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Testimony to Witness to Guantánamo (Brahim Yadel)

Making an Example

In the block where I was, which was Block B, at X-Ray, there was a man named Jumaha [1] whom I got to know a little. He has been released now. He was from Bahrain. And once, he talked back to a guard who...he was often being insulted, so what did he do? Well, he insulted the guard back. So he talked back. There was a very harsh exchange of words with the guard. So later several of them came, and it happened in front of me, in Camp B. They came. They did their intervention, but when they did their intervention, they wanted to set an example—that is, the man in charge of the Block videotaped it. He took his videocamera, a small camera—this big—and filmed the intervention. He got inside his cage. They beat him up. And on top of it all, they grabbed Jumaha’s head and badged it on the floor. And later, there were blood stains. That was very, very, very violent because the intervention group, the guard—the top guard who was taping the scene— he asked for it to be especially violent because he wanted to make it an example of why we must not talk back. Even if we were being insulted, we must not insult back. So they really beat him up. They hit him. They bashed his head on the floor many times until there was blood. They tied him up and took him to another block. I saw it. It happened inside my block.

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Interrogation During Surgery

So then they undressed me. I was naked in that room. They set me on the table and made me lie down on the table. And then what happened is that they operated on me. The doctor was standing behind me, and he started to operate. What he did was, he put me to sleep. He gave me an anesthetic, but I thought he was going to give me a general anesthetic. But what he did was a half anesthetic, which means that I was semi-conscious. Why? He had his reasons. This way, he could go on with the operation—while at the same time— so I could feel the pain from the surgery. And at the same time, interrogators were asking me questions. So that it is a technique apparently well documented. Later, I found out it was a commonly used technique. At the same time as they were operating on me, they were interrogating me. That meant that I endured the pain of the surgery, while at the same time, I was facing two interrogators who were interrogating me and bombarding me with questions throughout the surgery, actually. That’s a fact. So that went on for, I don’t know, a very, very long time. And at that point, I really was in pain. It was a very, very, very hard time.

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 CSHRA Note

* This transcription was carried out by Laila Soudi

1. Probably Juma al Dossari (ISN 261). His beating has been described by a number of other sources, including Specialist Brandon Neely.