01/20/10 – Brandon Neely – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Anti-Guantanamo Radio.
Alright, y'all, we're going to start off the show today with our first guest.
It's Brandon Neely, he's a former military policeman in the U.S. Army, a guard at Guantanamo Bay.
He's in the Army from 2000 to 2005, and was in the news this last week because he took a trip to England to meet two of his former captives at the prison down there that he was guarding.
Welcome to the show, Brandon, how are you doing?
Great, how about yourself?
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing great, and thanks very much for joining us.
I should also mention you're a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War as well.
That's IVAW.org.
So I guess, tell us about when you first went to Guantanamo Bay, how it was, I guess, if you want to, tell us how it was that you decided to be an MP and your path to Guantanamo Bay.
Well, I joined the Army in August of 2000.
I joined a year before 9-11 even happened, so when I initially joined the Army, I didn't think much was going to go on, you know, just join and get some education and some kind of skill set and go on with life after five years of service.
9-11 happened in January of 2002 on a Friday night.
I volunteered for an Iraq deployment, which I found out later on that night, Sunday morning, that I would be leaving to Guantanamo Bay.
So we get to Guantanamo Bay about 72 hours before the first Japanese arrive on January 11, 2002.
From the time we hit the ground, we were told that the people that would be held at Guantanamo Bay were, they would be detaining these guys, these were the worst of the worst, these people were cops fighting American people on the battlefields, that these are the people that planned or helped plan 9-11 or would, you know, kill us in a heartbeat.
I stayed at Camp X-Ray for six months, I was there at Guantanamo, during my time there, like after 9-11 and when I got to Guantanamo, I was just as angry and upset as everybody else.
And I really thought at the time that we needed to do something, seek revenge, and kind of like an eye for eye.
And during my time at Guantanamo, my views kind of changed on the whole issue.
Not that I didn't think that terrorists should be held in some way or not, I just didn't agree with a lot of the treatment that was going on.
I wonder, how long were you there before you realized that maybe not all these guys would cut my head off if they could in a second, kind of thing, like they had told you?
Probably maybe a couple months or so, when I started speaking to some of the detainees that did speak English, like one of the detainees I did go meet, Ruhal, I mean, I was a year older than he was, and here we were talking about music and things that I did back home when I was here in the States, you know, in the club, talking to girls.
But it just, you know, a lot of detainees were telling the same story, that, you know, I was bought, the Americans bought me for $1,500, $3,500 a head, and they were sold to the Americans by the North Lions or whoever, and that's when I started thinking about it, but even with stuff that was going on at camp, you know, every day when you went to go work at the camp, you were constantly getting drilled in your head that these people would kill you in a heartbeat, so as soon as a lot of people maybe started having doubts, you know, every day you're getting that in your head, you're going to start thinking one way, you're going to snap right back to the other way.
Yeah.
Well, I'm curious, if your officers are teaching you guys that these are all the worst of the worst and all that, what are the instructions, the specific training that they gave you on how to imprison them?
I mean, if you're an MP, that doesn't mean that you're trained as a prison guard, right?
So they must have given you all instructions about how you were to treat these worst of the worst people.
Strength training-wise?
No, we were probably there a day and a half, two days before the first detainees arrived.
We went over quick training as far as handcuffing procedures, but being military policemen, we were all pretty efficient in that anyways.
Other than that, we weren't given no kind of specialized training, other than we were given instructions on the IRF team, the Internal Reduction Force team, just, you know, the one man would carry the shield and take control of the head, two men would go to the right hand and so on, you know, and just go back a little ways.
From the time we were there, the day we stepped foot in Guantanamo, we were told at no time did the Geneva Convention, it would not be in effect, because these guys were not enemy prisoners of war, that they were detainees, and we were told from day one that a facility like this had never been ran, and there was no standing operating procedure at the time.
That was just play it by ear.
If it didn't work on one day, we'd just go a different way the next day.
