“We tortured some folks,” President Obama said recently.
I was one of those folks, and today I am at the United Nations to confront the government responsible for torturing me. It is the first time that the UN Committee Against Torture has heard directly from one of the 779 men and boys detained at Guantánamo since 2002. The committee members are in Geneva to review the US government’s compliance with the global ban on torture, and I am here to remind them that not a single person who designed, authorized, executed or oversaw the torture of Gitmo detainees has been prosecuted.
In 2001, I was sold to the US military for a $3,000 bounty. I was 19 years old and would not see my family again until I was twenty-five. I found out later that the US government knew of my innocence as early as 2002, yet I was detained for years after that and repeatedly tortured during that time. I was subjected to electric shocks, stress positions, simulated drowning and endless beatings.