All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Brandon Neely.
He used to be a guard down at Guantanamo Bay.
Now he's attempting to make things right by telling people the truth about it and about his time there and his role in it.
Welcome back to the show, Brandon.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
It's been a while since we spoke.
I saw that you were interviewed by CNN here.
A very important story, and a good chance, I hope, for people who haven't heard before to hear about your experiences down at Guantanamo Bay.
So I guess, can we please start with name, rank, and serial number, and how long were you in the service, and the basic outlines like that?
Yeah, I served five years in the Army as a military police officer from 2000 to 2005.
I was at Guantanamo the day it opened for the first six months it was opened, and after that, I deployed in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 and came home in 2004.
Okay, and then got out in 2005, you said?
Yeah, I got out in 2005, and a couple years later, just decided to tell my story about how it was when I was at Guantanamo.
Now, were you also a prison guard when you were in Iraq?
No, when I was in Iraq, we did our duties of patrolling the streets, VIP escorts, escorts, patrolling the streets mostly, and escort was our main mission, but we didn't have anything to do with the prison.
All right, now, so you were there for the first six months of Guantanamo Bay, and it says here in the CNN article, you told her, you were told on the first day, the Geneva Conventions don't apply here, this is a brand new thing, but then it also says that they didn't really give you any more instructions than that, just what the rules weren't anymore, but none of what the rules are?
Yeah, before we ever left the United States on Saturday, actually, I flew to Guantanamo on a Sunday, and that Saturday, we were told there was no rules, that the Geneva Convention wasn't going to be held to the effect that there was no standing operating procedure, there were no rules, the detention facility had never been ran before, because this was, you know, never done before, because these guys were not enemies, prisoners of war, they fell under the category of detainee, and we'd literally be writing a book as we went.
As we were told, if it didn't work one day, we tried it a different way the very next day until we figured out how to work.
I mean, if you go back and look now, the first official SOP came out until late 2002, so for the whole time I was there, we didn't operate under any kind of SOP standards or anything, we just kind of did as we pleased and trial and error.
Well, and even then, was it at that point, that was when the MORA, the General Council of the Navy was, I think the Navy was objecting to Rumsfeld and forcing the military at least to stop carrying out the CIA-like tortures?
Not in the initial days when I was there, no.
I mean, at the point where you finally got the SOP?
Yeah, the whole time I was there, we never had an official SOP.
Oh, the entire time you were there?
Oh, that's right, you were only there for the first six months, you said?
Yeah, when I was there, we didn't have it, I was just saying, you know, if you go look for the SOP, you don't see one that doesn't come out until late 2002, up until then, there was no official SOP.
All right, now, a big part of this, I don't think could be overstated, best I understand it anyway, is the fact that you guys were told that every one of these guys is the worst of the worst terrorist bad guys, they attacked us, they're the 9-11 perpetrators, etc., like that, when in fact, in Afghanistan, they had bucked the procedure, you know, same for suspending the prisoners of war rules, they bucked the entire procedure for figuring out who's who and who needed to be detained as a prisoner of war at all, they were basically just taking whoever they bought off the Pakistanis and whatever bounty hunters out there, and putting them on the plane to Cuba under the theory that, well, they'll figure it out in Cuba who's who, but on the other end of the chain, you guys thought that they'd already figured out who was who, and so you were told basically to go ahead and take out all your frustrations on these men, they're the ones who did the thing.
Yeah, true.
We were told that everybody that arrived at Guantanamo was guilty, they either helped or had knowledge of the 9-11 attacks.
We were told from day one that they were all caught fighting American soldiers on the battlefield, and they were all guilty.
And as we all know now, that's a big lie.
I think the fact is something like 95% of the detainees that were at Guantanamo were actually given by foreign forces and actually were bought for bounties, I think only 3-5% of them were actually picked up by American forces.
I mean, as you know, most people know now, hundreds upon hundreds of people were held at Guantanamo were innocent, and the fact is that the government, you know, Donald Rumsfeld and all of them from day one knew that a lot of guys were being held there were just sheep herders, farmers, just, you know, market workers.
