“I would like to share with you how one goes about becoming a concentration camp guard without having made many decisions,” 24-year-old former Guantanamo prison guard Christopher Arent told a crowd of hundreds at last weekend’s Winter Soldier gathering outside Washington, DC.

“I was 17 years old when I joined the Army National Guard,” he said. “My family had just been displaced and I was living with friends. My family was poor, I was poor and I wanted to go to school. They promised me a significant amount of money toward that goal — funds I have yet to receive.”

Arent explained that he was initially happy with the Guard, but that his mood changed when he was deployed to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2003. There, he served in the detention operations centre of the prison, where he managed the movement of inmates from one part of the facility to another.

“I would get into the office at 4:30 in the morning and sometimes there would be an interrogation occurring in the interrogation room,” he said. “Inside the interrogation room, it would be 10 to 20 degrees [F.] with loud music playing. And there would be the detainee shackled to the floor by his hands and feet with nothing to sit on, with loud music playing in the freezing cold.”

After serving a tour at Guantanamo, Arent told the assembled veterans that he believes the mere existence of the prison is torturous.

Full article at IPSNews

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