Well now, you know, most of the coverage of torture, whether at Guantanamo, or whether in Afghanistan, or whichever ghost prisons around, have focused on actual interrogation, but you know, there was also the Abu Ghraib scandal, where the people who took the rap anyway, the people in the pictures, they weren't interrogators, they were the guards, and they had been instructed, they say, and I think credibly in enough different times from different ones of them, that they had been instructed to soften these people up, so that when the actual interrogators got there, that they would have less trouble cracking them.
Were you guys under instruction, either explicitly or implicitly, to keep these guys on edge and make their lives absolute hell, or were you basically there protecting them in the sense that a sheriff is in charge of the people in his holding tank?
I would say we weren't directly told to, as you would say, soften them up.
We were told to keep the pressure on them, as far as, you know, first beginning of camp, they weren't allowed to talk, they weren't allowed to move around, they weren't allowed to pray, they weren't allowed to do any of that stuff, and now that I go back and look at it, it's like, I worked nights for a little bit when I was there, like, none of the detainees could have anything covered up as far as hands or anything, so you're constantly walking around and pretty much just waking everybody up every five or ten minutes, telling them to uncover their whole body, which we were told to do that, which pretty much was depriving the whole camp of sleep for all those months, so I guess, you know, without even knowing it, you know, we were softening them up for interrogation or whatnot, but we were never directly told, we were just told to keep the pressure on them and strictly enforce the rules or whatever we were told to, but that was it.
Now did you ever witness any interrogations there?
No, I never was part of any interrogations, the only thing I speak about and the only thing I saw was what I saw on the everyday blocks there, or what I took part in.
Well, and, you know, I think that's really important just to make that contrast, that here's a guy, you're a military policeman, a guard, never involved, I guess not even standing outside the door while someone was being interrogated, is that what you're saying?
No, not at all, at Camp X-Ray, they actually brought another MP, military police company, in from Fort Stewart, Georgia, and their primary mission was to come into Camp X-Ray and escort the detainees to the interrogation room, that was their primary mission, that's what they did the whole time.
And yet, all that being said, with you having nothing to do with any interrogations, in your interview with UC Davis and on Rachel Maddow's show and in other places, you've really described witnessing quite a lot of, at least, abuse, if not outright torture, some of it I think would even clearly be torture, according to what you told UC Davis, so why don't you tell us about, you know, I don't know, top ten worst things you saw happen down at Guantanamo, and perhaps tell us about your involvement in some of these things as well.
Well, I'll just start off with my involvement in the first situation, you know, many people have read the UC Davis Project, initially when I started the conversation with UC Davis, I had left it out, for, you know, different reasons, it's kind of an embarrassing situation, and it was just a time, you know, I'm not proud of, but, you know, then I went back and told them about it, I think it's important for people to know, because it was the very first incident to ever happen at Camp X-Ray, it was the first day the detainees came, and we take them off the bus, and we take them to the in-processing station, and the detainee was a little, he was a lot older than other detainees, I would say probably in his late 40s, early 50s, and me and my escort partner grabbed him, and we could initially tell that he was very scared, shaking, didn't want to walk, didn't want to listen to any instructions at all, so we were screaming at him, yelling at him to the block, and we took him to Alpha Block, and we put him on his knees, and at this time, the detainee still had his leg irons on, his hand shackles, and the blackout goggles, so they couldn't see nothing in his earmuffs, so we put him on his hands and knees, and my escort partner takes his leg shackles off, throws them outside the cage, he goes in and takes his hand irons off, and when he did, the guy jerked to the left a couple times, and we're yelling at him, don't move, don't move, and the interrogators supposedly tell him, don't move, we're taking the handcuffs off, so my escort partner goes back in and takes the handcuffs off again, and when he did, once again, he jerked to the left, and I was on the left side of him, I had my hand, I was grabbing him by the left hand, and I had my hand on the back of his shirt, and when he jerked to the left, I just slammed my face first to the ground and got on top of him and held him down until the Internal Reaction Force team came and pulled me off of him, and a couple days, about a day or two later, I remember coming back on the alpha block and walking by him, like the left side of his face was all scabbed up and bruised up, I guess, from hitting me on the pavement floor when I slammed him, but then in talking to some of the detainees on the alpha block later on that spoke English, they told me the whole reason the guy even resisted was because when we put him on his knees and he couldn't see, he thought he was going to be executed because he had seen family members and friends who knew of, well, that's the way of execution in some countries, so he was pretty much fighting for his life that he thought at the time.