And, you know, as you know, Lawrence Wilkerson stated that years later in an affidavit that the government knew from day one that hundreds of people were innocent.
You know, they were actually putting people in Guantanamo, locking people in Guantanamo for just wearing one of those cheap Casio watches.
That was one of the standards they had back then was if anybody was wearing a cheap watch, Casio watch, they would be sent to Guantanamo because they were supposed to be hardened terrorists.
Right, because yeah, that was the Casio watch that Ramzi Youssef used to blow up that plane in 96 or whatever.
So this is a terrorist watch.
Anyone with that watch is a terrorist since it's a terrorist watch.
That's Rumsfeld logic for you there.
I've never heard it.
All right, well, so give us some horrible anecdotes.
Brandon, what happened there?
What did you do there?
Yeah, the first day Guantanamo opened, I actually was involved in the very first incident that took place, that took place there in Sikant X-ray.
Me and my escorting partner, we were escorting a detainee from in-processing to Alpha Block where he was to be housed at.
When we took control of him, he wouldn't move.
He was shaking real bad.
So we yelled at him and pretty much picked him up and carried him over to Alpha Block.
Once we got to the block, we placed him on his knees, took all his leg shackles, and when my escorting partner went to take his handcuffs off, the detainee began to move and move around and jerk his side towards my side.
And we started to yell at him not to move, and the interpreter began to scream at him.
Well, once he took the handcuffs off again, the detainee moved.
And when he moved, I just slammed him face first into the ground.
And I was on top of him.
And every time he tried to get up, I just pushed his head back into the cement.
And next thing I knew, the internal reaction force team, the five-man team, and Poole Rye here came in and pulled me off.
They had hog tied him.
And the guy laid on the concrete to the rest of it.
For a while, I don't know how long he was there.
But a couple days later, when I came back to the camp and was actually on the block working, I was told by an English-speaking detainee on the block that was there that told me the reason the guy moved was because he wasn't trying to really cause problems.
He thought when we placed him on his knees, he couldn't see that we were actually going to execute him.
So he thought he was going to be executed.
So pretty much moved to try to fight for his life.
So I found that out and got to know the detainee.
He never was no problem at all.
I didn't feel too good about the whole situation.
And I guess that was the worst one.
That's the one that you always think of.
Did you ever get a chance to apologize to the guy that you didn't understand and you didn't understand that he didn't understand?
No, I never spoke to the guy.
He didn't speak English.
And still to this day, that being the first incident and the one that I was mainly involved in, I still can't pinpoint back to who the detainee was that day.
I've tried, but it's just one of those things that I always think about, and it speaks with you, is being involved in the very first incident that ever happened in San Juan, Tonvo.
And it pretty much happened because there was a lack of communication.
Now that we know a lot of what the translators were even trying to tell some of these detainees, they didn't speak the same dialect, so they couldn't even tell them what we were telling them.
And we didn't know that at the time.
We figured the translators obviously know what they're doing, and now we know that they didn't know what they were doing.
Right.
Well now, best we know anyway, the CIA and military torture down at Guantanamo has stopped as far as torture during interrogation and so forth.
And yet they still are subject constantly to these IRF teams, the guys that came to back you up when you got into that struggle.
Can you tell us a little bit?
Actually, you know what?
We'll have to hold that because we're about to hit the time wall here and go out to this break.
So I'll ask you more about the IRF teams when we get back.
Everybody, it's Brandon Neely.
He was a military policeman, was there for the first six months of Guantanamo Bay during the worst of it, although he wasn't an interrogator or anything like that.
And he's taking responsibility for his role, and he's trying to make things right by telling the truth to people like you and me.
I think it's worth hearing.
So hold it right there, and we'll be right back with him after this.
Read the recent piece about him at cnn.com as well.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Brandon Neely, former military policeman down there at Guantanamo Bay and subject of this article at cnn.com, ex-Guantanamo guard, tells of violence against detainees.
