Army Specialist Brandon Neely
This is an excerpt from an interview with Army Specialist Brandon Neely by the University of California at Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas. Often overlooked in the torture debate is the effect of torture on the perpetrators.
There is a wonderful Danish documentary about this called “Your Neighbor’s Son: The Making of a Torturer.” Like Neely, the Greeks recruited to torture suspected Communist subversives were poorly educated and young, making them especially susceptible to the influence and authority of their commanders.
Neely: I did not feel good about what I did. It felt wrong. This man was old enough to be my father, and I had just beaten up on him. I still to this day don’t know who was more scared before and during this incident me or the detainee. I remember seeing him the next day when I walked into camp. His face was all bruised and scraped up. I was young and didn’t question anything back then. As I do nowadays. But even then, when I was as pissed off as anyone there, I felt ashamed of what I did. As the years have went on and the more I learn the more guilt I feel. This is one of the incidents from my time at Guantanamo that haunts me… I am fine with this being part of my tes timony. I want it to be told no matter how it makes me look. I believe it’s very important people know what happened there. I am sure there were (and are) a lot of detainees in Guantanamo that are guilty of something. But, on the other hand, there are a lot that are not guilty of nothing at all other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And no one, guilty or innocent, should be treated in the manner they have been.