Well, and when you found that out, did that make a big difference to you in your view of what had happened?
Yeah, I never felt really good about it, even after the situation, you know, guys were just like, man, you got something, you got a piece, you know, I never felt good about it.
Here was this guy that was, you know, almost to be my father, here I had to slam his face first into the ground, so I wasn't really trying to think much about it, but when I found that out, I felt really bad, and just watching the guy over time, he just never caused a problem, he didn't do anything, he just didn't understand, and he thought something was going to happen that it didn't, but once I found out, you know, I felt really bad about it, the whole situation could have been involved, could have been, you know, not even there if we had better, now I look back at it, if we had better interpreters and whatnot, the whole situation could have been, you know, it wouldn't even been there.
Mm-hmm.
Well, did you ever, you know, come forward to your officers and tell them you'd done something wrong or anything like that?
It was, it was open in the camp, it was right there, everybody knew what had happened, it wasn't, there was no cover up, there was no nothing, it was right there out in the open, Camp X was wide open, and once it happened, I mean, it was on the radio, they were yelling code red, which at the time meant there was an emergency on the block, and everybody came running, and once the situation was over, there's no paperwork, no nothing, it was just over with, and everybody went back to what they were doing.
Well, and judging by some of the things that you told UC Davis here, and, you know, other credible reports we've had over the years, it sounds like the whole place was lawless, you weren't the only one who'd beaten somebody up without good cause, people were getting beat up, what, all day every day over there, or what?
Well, I just really depend on, I mean, I wouldn't say all day every day, but there were situations, like, there's one situation that really, you know, really was uncalled for, and it was one of the big reasons which really, really had me start thinking, like, what are we doing here?
It was on Bravo block, there was a detainee named Juma, he, he was, I guess, was arguing with one of the female guards, she was saying something to him, and supposedly he had cursed at her.
Well, the officer in charge of the camp that day came to the block, and they called the internal reaction force team, what happened in the internal reaction force hut with them, that was the escort that day, wasn't doing nothing, so pretty much being nosy, I followed them to Bravo block, and stood outside the, stood outside the block, and the OIC, the officer in charge, briefed the third team on, hey, you know, we're going to go in here and take the detainee's, you know, mat, and karan, and everything, all his necessity items, as they call them, so they go, they go over to the cage door, Juma's sitting there, and the officer in charge gives him an order to turn around, put down his hands and knees, and whatnot, well, Juma just, the detainee just looks at him, well, OIC unlocked the cage door, didn't take the lock off, just unlocked it, as soon as he unlocked it, Juma turned around with his hands and knees, put his hands behind his back, so they went ahead and opened the door, and the internal reaction force team started to go in, but as they started going in, the one man, the one man on the IRF team would carry a riot shield, he just threw, tossed it to the side, and kind of, you know, about five or six feet from him, kind of took a little, little jump, and jumped in the air, came down, knee first, on the back of Juma's back, and the rest, rest of the internal reaction force team jumped on top of him, you could see him hitting him, kicking him, for about 15 or 20 seconds, and as they were holding him down, they called for the female guard to go in the cage, and she went in there, and she struck Juma a couple times in the head, then the, everybody stood up, and Juma laid there, in a pool of blood, hog tied, right there on the bravo block floor in his cage, and then the medics came and got him, and took him to the Navy hospital there in Guantanamo, and he came back a couple days later, all stitched up with a broken nose, um, but it was a situation that was just really uncalled for, there's no reason for the whole situation to go that way.
