegation about the Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and putting them on the floor of the hospital where they died, I didn't know if that was true or not, but it certainly sounded very sensationalist to me. And as a result of that, I made an effort to hold that report back for further review...

They wouldn't do it. It was clear it was on the fast track there in London ... Finally, I said look, let us at least put out an Errata report to accompany it on those aspects that are clearly wrong. They refused to do that either. They then put the report out, and you know what a terrible impact that had in terms of war propaganda. Of the six votes in the United States Senate that passed the resolution to go to war, several of those senators said that they were influenced by the Amnesty report.

On March 27, US-NATO Commanding General Wesley Clark announced that it was 'entirely predictable' that Serb terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing. Shortly after, Clark reported again that he was not surprised by the sharp escalation of Serb terror after the bombing: 'the military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach that Milosevic would adopt, as well as the terrible efficiency with which he would carry it out'.

José Cutileiro [the Portuguese ambassador who led the first conference on Bosnia] had, long before the real horrors broke out, negotiated an agreement which appeared broadly to be what was arranged under the Dayton accords - except that Cutileiro arranged things better, and sooner, so that it would have been easier to enforce. All parties could find something in it, except the Americans, who told Izetbegovic that he shouldn't accept it, because it would be a recognition of ethnic cleansing in territorial terms by force. That's what the Americans said, I've seen the text with my own eyes. And as a consequence of that Izetbegovic then rejected the agreement.

A month after the bombing [of Kosovo] began, General [Wesley] Clark reported that ... the NATO operation planned by the political leadership 'was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. It was not designed as a means of waging war against the Serb and MUP forces in Kosovo. Not in any way. There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea.'

I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that time, ***. If you ask my personal view, I think the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate. That does not excuse an awful lot of other things, but we were at a point when some people felt that something had to be done, so you just provoked a fight."

The disinformation is total (...) Television needs a scapegoat. For the moment, there is complete unanimity in condemning the Serbs, and that in no way facilitates the search for a solution. I don't think one can view the problem of ex-Yugoslavia and of Bosnia-Herzegovina only from the anti-Serb angle. It is much more complicated than that. One day in the middle of the Croat-Muslim war, we gave some information on the massacres committed by the Croatian army. An American journalist said to me: 'If you give out that sort of information, the American public won't understand anything.'"

A senior US administration official told the media at Rambouillet that 'we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing and that's what they are going to get'. The [UK] Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that:
One interpretation of the oral evidence given us by FCO officials is that they never really believed that Milosevic would sign at Rambouillet, but that...'we had to go through a process', presumably with the aim of promoting unity amoung the international community in favour of military action by showing that Milosevic was unwilling to negotiate...

Twice a day my client, Shaker Aamer, is strapped into a torture chair and a 110 centimetre tube is forced up his nose. Occasionally, it goes into his lungs - which is excruciatingly painful and quite deliberate.

The brutality of SERE techniques was in evidence during the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, believed by some to be the missing 20th hijacker of the 9/11 attacks. From November 2002 to January 2003, interrogators and psychologists at Guantanamo experimented with ways to torment Qahtani into confessing. The methods used in his torture, which were directly authorized by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, included months of isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, and even a stint where a female interrogator allegedly performed lap dances on him. He begged to commit suicide. Qahtani ultimately "confessed" in June 2005, claiming that 30 other Guantanamo prisoners were Osama bin Laden's bodyguards. The Pentagon claimed this was vital intelligence, though Qahtani repudiated all his confessions a year later, saying they were extracted under duress. According to military prosecutors, what was done to him negated any value he may have had in a trial setting. Nevertheless, in February, the Bush administration and Pentagon announced that Qahtani would be among the first Guantanamo prisoners to be granted a trial; he faces execution if found guilty.

“I am dying here every day, mentally and physically. This is happening to all of us. We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of the ocean for years. Rather than humiliate myself, having to beg for water, I would rather hurry up the process [of dying] that is going to happen anyway...
“The British government refuses to help me. What is the point of my wife being British? I thought Britain stood for justice, but they … abandoned us [British residents], people who have lived in Britain for years, and who have British wives and children. I hold the British government responsible for my death, as I do the Americans.”

British resident Bisher al-Rawi has told how he was betrayed by the [UK] security service despite having helped keep track of Abu Qatada, the Muslim cleric accused of being Osama bin Laden's 'ambassador in Europe'. He was abducted and stripped naked by US agents, clad in nappies, a tracksuit and shackles, blindfolded and forced to wear ear mufflers, then strapped to a stretcher on board a plane bound for a CIA 'black site' jail near Kabul in Afghanistan.
He was taken on to the jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba before being released last March ... after four years' detention without charge... the British did not intervene on the grounds he did not have a UK passport. The government claimed he was the responsibility of Iraq, which he fled as a teenager when his father was tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime.

In January 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush that a benefit of not applying the Geneva Conventions to detainees picked up in the Afghanistan conflict would be that prosecutions of US personnel under the US War Crimes Act would be more difficult. Two weeks later, on 7 February 2002, the President signed a memorandum confirming that no Taleban or al-Qa’ida detainees would qualify as prisoners of war, and that Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions would not apply to them either.
Common Article 3 guarantees minimum standards of fair trial. It also prohibits torture, cruel treatment and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment".