And did they show this on TV, Brandon?
I don't think so.
I have really no clue as far as it got shown on TV or not.
They didn't film it?
They just, what, talked to you on the phone or what?
Yeah, I talked to him on the phone months ago.
I really had no clue the article was even coming out the other day.
Huh.
Months ago, huh?
That's interesting.
All right.
Well, so now tell us about this, what's an IRF team?
How's it work?
Now, when I was there, we called it the Internal Reaction Force Team.
I think now they call it the Media Reaction Force Team.
The reason we call it the Internal Reaction Force Team back then is because in the early days of Guantanamo, we had an IRF team or Internal Reaction Force Team inside that consists of the Army guys that took care of detainees, obviously took care or dealt with detainees that were supposedly brulee.
And also on the outside, we had an External Reaction Force Team, which consists of Marines that were supposed to get in full riot gear and come in if there was a massive riot that went right outside the gate.
But during those days, and still now, what the IRF team is, or the IRF team as it's become used, is a five-man team that's in full riot gear, like you would see in any state prison facility, you know, the full riot gear with the shield and the mask.
And basically, you're trained, the one man carries a shield, he's trained to come in there and hit the detainee as hard as he can, put him up against the cage.
And the two man comes in, takes control of the left arm, three man right arm, four left leg, and so on, and take the detainee down and halt timer or subdue him.
But the fact is that the IRF team was used in such a way that it became very, I mean, it was wrong.
You know, I went to Guantanamo with the premises, all these guys were guilty.
And really, I wasn't, I'll be honest, and I've always been honest, like, I really wasn't worried how we treated these people, because here these people were, that, you know, had planned 9-11, took part and killed all these people here in the United States.
And basically, I thought whatever they got, they deserved.
Well, and your commanding officers were reinforcing that opinion, weren't they?
Oh, yeah, true.
Yeah, I mean, and every day we went inside Camp X-ray, and Guantanamo, we were told, you know, these guys were killed in a heartbeat.
And that was my logical thinking, but, and I went along with it.
And I've always been honest about it.
But the day that I really started, I didn't start doubting about some of the treatment that was going on.
I just didn't think that that's the way the United States really was, that this wasn't what you, you know, you know, that, you know, these aren't the values, and these aren't the principles and the morals that we try to preach to other countries about how they should treat prisoners and prisoners of war.
And here we are doing it.
There was an incident on block, on Bravo block, with a detainee by the name of Juma.
Supposedly, he had made a comment to a female guard.
They had called the internal reaction force team to the block.
And I was in the back with him, and I wasn't doing, I was doing escort duties.
I wasn't doing nothing.
So, being nosy and curious, I followed him along and watched him right outside the block.
And they went and told Juma.
They lined up outside the cage door.
They told Juma to turn around, put his hands on his head, get on his knees.
He kind of looked at him at first.
He didn't understand.
They unlocked the door.
They unlocked the cage door.
They didn't take the lock off.
As soon as they unlocked it, Juma turned around, got on his knees, put his hand on his head.
Cage door was open.
The number one man took his shield, threw it to the side.
About three to four feet, he had, he had enough room to get a little running start.
He jumped up right on the back of Juma with his knee, started punching him.
And the other four guys followed along, and they punched and kicked on Juma.
The next thing you know, they called for the female guard, and they had told her to hit Juma on the ground.
She struck Juma a couple times.
They hogtied Juma, and they stood up.
And when they stood up, you could see there was a pool of blood all around the cell and all around the cage floor.
And the Navy medics had to come in with the stretcher, put him on an ambulance, and take him to the, actually take him to the main hospital there that day.
And Juma was there for a couple days, had some stitches and whatnot.
But that night when they came back, it was such a serious issue.
When I was talking to a lot of the guys, and we were out talking around the tents where we lived was, um, uh, the, uh, one of the NCOs that was involved, one of the noncommissioned officers made the comment, well, I never heard my name in war crimes in the same sentence so many times.
