Senate wants Gitmo 'torture' videos, too

Videotapes that ex-inmates say show guards beating prisoners at the U.S. military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been reviewed by the inspector general of the Navy and will be provided to senate investigators, a military spokesman told United Press International.

U.S. officials insist that detainees are treated and interrogated humanely at Guantanamo and that any abuse is immediately reported and punished. Nonetheless, news of the existence of the tapes raises the prospect of more images of alleged U.S. brutality emerging, broadening and deepening the scandal over what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the "radioactive" pictures of detainees being abused at the now twice-notorious Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq.

One set of the Guantanamo allegations centers on the actions of the Immediate Response Force, a special team of guards tasked to deal with detainee misconduct and violence. In recent media interviews and letters to U.S. senators, three Britons who were held at the camp until their release in March 2004 described several incidents in which they say the team savagely assaulted inmates.

"They pepper-sprayed me in the face. ... They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching," Tarek Dergoul, one of the three, told the Observer newspaper in London Sunday.

more