Former Gitmo guard 'ashamed' he once participated in detainee abuse David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Wednesday February 18, 2009





Print This Email This As the debate over closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay heats up, the treatment of the prisoners there has become a matter for close scrutiny.



Over the last seven years, Pentagon officials have repeatedly insisted that the treatment of the prisoners is, in former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's words, "humane and ... fully consistent with international conventions." However, Breandon Neely, who was a guard at Guantanamo when it first opened in 2002, has recently come forward to dispute those claims.



Neely was honorably discharged from the military last year and now leads the Houston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Tuesday, "We were just told from the git-go that these were the guys who planned 9/11. That these were the worst people in the world."



Neely went on to recount an incident which he has previously described in his testimony for the Guantánamo Testimonials Project of the University of California at Davis as "something that I am very ashamed of."



On the the day that the first prisoners arrived, Neely and another guard were put in charge of an older man who was nervous and shaking. When they placed him in a cage and went to take his handcuffs off, the man -- fearing, as Neely later learned, that he was about to be executed -- jerked sharply away.



"Just out of reaction, I slammed him to the ground and got on top of him," Neely recalled. "I was just holding him down by the head and a couple of seconds later I was pulled out of the cage by other soldiers that had came to help. They went ahead and hog-tied him. ... The next day, we arrived to the camp. I was walking by and I could see on the side of his face, he was all scraped up and bruised."



"I was young and didn't question anything back then," Neely told the Testimonials Project. "But even then, when I was as pissed off as anyone there, I felt ashamed of what I did. As the years have went on and the more I learn the more guilt I feel. This is one of the incidents from my time at Guantanamo that haunts me."



Neely also told Maddow of an occasion when he was present as a medic struck a prisoner who was refusing medicine and how he realized later that the medic had deliberately directed him to stand where he would block the view of the guards in the tower.



"It's just something you relive every day of your life," Neely said of his experiences. "Over time, it's just really built up, and every day I think about it and I relive those situations. And it gets the best of me, and the best way for me to deal with it is to speak out. ... Around December, everything just really hit me and I just knew I had to talk."



"I think the public has a right to know what really went on," Neely concluded.





This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Feb. 17, 2009.









Download video via RawReplay.com







Get Raw exclusives as they break -- Email & mobile Email - Never spam:



