Yay, Olympics! 8/30
Would you say the interrogations were torture? Well, I think probably, a lot of people might disagree, even some of my other detainees might feel like what they received wasn't torture. And relative to what someone might receive on a daily basis at a place like Gitmo it certainly is not particularly harsh. It's kind of like being a little bit pregnant, we were a little bit tortured. We were strapped into chairs in uncomfortable positions, we were put into cages with blood on the floor and told we would never live, we were sleep deprived the entire time. There was an interrogation every night and they kept us up all day. They never turned the lights off in the cells. We were fed food that was inedible, we were not given potable water. Any time you threaten and take the numbers of family members and take down home addresses, there's an element of mental torture there. There's physical torture in the form of us having to sit in uncomfortable positions all day long and spending the night strapped to a metal chair inside of a cage. We all have cuts and bruises from that, and some of my peers were beaten up a little bit.
Were there any Chinese nationals with you? No nationals, and that's basically why we do this, because there are Tibetans in exile, who would do what we did themselves, and put their lives on the line, but they're not issued passports. And Chinese nationals who would say something would be thrown into jail for the rest of their lives. So the next best thing is Americans of conscience who believe (like we did) they're not going to get detained, but simply deported. So yeah, we make sure there are no Chinese nationals involved and we don't take their assistance inside, and that's to protect those people who would suffer much worse consequences than us.