And somebody made the comment, well, where's the videotape?
And then they were told, well, don't worry about the videotape.
The videotape's been taken care of.
Well, back in those days, and even now, all earthing incidences are supposed to be videotaped, but the way around it was.
And from what I understand from people I've talked to that are serving Guantanamo over the last couple years, what still happens is either cameras pointed at the floor, they put the biggest guy at the end so the camera can't see what's going on, or the tapes just come up missing.
Kind of like how the CIA destroyed a bunch of tapes.
Same thing's happening with the IRF team.
Um, but the thing about it is, Juma was released without charge.
He was completely innocent.
Um, when Juma actually left Guantanamo, he ended up surgery on his intestines from the earthing incident.
And, uh, the thing was, was Juma has to take, has to take medication to level him off.
He's not, I guess you would say he's kind of off.
You know, he, he didn't understand what was going on there.
And, uh, you don't, you don't see the stories of like Juma.
The guys are out, got a good career, got married.
He's got a job at some IT computers and he's living his life.
You only hear about the one or two guys that get out and, you know, and want to go join the fight at Jihad or whatever.
You don't hear about all the guys that get out and were innocent or live their lives there every day.
They just want to put those one or two out there.
But yeah.
Well, and you know, I just think Brandon, that point cannot be emphasized enough.
I mean, I just imagine some guy driving by his truck.
We're talking about Guantanamo where this guy in his pickup still believes like you were told the first six months of this thing, that all these people are terrorists, they're all guilty or they wouldn't be there in the first place, et cetera.
And so who cares what happens to them.
But in fact, as you said at the beginning of this interview, the vast majority of the almost 800 people detained in Guantanamo Bay have been simply set free.
And the only convictions they've gotten, I might add, are the chauffeur, the cook, and then a plea bargain out of David Hicks, who never was Al-Qaeda, just friends with the Taliban, and against Omar Khadr, the 15-year-old that they tortured into admitting he threw a grenade.
We all know he never threw.
Yeah.
I mean, the fact is, too, I argue with people all the time is, say, even if everybody there was guilty, which they're not, but it still doesn't give us the right to treat the people that we have the way we have.
Right.
Absolutely.
The fact is, if this would happen to one of our soldiers, you always hear people say about, well, look how Al-Qaeda treats our people.
They cut off their heads.
You know, just like I had done an interview one time on TV, and I took a lot of flack for it, was, okay, they did it.
It happened.
The fact is that you can't go to the level of a terrorist organization.
You can't go to the level.
It's just like when you raise your kids, you tell your kids to be above the bullying.
Don't start bullying people, because it makes it worse.
The fact is that Guantanamo is a black eye on the country around the world.
It's going to continue to be that way.
The fact is that Obama's come in and said he was going to close Guantanamo.
It hasn't happened.
He's not going to do the military commission court.
He just basically rewrote the book his way, and it's still happening.
And I will always believe, until a government in the United States admits to what happened inside of Guantanamo, is that the world's never going to get over it.
It's been the biggest recruiting tool as far as terrorists that, I mean, other than Iraq, that we could have.
Al Qaeda used it as a propaganda tool to recruit people into the movement.
I mean, CIA officials have gone on record and said that when they interrogated true terrorists, they said the main thing they used to get people to join the movement was Guantanamo and the treatment of their prisoners there.
And it's done more harm than good, and it's very frustrating and very sad for me to look around in this country and see the people that try to make the case that torture is okay.
That's just like me saying, well, somebody steals my car, so it's okay for me to go steal his car.
It doesn't work that way.
You can't treat people that way.
You're going to make a lot of people mad, and that's what we've done.
Well, you know, really what it is is we've adopted this, you know, basically Israeli strategy of just showing them that we mean business so much.
We're so tough that they will just never bomb us again because they'll be so afraid of us, or something like that, when obviously the entire war on terrorism should be handled the same way an FBI agent would interrogate a single terrorist, which is, you know what, man?