Now, this, uh, immediate reaction force, or rapid reaction force you're talking about, this is like when people see on TV, you know, MSNBC will do the thing on the prisons, this is like, uh, cops in riot gear, and they all rush in, uh, four or five guys, all rush into the prison cell to get control of somebody who's unruly, or something, all at the same time.
I wonder, what were the circumstances, uh, you know, how bad would somebody in their cage have to be acting before you guys would rush them like that?
Well, in Camp X3, in the early days, or Camp X3 in general, it was just the discretion of the officer in charge, so it's pretty much, um, if they wanted to irk you, as, you know, irking became a verb, as you, again, they would just irk you, they would send an interaction force for whatever reason, whether you're being too loud, whether they wanted to take your items out, whether they wanted to restrain you, to force you to take medication, it was just...
What about no reason at all?
Were there, uh, did they do these IRF raids on people who were just sitting there doing nothing?
I never saw nothing for no reason, I mean, but they would do it for reasons just like, um, like I said, you know, just refusing to take medication, let's go in there and irk them, but it wasn't like, like you would see on MSNBC, on the prison shows, or at a prison, where they would send a five mil, uh, uh, extraction team in, and they would go in there and hold them down, and cuff them up, and bring them out, it was always done with, like, extreme force, there was never, there was never no in-between, once they were coming, and the detainees knew that you were going to get, I mean, you were going to feel some pain, so...
What does that mean, exactly, extreme force?
We're talking about how many men, uh, going in there, and then what is it that they do to these guys?
Probably, there'd be five men, uh, five, you know, good-sized guys, and they would go in there, and they're supposed to go in there and haul time, or just take control of them, but, you know, most of the time they would go in there and just hold them down, hit and kick them before they either ever attempted to put the, uh, cuffs up, or haul time up, and it was just, you know, it just became a normal thing, like, one time on a Charlie block, this guy, one of the detainees refused to drink an insurance can, and they went in there, and they chained him to the fence, like, standing up, and the one man held him by the, uh, the guy on the one man on the earth team held him by the face while they kind of held him by the jaw while they just shoved the insurance down his face, or down his throat, it just went all over his face, and he didn't even take a drink of it, um, I mean, that's, I mean, that's the kind of stuff they did when I was there.
Well, you know, you've mentioned hog tying here a couple times, and, uh, that means that, you know, like, you're laying on your stomach with your legs back and, and cuffed to your also cuffed wrists, right?
Yeah, correct.
So, I wonder about other stress positions, where people shackled into other, uh, well, for example, how long would somebody be hog tied, and it's the kind of thing where if they tie too tight, your spine snaps, right, so it can't be comfortable even if it's, uh, not quite that tight, how long would somebody be hog tied like that?
Well, uh, during that time I was there, it came back to pretty much the officer in charge discretion, so, I mean, they might be there 20 minutes, they might be there an hour, um, it's just depending on who's working and what they chose to do.
And other stress positions, I guess we know from the minutes of the torture of Katani that they would have him chained to the floor in a squatting position, and, and, uh, all kinds of strange things, uh, people have been hung from the ceilings, uh, what about at Guantanamo?
Oh, I don't know, I never saw any of the, uh...
Well, now, most of that's during interrogation, but what about any other, uh, you know, shackling or people, you know, forced to crouch over for a long time or that kind of thing?
No, I never did see none on the blog.
Um, all right, now, uh, what about Camp No?
I'm sure you saw the other Scott Horton's, uh, article in Harper's Magazine, uh, about, uh, the suspected murder of three men in, uh, June of 2006.
Uh, do you know anything about this Camp No?
Was it there when you were there?
Uh, not that I know of, um, the last month and a half I was there, we actually, uh, took paintings over to Camp Delta.
Camp Delta, the first part of it had just been finished, had just finished being, being built.
Um, at the time, I didn't know any of Camp No, any other camp at all.
Um, so, I don't know, I have no knowledge of it, if it was there at the time I was there.
