Detention. Humiliation. Torture. The world can only guess at the horrors of Camp X-Ray. But now Brandon Neely, a former guard, wants to tell the shocking story of what happened there – and why it shames America.
I am very ashamed to admit it and tell you that I was involved in the very first IRFing (internal reaction force) incident at Camp X-Ray. On the first day we had been taking detainees from the in-processing centre to their cages for quite a while when myself and the guy that was my escorting partner grabbed the next detainee to be taken. He was probably in his mid to late fifties – short and kind of husky build. I remember grabbing him and then starting to walk first through the rocks and then through the sally port [a long walkway with gates on both sides] heading towards Alpha Block. Then I noticed he was really tense, shaking really bad, and not wanting to walk or move without being forced to do so. We made our way to Alpha Block, to the cage he would be placed in. He was instructed to go to his knees, which he did.
My partner then went down and took off his leg shackles. I still had control of his upper body, and I could still feel him tensing up. Once the shackles were off my partner started to take off the handcuffs. The detainee got really tense and started to pull away. We yelled at him: “Stop moving!” Over and over. Then he stopped moving, and when my partner went to put the key in that first handcuff, the detainee jerked hard to the left towards me. Before I knew it, I threw the detainee to the ground and was on top of him holding his face to the cement floor.
At this time my partner had left the cage. The block NCOIC [Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge] was on the radio yelling code red, which meant emergency on the block. Before I knew, I was grabbed from behind and pulled out of the cage by the IRF team. They grabbed this man and hog-tied him. He laid there like that for hours before he was released from that position.
A couple days later, I found out from a detainee who was on that block that the older detainee was just scared and that when we placed him on his knees he thought he was going to be executed. He went on to tell me that this man had seen some of his friends and family members executed on their knees. I can remember guys coming up to me after it was over that night and said: “Man, that was a good job; you got you some.”
The Independent
