Following are excerpts from an interview with Walid Muhammad Hajj a Sudanese released from Guantanamo Prison, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on December 12, 2010: [...]
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Yes. The most common method to wear down the brothers was witchcraft.
Interviewer: How did they do this?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: There were, of course, Jews among the [staff of] the Guantanamo Base, and they would set traps for the guys.
Interviewer: Give me an example of witchcraft.
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Witchcraft was used on most of the guys.
Interviewer: They would cast a spell on them?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Yes, but by the grace of Allah, through frequent reading of the Koran and invocation of the names of Allah, they managed to withstand this.
Interviewer: How did you know that somebody was under a spell?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Someone like that would change.
Interviewer: In what way?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: For example, somebody would take his clothes off, all of a sudden, or would sit on his bed for three days straight without sleeping.
[...]
They would use all kinds of witchcraft against the guys.
Interviewer: Tell me more.
Walid Muhammad Hajj: I will tell you how the witchcraft affected the guys. A person would suddenly see his brothers and sisters naked before him.
Interviewer: And they weren’t really there?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Absolutely not. It was as if he was in a different world.
Interviewer: You mean, his brothers and sisters from back home.
Walid Muhammad Hajj: That’s right. I remembered an incident with a guy who sat next to me in the morning. When they brought the milk, he began to urinate into the milk.
Interviewer: In front of you?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Yes. I said to him: “Why are you urinating in the milk?” That’s when we knew that he was under a spell. After he had recovered a little, after we read Koranic verses to him, he said to me: “The birds on the barbed wire would talk to me, and tell me to urinate in the milk. When the guards pass by my cell, the sound made by their pants talks to me.”
Interviewer: They tell him to urinate in the milk?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Yes.
[...]
Interviewer: Did they ever use witchcraft on you?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: There was one attempt.
Interviewer: How did they do it?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Once, when I was sleeping - on the floor, not on a bed - I suddenly felt that a cat was trying to penetrate me. It tried to penetrate me again and again. I recited the kursi verse again and again until the cat left
Instead of witchcraft they should have used dull saws on their throats the way the Muslims do to the Jews in their jails.
As Peter O’Toole says to Omar Sharif in Larry of Arabia: You are a little people; a silly people. Boy, did he have that right!