So, the camp that you were stationed at isn't even the same camp that the, uh, witnesses in that story were stationed at.
They're, they're talking about a road away from their camp that you go this way and then take a left and it leads to the secret base.
You weren't even anywhere near that.
Uh, just for about a month and a half, where Camp Delta is at now, I've seen the map of where Camp No is at, and when I've heard Scott Horton and people tell that story where they're at, I know where they're talking about, because once you leave Camp Delta, if you take a left, before I left there, there was a bunch of sea huts that we moved in, in from that it was built there by the seabees there, because we lived in tents when we initially got to Camp X-Ray, because Camp X-Ray was on the other side of Guantanamo Bay.
Um, I do know the area they're talking about.
We take the left and go to the beach, or you go this area, but, um, I can, you know, I didn't know the camp or if it was there when I was there, if it was being built or what, but I had no knowledge of it when I was there.
And what about the three men in that story who died that night?
Did you know them?
No, I looked at the pictures, uh, last night and, like, I can't place them anywhere, so I'm not, I don't, if I know them, I can't remember them.
All right, well, so now let's talk about this redemption thing you got going on here, man.
It's, uh, quite impressive to me that you would go over to England to meet two of these former inmates and apologize in person to them the way you did.
When was this exactly?
Well, actually, I took the trip about a week before Christmas, when I actually got to London and, uh, got to speak to them is when it happened.
And, uh, now who were these two guys, and how was it that you came to, uh, you know, go and do this thing with the BBC News and everything?
Well, two guys, uh, one of them was, uh, Ruha Ahmed and Shafiq Rezul.
Uh, they're two, two, two guys, part of the Tipton Three, which is probably one of the most famously known detainees.
They're all from Tipton, England, and they're all grew up together.
And they got, went to Pakistan for a wedding and went to Afghanistan, as they say, to smoke dope and hang out before the wedding, got captured and sold to the Americans and spent two and a half years inside Guantanamo.
But during my time at Camp X-Ray and my time at Guantanamo, I spoke, spoke a lot to Ruha, just, I mean, he was a guy that was a year older or younger than me.
And we talked about James Bond films.
We talked about Eminem.
It was just weird, you know, here was a guy that did everything I did in the outside of the world, and here he was sitting in Guantanamo.
And then, uh, Shafiq, I spoke to a little bit, not a whole lot, because he didn't like for the guards to know that he spoke English.
But Ruha had told me at Camp X-Ray that I was his buddy and whatnot.
But what happened was after I spoke to the UC Davis project, I just happened to log on to Facebook.
I was pretty new to it.
I just messed around.
And for some reason, one day I was sitting at the computer and decided to type their names in to see if anything popped up.
And from my surprise, Shafiq had an actual Facebook profile.
So I kind of sat there for a while and decided just to send him a message, just to say, hey, you know, this is who I am.
I was there, you know, from Camp X-Ray from, from January when it started that year to June of that year.
Um, you know, I agreed with it at first, but over the time I saw, I didn't agree with what was going on and just pretty much told him, hey, I'm sorry for what you've been through.
You know, the guys he was with had been through and that, um, and, you know, just let him know that not everybody did agree with everything that was going on.
And, uh, to my surprise, a couple of weeks, maybe a month later, he actually replied to me and we just sent off a chain link of emails.
We're just emailing back and forth.
And then I was contacted by the BBC sometime after that, uh, about March of last year.
March of last year.
And they want to know if I would be interested in flying out to London sometime and actually meet them face to face, which I got a chance to do.
And the YouTube of that is that my blog, thestressblog.com and at the blog at antiwar.com slash blog.
And the article at the BBC website is, um, Guantanamo Guard reunited with ex inmates.
And, uh, so tell me about how this go.
It looked, uh, it started off a little bit uncomfortable, but you guys ended up being friends by the end.
Look at this picture of the three of y'all smiling and joking together.
Yeah.