You tell us everything you know.
We can get some medical care for your wife, and we could probably make sure that you get a medium security prison instead of the worst one and whatever.
You make friends with people.
You show them, look, we're not the devil.
We don't deserve to be attacked like this.
We're the good guy.
And actually, hell, we're a better friend to you than the people you're working for.
Just look at us, whatever.
That's how they flipped the guys that did all the testifying in the embassy trials.
I mean, there was one of Bin Laden's right hand men, the guy that ran Bin Laden's money for him in the 1990s.
Bin Laden wouldn't give him the money for his wife to get surgery.
The Americans would.
And that was it.
That's all it took to get him to flip.
The whole terror war ought to be fought with a strategy like that.
We're nice guys.
We're not torturers.
We're not imperialists.
Hell, we were just trying to protect you from the Russians, but we didn't mean no harm, whatever like that.
That's the strategy if you really want to destroy Al-Qaeda.
And they know that.
They must know that.
Yeah.
And another fact, I think people really a lot of public doesn't know is the fact that when people like myself, whether you're a guard, you're an interrogator, you're a medic, you're whatever you did at Guantanamo, when you leave there, they tell you that you can't talk.
They force you and they tell you that you can't go home unless you sign a non-disclosure statement stating that you won't talk to the media, you won't make a movie, you won't write a book, or you will be prosecuted.
And the fact is that a lot of people don't even know that there's been individuals within the last year that have spoken to people like, as you know, like Jason Leopold from Truthout, who actually gave Jason a small piece of what he would call Guantanamo, and was kicked out of reserves, was barred from realistic and was told he would be classified information, which is completely false.
And they know it.
They cannot even tell.
I mean, it was the whole fact is non-disclosure statement.
And we finally got a hand on a non-disclosure statement, which for the last three years, we've tried to get our hands on.
I mean, it states in there that, I mean, they can prosecute for anything, whether it's when you get out or anything.
And the fact is, all I've always said is that even the detainees leave, whether you're innocent or guilty, or whatever you, you pled guilty in a court or a military commissions act or whatever, is that they're even told they can't talk about what happened in there.
They have to sign a piece of paper saying the United States treated them above and beyond.
And then they talk about recidivism rate of detainees, of guys that get out.
I don't think people realize either that if any of them make a comment about, well, I was treated poorly by the United States, nine times out of 10, these guys go on a list that they're back in terrorism because they made an anti-American remark, because they spoke out against their treatment.
And these guys are part of that percentage.
The guys I went and visited in London, two guys who are plumbers now are on that list because they spoke out and made a movie about the treatment of Guantanamo.
But the people around the world will never know the true effects that Guantanamo has had, not only on the detainees, but also the soldiers that have had to watch and take part in the abuse and watch the interrogations and watch the tortures behind their two-way mirrors.
The guys that had to lock short shackled detainees in the room, turn on the music, turn the AC down, or turn the heat all the way up.
The guys that did this, nobody will ever know the true effects from these guys, either, because they're too scared to talk, and the government is going to prosecute.
And that's the sad part about it, is that you've got a whole generation of soldiers out there that have been there and have messed up as guys that have fought in the front lines of Iraq for years, and I never realized from guys that were just at Guantanamo how it messed them up mentally for the last couple years, and I got to know a lot of people.
And there's guys that are alcoholics who can't even build themselves because the treatment they either took part in, they witnessed, or they didn't say nothing.
But the government will refuse to let these people talk, and they will go nothing to stop them from talking, and it's wrong.
And they will spend more money trying to prosecute a whistleblower than they will trying to prosecute somebody that's out here torturing people.
It's just, it's ridiculous.
It's un-American, it's unethical, and it just really pisses me off, to be honest.
It's just, it's wrong.
Yeah.
All right, well, we're all out of time.
Actually, over time, and I got to cut you loose here, but I want to thank you very much for your time, Brant.
I appreciate it.
Take care.
You too.
