PHOTO SHAKER AAMER RECREATES BEING 'HOG-TIED' FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY


One of the worst tortures Shaker Aamer endured at American hands while he was being held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan was to be ‘hog-tied’ – left trussed up on the floor face down, bent backwards into the shape of a bow, with ankles and wrists tied together.
Last week, in a lawyer’s office in Camden Town, North London, he demonstrated it for The Mail on Sunday. ‘It is amazing – a lot of people don’t understand this mechanism. It is very horrible, let me show it to you,’ he said, getting up from his chair to lie on the carpeted floor. His legs and wrists would already be tied together, he explained, ‘and they bring your legs up all the way and tie them close to your arms’.
But his torturers added an exquisite refinement: a further, very tight tie threaded around each bicep, used to bind his upper arms closely together. That meant that if he tried to relax, by letting his chest sink to the floor, the blood supply to his arms was cut off, causing excruciating pain: ‘It kills you, man. You cry, the pain is so bad.

Aamer said he was in agony for 45 seconds and was bound for 45 minutes at a time when he was 'hog-tied'
The only way to avoid this agony was to raise his head, neck and chest, deepening the concave bow made by his spine. But in just a few minutes, this too became excruciating. Shaker said: ‘It digs into your wrists. It cuts the blood in your hands, it cuts the blood in your feet and everything.’
He still suffers severe back pain as a result of this treatment. At Shaker’s urging, this newspaper’s reporter tried to adopt the position he had demonstrated. In just seconds, I experienced a stab of pain as my left thigh went into a cramp. I tried to hold the position a few moments longer, but the pain in my lower back was becoming unendurable.
‘They did that to me twice, once for almost an hour,’ Shaker said. ‘They were kicking me at the same time. I thought I was going to lose my legs.




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