Well, actually, you know, um, the thing about the project took a lot longer to do than, than, uh, I think people realize it took almost a year to really complete the whole thing because me personally went back and forth about doing it or not doing it.
Um, cause nobody knew what the reaction was going to be.
There was none of it was scripted.
None of it was anything.
It was just what you see is what really happened.
So when I finally decided to go and, you know, both sides, as you can see in the documentary, um, we're, we're very nervous.
I don't, I don't think literally when I got off the plane that morning within four hours, I was sitting in that room.
I'm going to take a talk much at all the whole time, but, um, it was good at first.
It was, wow.
You know, here, here we are.
Cause we all knew each other.
And then it was kind of like, I grew out come that, Hey, you look different with a, without a cap on.
And I'm just like, well, you look different.
That always jumps through.
So it kind of broke the ice right there, but it, it was, it was good.
You know, I think, I think, I think me telling them, um, as like, she told me like, no, you didn't come here and try to apologize for the government.
You just came here and told apologize for what happened, what you did and what you took part in.
And then, you know, they told me they really appreciated it.
And there was a moment in the whole thing where I told them about the situation with alpha block because they weren't there yet.
That was like, I didn't know what the reaction was going to be, which was very tense.
Like you could feel it was, it was a feeling, but, um, it was good.
You know, I could say that we really left her as real friends.
Like I still talk to him almost on a daily basis now.
Um, but it was, it was a good experience.
I think it's helped me a lot to really, you know, maybe deal with some of the stuff that actually here didn't tell me it was time for me to move on and get over it.
And I'm not the one to blame, you know?
And I think it really helped them from what they told me really just here, here for me here for it to be real here to come for somebody like me.
And it was great just to meet their families and everything.
Just, you know, eight years ago, here we were detaining a guard and eight years now, we're all three of us got jobs, got family, got kids.
And we're just, you know, we're, we're really, really no different.
It's just, we started on a journey years ago.
Here we are.
We're the same people.
All right.
So tell me about your activism with the Iraq veterans against what we're all actually now.
First, tell me about how you ended up in Iraq.
You left Guantanamo Bay and when, 2004?
Yeah, I left Guantanamo in 2002.
I was there from January of 2002 to June of 2002.
Oh, okay.
And then from there you went to Iraq.
Yeah, I went to Iraq March of 03 and left that Iraq in March of 04.
And what did you do there?
I was an M.T.
There I just did various missions from VIP escorts to patrolling to convoy escorts and just the little missions, just driving around, patrolling the streets of whatever city we were in at the time.
So luckily you didn't have to do too much that you regret while you were there, at least.
Yeah, I mean, I think you go to places like that, you do stuff that, you know, because at first going to Iraq, I agree with the whole situation, like we're going to do this great stuff.
And after a while, seeing some of the stuff I did and taking part, you know, just seeing it and realizing what we were telling American people wasn't real.
I just, I really just became disheartened.
It was really turned against the war.
I just didn't agree with it.
All right.
So now tell us, please, about Iraq Veterans Against the War and your role there.
Iraq Veterans Against the War, you know, many people know just the organization of most of the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are just speaking out against the war, you know, have points of unity that unite the whole organization as far as, like my big one is the ODA benefits in full health care for all veterans returning, reparations for Iraqi people and, you know, immediate withdrawal of the country.
Because, you know, like Obama says, we're going to leave Iraq, but he's still not proving to show that he's going to do that anytime soon.
So hopefully people keep the pressure up.
We'll actually leave that country.
All right.
Well, listen, I think it's great that you're going around speaking out and, you know, trying to make right what once went wrong and all that.
So thanks very much.
Thanks for having me.
I really enjoyed it.
All right, everybody.
That's Brandon Neely, former MP in the U.S. Army and Guantanamo Guard.
You check out the article at BBC News.
It's Guantanamo Guard reunited with ex-inmates.
And you can also find the YouTube of it at Anti-Wars Blog and at my own blog, thestressblog.com as well.