Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files and a regular contributor to the World Can’t Wait website, recently gave a seminar at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in London. This foundation has four centers in the U.K., and in the past 23 years has had referrals from 45,000 victims of torture in over 100 countries.
As Andy wrote on his website, "The topic of the seminar was "Stories from Guantánamo," and it gave me the opportunity to run through a condensed history of Guantánamo, as related in my book The Guantánamo Files, specifically looking at how it came about that a regime of torture was introduced at Guantánamo. Primarily, this was because those who ended up there – mainly a mix of innocent men and Taliban foot soldiers – had no "intelligence" to provide, but were regarded as having been trained to resist interrogation by al-Qaeda.
The full talk, which was filmed, was about 45 minutes in length, and a short excerpt, dealing with an allied topic, the CIA’s program of "extraordinary rendition" and torture in secret prisons, which led to the transfer into Guantánamo of between 60 and 80 of the 779 prisoners who have been held at the prison throughout its history, is available on the front page of the Medical Foundation’s website".