More Detainees Claim Quran Abuse

Several Former Prisoners Make Charges After Release

(AP) 
Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman, said inmates at Guantanamo are treated humanely and there are "adequate standard operating procedures in place to ensure detainee religious faith is respected."

He said al Qaeda taught detainees to make false abuse allegations.

"That these detainees are now making allegations of abuse at Guantanamo seems to fit the standard operating procedure in al Qaeda training manuals," Plexico said.

A Pentagon report released this month confirmed five cases in which U.S. guards at Guantanamo mishandled the Quran, including incidents in which one copy of the book was splashed with urine and another was stepped on.

The report concluded that none of the guards flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet — an explosive allegation that surfaced in a Newsweek magazine report. The magazine later retracted the report.

The freed detainees said they had learned about the controversy from other inmates and prison officials.

Many Pakistanis went to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban, and scores ended up in Guantanamo. Pakistani officials say as many as 11 Pakistanis are among the 540 detainees still held. They say 67 Pakistanis have been freed from Guantanamo, and virtually all have been held in Pakistani custody since their return.

Tahir Ashrafi, a religious affairs adviser for Punjab province, said the 17 men had been cleared by Pakistani intelligence agencies after thorough interrogation and "have not been found to be involved in any kind of terrorist activity."

He said all the men signed statements saying they wouldn't join any anti-state activity.

However, one of the freed men, Khalil-ur Rahman, 21, from the eastern town of Gujrat, said he wouldn't hesitate to fight again. "If I get a chance to fight jihad again, I will definitely go. I will not miss it," he said.

Rahman claimed female interrogators at Guantanamo stripped in front of prisoners despite pleas for them not to — echoing allegations leveled by other inmates, although not by the other five inmates who spoke to AP on Monday.

"Girls would interrogate us. They would take off their clothes in front of us. They would make different poses in front of us and they would sit on our chests," said Rahman. "This was shameful."

Vakhitov said he previously had been held by U.S. forces at Kandahar in Afghanistan, where many detainees were held before being sent to Guantanamo, and that he also saw Quran desecration there.

"In Kandahar, they tore up copies of the Quran and even put it in a bucket of feces," he said.

Vakhitov also said detainees were abused through sleep deprivation.

"We would be made to be in a special investigative room where we would be handcuffed to the floor and then would be prevented from falling asleep by the playing of loud music, shining bright lights and so on. There was one program in which we would be moved from one cell to another every 15 minutes continually over a period of three or four months," he said.

He also claimed that forces used unspecified gas and one time allowed dogs to attack the prisoners.