Afghan Says He Wasn’t Tortured at Guantanamo

An Afghan man freed from the U.S. detention center for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said Saturday that he was stripped naked and photographed the day he arrived, but was not tortured during three years at the camp. He said his interrogators asked over and over: “Do you know Osama?”

Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, 42, said he and his brother were arrested at their home in Pakistan on Nov. 17, 2001, by Pakistani intelligence agents and eventually taken to the U.S. military base at Bagram, north of the Afghan capital, Kabul. After about 11 weeks there, he was flown to Guantanamo.

“First I was questioned by Pakistani security men. Then American men and women also started to interrogate me. They had only one question: Do you know Osama?” Dost said, referring to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“I told them that you have made Osama so popular that even children and mad people know him very well,” he said.

The same line of questioning continued at Guantanamo, with American interrogators also asking him whether he had anything to do with Taliban leaders.

“I told them I had nothing to do with Osama or the Taliban,” Dost said from the home he shares with his wife and eight children in this frontier city.

Dost was set free in Afghanistan on Tuesday. The next day he traveled to Peshawar.

He said he had once worked for three Afghan magazines said to be sympathetic to the Taliban, and had once belonged to an Afghan rebel group, but had severed those ties.

“I committed no crime against the Americans or anyone else,” Dost said.