Friday's Guardian reports on documents it has received that disclose torture of prisoners at Bagram and Kandahar in Afhanistan. The documents allege that prisoners were subjected to mock exeuctions, sexually humiliated and, in some cases, raped. "Trophy" photographs were taken of the abuse and destroyed. The Guardian obtained the documents from the ACLU, which received them pursuant to it's Freedom of Information Act request.

Photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing US soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid "another public outrage", the documents show. Here's one case:

In the dossier, the Iraqi detainee claims that three US interrogators in civilian clothing dislocated his arms, stuck an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, choked him with a rope until he lost consciousness, and beat him with a baseball bat.

"After they tied me up in the chair, then they dislocate my both arms. He asked to admit before I kill you then he beat again and again," the prisoner says in his statement. "He asked me: Are you going to report me? You have no evidence. Then he hit me very hard on my nose, and then he stepped on my nose until he broken and I started bleeding."

What excuse will the Administration come up with for its torture of Guantanamo detainee Omar Deghayes?

Mr Deghayes mother Zohra Zewawi, from Brighton, wept as lawyer Clive Stafford Smith described the injuries the detainee has allegedly suffered at the Cuban base.

"In March 2004 the Emergency Reaction Force in Camp Delta came into his cell," he said. "They brought their pepper spray and held him down. "They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes. "Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks but he gradually got sight back in one eye.

"He's totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all white and milky - he can't see out of it because he has been blinded by the US in Guantanamo."

Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul has an excellent post today on the latest in the torture scandals. The middle section of her post talks about 18 year old Canadian Omar Khadr who has been imprisoned for 3 years, since age 15. This week the Toronto Star called for a trial by impartial tribunal or his release.

Last year we wrote a long piece on Omar's family--which stemmed from an article titled Married to the Jihad. It depicted a reporter's interview with two Canadian al Qaeda wives, one of whom was Omar's mother, who expressed their expectation and approval of their sons joining the call to fight.

Great reads: Jane Mayer in the New Yorker on Outsourcing Torture, a history of the U.S. "extraordinary rendition" program and Billmon's collection of quotes on torture.

[hat tip to Mark at Norwegianity, who made an extensive list of great reads today while home recovering from the flu]

Update: The New York Times has a lengthy article Sunday about Mamdouh Habib, a detainee who sued to stop the U.S. from sending him back to Egypt:

The Washington Post reports a new scandal emerging about Guantanamo Bay. A soon-to-be released military report of investigations into the abuse claims of detainees will confirm that female interrogators sexually humiliated and abused them.

A wide-ranging Pentagon investigation, which has not yet been released, generally confirms the detainees' allegations, according to a senior Defense Department official familiar with the report. While isolated accounts of such tactics have emerged in recent weeks, the new allegations and the findings of the Pentagon investigation indicate that sexually oriented tactics may have been part of the fabric of Guantanamo interrogations, especially in 2003.

The inquiry uncovered numerous instances in which female interrogators, using dye, pretended to spread menstrual blood on Muslim men, the official said. Separately, in court papers and public statements, three detainees say that women smeared them with blood.

It was only a matter of time - get ready for a reality show about Guantanamo where the participants play detainees.

Volunteers on a reality TV show have been subjected to sexual humiliation and physical cruelty in a copy of the Guantanamo Bay military camp. The seven men, including three Muslims, endured painful stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.

Scenes for the programme, The Guantanamo Guidebook, were filmed in a warehouse in East London which had been fitted with cages, interrogation rooms and surveillance equipment. Presented by Jon Snow, it examined how they stood up to 'torture-lite' after being left in the hands of a team of former U.S. military interrogators for 48 hours.

At the beginning, some of the particpants supported the Bush administrations treatment of detainees. That changed, after they were subjected to similar treatment.:

....after being subjected to religious and sexual humiliation and forced nudity, two of them vomited, another soiled himself and one dropped out after seven hours due to the onset of hypothermia.

[link via What Really Happened.]

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a war-crimes lawsuit on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo naming Rumsfeld as a defendant. Rumsfeld isn't taking any chances--he'll skip an important conference to avoid the chance something wierd will happen.

In recent days, the Center added Alberto Gonzales as a defendant to the suit. According to this letter (pdf),

Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirms his role as complicit in the torture and abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.

Associated Press reports:

Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.

A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk.

It's the most revealing account so far of interrogations at the secretive detention camp, where officials say they have halted some controversial techniques.

More egg on the Pentagon's face. Forty eight hours after four Guantanamo prisoners were returned to Britain, UK authorities freed them, declining to file charges against them.

Five other British detainees at Guantanamo who were returned in March were also set free within a day, and have never been charged with a terrorist offense.

The last four of the British detainees held at Guantanamo arrived back in Britain today. The British Government will decide what happens to them next. But, this is significant--Britain is about to reject such treatment for its own terror detainees:

The home secretary, Charles Clarke, is expected to announce today that he will accept the law lords' ruling that the indefinite detention without trial of 12 terror suspects in Britain breaches human rights laws.

Meanwhile, the four released detainees are complaining of gross acts of mistreatment:

The Government has disclosed that during a 2003 mass protest at Guantanamo, 23 detainees attempted sucide. The Government did not advise the media of these attempts when disclosing past incidences:

The incidents came during the same year the camp suffered a rash of suicide attempts after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller took command of the prison with a mandate to get more information from prisoners accused of links to al-Qaida or the ousted Afghan Taliban regime that sheltered it.

Between Aug. 18 and Aug. 26, the 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves with pieces of clothing and other items in their cells, demonstrating "self-injurious behavior," the U.S. Southern Command in Miami said in a statement. Ten detainees made a mass attempt on Aug. 22 alone.

The military had this explanation today:

There is a serious gag order imposed on lawyers who visit their clients at Guantanamo. Nonetheless, today we get a glimpse of the detention conditons from defense attorney Thomas Wilner, who says that by comparison, Charles Manson is living in a palace.