US running a string of global torture prisons: American journalist

American author and radio host Stephen Lendman says the United States is running a “string of torture prisons” around the world and that it has put innocent people at the Guantanamo Bay military prison in order to experiment on them.

Lendman made these stunning remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Saturday while commenting on a recent report which says that the US military officials are considering relocating Guantanamo detainees to Colorado State Penitentiary and have started assessing eligibility of the facility.

“On day one in office [President Barack] Obama pledged by the end of his first year, which was 2009, Guantanamo would be closed, and would be done with this thing,” Lendman said.

“Of course, what he didn’t mention even if he followed through on that, which he did not, because Guantanamo is still open - but Guantanamo is only the tip of the iceberg - America runs a string of global torture prisons, which is what I call them. They were in many many countries around the world,” he stated.

“Other countries collaborated with America running these facilities, and America has its own facility running on its own, including maybe some in America. Americans even don’t know about [them],” he added.

“But there are many of these prisons, and most of the people in them are not criminal. They are in for political reasons, or in the case of the Afghan war, literally, individuals were sold to America for bounty,” the analyst noted.

“Pakistan collaborated with Washington on this. They would arrest people, like Aafia Siddiqui – a glorious Pakistani-American, a PhD, just an extraordinary woman,” Lendman said.

“She has been in US custody for many years. Brutally tortured, not the same person she was many years ago, and sentenced to 86 years in prison, for doing absolutely nothing,” the journalist said.

Siddiqui vanished in Karachi with her three children in March 2003, when Pakistan was under the military rule of General Pervez Musharraf.  The following day, local newspapers reported that she had been abducted by US forces and charged with terrorism.  

Human rights groups say that Siddiqui was secretly transferred to the US base in Bagram, north of Kabul, and tortured for five years prior to the alleged incident in 2008. She was taken to the US in July 2008 and then convicted in the New York court in February 2010.

Siddiqui is currently detained at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, which provides specialized medical and mental health services to female prisoners.

Lendman said that “everybody in Guantanamo now, and everybody there from the beginning, from the first arrival, back in 2001 and 2002, everyone of them was a political prisoner, everyone of them was sold either as a Taliban or as an al-Qaeda.”

“And people selling them received the bounty. I think, the amount was something like 5,000 or 10,000 dollars for a Taliban member and 25,000 dollars – I remember that figure - for an al-Qaeda,” he said.

“America knew that these were innocent people, but they wanted to experiment on them. They wanted to keep them there. They wanted to convince American citizens that there was war on terror going on, and America was rounding up these bad people and putting them away in a safe place so they couldn’t commit terrorism on US soil,” the analyst pointed out.

“And it’s all a complete fabrication. It’s been fabrication from the start. The only war on terror going on is a war of terror by America and its allies on humanity, literally,” he observed.

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