Thread by @MansoorAdayfi

#GITMO20
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20 years ago, I was sent to #Guantánamo after being sold to the US for bounty. I was 19 years old and didn’t know much about the US. What I learned, I learned at Guantánamo.

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The Bush administration said that prisoners held at Guantánamo were all illegal combatants and weren’t covered under the Geneva Conventions.

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We lived in dog kennels at Camp X-Ray for the first months, where we weren’t allowed to talk, stand, or pray together. We weren’t told where we were or why we were being detained.

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We didn’t have lawyers or contact w/ our families or the outside world. We were harassed, beaten & interrogated nonstop for years.

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We learned not to see all Americans thru the filter of Guantánamo. We saw guards punished for not beating us. We saw James Yee, the Muslim Chaplain, arrested and harassed for doing his job and treating us humanely.

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I wrote about some of these guards in my book. In 20 years, no one who entered Guantánamo left unharmed. 9 prisoners died at Guantánamo. Some guards committed suicide after serving there.

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Some in the US govt would like to forget Guantánamo, the 780 men who were held there, and the thousands of men rendered to black sites.

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Help us remind the world that Guantánamo exists and is still open, that the US did torture, harass, arbitrarily detain, and treat inhumanely hundreds of prisoners at Guantánamo and thousands in prisons around the world.

What can you do? Endorse and share the letter to Biden I wrote w/ @Moazzam_Begg, Lakhdar Boumediane, Sami Al Hajj, Ahmed Errachidi, Mohammed Ould Slahi & Moussa Zemmouri closingguantanamotogether.com/former-guantan…

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Share this Twitter thread as part of our #GITMO20 Twitter Storm.

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Read our stories and share them with others so that we all remember what happened; so that we don't forget the ones who remain in prison. #DontForgetUsHere hachettebooks.com/titles/mansoor…