In 2005, the US Senate, in effect, voted to abolish habeas corpus when it passed an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantanamo Bay prisoners access to a federal court. On October 17, President Bush signed a bill that legalised torture and kidnapping and all but confirmed the repeal of habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights. The CIA can now legally abduct people and 'render' them to secret prisons in countries where they are likely to be tortured. Evidence extracted under torture is now permissible in 'military commissions'; people can be sentenced to death based on testimony beaten out of witnesses, and on hearsay. You are now guilty until confirmed guilty.

"Military necessity" was used to justify the "special interrogation plan" authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for use on Guantánamo detainee Mohamed al-Qahtani, considered to have high intelligence value but to be resistant to standard US army interrogation techniques. Mohamed al-Qahtani was subjected to extreme isolation for three months in late 2002 and early 2003. He was variously forced to wear women’s underwear; was tied by a leash and led around the room while being forced to perform a number of dog tricks; was forced to dance with a male interrogator while made to wear a towel on his head "like a burka"; was subjected to forcible shaving of his head and beard during interrogation, stripping and strip-searching in the presence of women, sexual humiliation, culturally inappropriate use of female interrogators, and to sexual insults about his female relatives; was subjected to hooding, loud music, white noise, sleep deprivation, and to extremes of heat and cold; was made to stand for long periods; and was forced to urinate in his clothing when interrogators refused to allow him to go to the toilet.
Mohamed al-Qahtani was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours per day for 48 out of 54 consecutive days.

"Two or three guards immediately entered the cell while he was lying on the floor. One forced Mr Ait Idir’s body onto the steel floor of the cell and jumped on his back, using his knees to pound Mr Ait Idir’s body into the floor."
This testimony, contained in a lawsuit filed in a US court in April 2005 on behalf of Mustafa Ait Idir, is one of many allegations of beatings and other violence by the Initial or Extreme Response Force, groups of around five Guantánamo guards sent to detainees’ cells to punish them for minor or imagined disciplinary infractions of prison rules.
On 24 January 2003, a man in an orange jumpsuit was brutally treated at Guantánamo and reportedly suffered a brain injury as a result. He was not a detainee, but a US military guard who had volunteered to pose as an unco-operative detainee in a training exercise. However, the five-man team sent in to extract him from his cell was not told it was an exercise. The guard says that they slammed him to the floor, put him in a painful chokehold, and pounded his head at least three times against the steel floor.

"When they vomited up blood, the soldiers mocked and cursed them, and taunted them with statements like ‘look what your religion has brought you’." Saudi Arabian detainee Yousef al-Shehri
During 2005 over 200 detainees participated in a hunger strike at Guantánamo to protest against conditions of detention and their long-term indefinite detention without trial. Hunger strikers were reportedly placed in isolation cells, strapped into restraint chairs, subjected to painful force feeding methods and deprived of "comfort items" such as blankets and books. Lawyers said that some hunger strikers were moved into isolation in cold rooms and strapped into restraint chairs. Guards allegedly taunted these detainees by rattling the doors of their cells, interrupting their prayers and disrupting their sleep.

"It's a kangaroo court system and completely corrupt," said Michael Ratner, the president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which is co-ordinating investigations and appeals lawsuits against the government by some 1,000 lawyers. "Stalin had show trials, but at Guantanamo they are not even show trials because it all takes place in secret."
Combatant Status Review Tribunals were held for 558 detainees at the Guantanamo in 2004 and 2005. All but 38 detainees were determined to be "enemy combatants" who could be held indefinitely without charges. Detainees were not represented by a lawyer and had no access to evidence. The only witnesses they could call were other so-called "enemy combatants".

"We made this camp for people who would be here forever. You should never think about going home. You’ll be here all your life… Don’t worry. We’ll keep you alive so you can suffer more." Alleged statement of a US interrogator to Mohamed al-Gharani, a Chadian national held in Camp V
In May 2006, the UN Committee against Torture told the USA that indefinite detention without charge constitutes per se a violation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This expert body urged the USA to close the Guantánamo detention camp.

Western journalists entering the city in the wake of British forces reported thousands of looters carrying on in plain view of British troops... Mutlaq Kitab Hamud, a fifty-two-year-old cloth merchant with a shop in al-Ashar market, described the chaos of the first two days after British forces entered the city.
'I was in my shop because I was trying to protect it. The first day that the British came to central Basra, their forces stopped at the Ashar River. They were stopped on the other side of the river before noon. Their tanks were just waiting there. Then an hour or so after noon, they crossed the river and went through the streets of the center. At that time, there were two or three hundred people waiting in groups behind them. It was a big mob. Some of them had acetylene torches and welding masks, and they headed straight for the Rafidain Bank [a branch of one of Iraq's largest banking groups]. The British tanks were standing right in front, but they didn't do a thing to stop the criminals. They were even encouraging them, saying "Go in Ali Baba, go in."