My tortured journey with former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks

I wanted to approach this as a straight news story and simply report that Hicks was tortured, that he was abandoned by his country, used as apolitical pawn by Australia's former Prime Minister John Howard in his bid for reelection and forced to plead guilty to a charge of providing material support for terrorism in order to finally be freed from Guantanamo. But I've written so many of those reports and all of them end with a shrug here, some outrage there and no one being held accountable.

So, I've made the decision that I would expose my own vulnerability and tell you how my interview with the man dubbed the "Australian Taliban" has weighed heavily on my mind. I still cannot comprehend what could drive a human being to torture another human being. Hicks said, at Guantanamo, "torture was driven by anger and frustration."

"It seemed like a mad fruitless quest to pin crimes on detainees, to extract false confessions and produce so-called intelligence of value," Hicks told me. "The guards were desensitized and detainees dehumanized. Soldiers were not allowed to engage us in conversation. They were told to address us by number only and not by name. They were constantly drilled with propaganda about how much we supposedly hated them and wanted them dead and how much they needed to hate us. On occasion, when some groups of soldiers jogged around the camp perimeters I heard them sing lyrics such as, 'you hate us and we hate you.' One time in the privacy of Camp Echo a male soldier broke down when we were alone repeating, 'what have I become' after having arrived from an interrogation of a detainee in another camp."

Brandon Neely, a former Guantanamo Military Policeman (MP), who escorted Hicks off the bus at Camp X-Ray the day Guantanamo opened, said some soldiers tortured detainees because they wanted revenge for 9/11. He said that's the message that was passed down from above.

"We were told (by superior officers) all of the detainees, including Hicks, were the ones who planned 9/11 or had something to do with it," Neely said in an interview. "We were told over and over and over that all these guys were caught fighting Americans on the front lines and at any given time if we turned our back on them they would kill us in a heartbeat. We were told that everyday before we went to work inside the camps. After a while, the attitude was 'who cares how we treated the detainees.'"

A day before he left Fort Hood, Texas, for Guantanamo, Neely said his unit was told "by the company commander, the colonel and platoon sergeant that these people were not Prisoners of War. They were enemy combatants, detainees, and the Geneva Conventions would not be in effect."

George W. Bush did not formally rescind Geneva Conventions protections for "war on terror" detainees until February 7, 2002.

Neely told me a remarkable story about the hours before Hicks arrived at Camp X-Ray that underscores how impressionable he and his fellow soldiers were and how the US government conditioned its military personnel to view detainees as animals.

"When Hicks' bus got to Camp X-Ray we were told this guy was a mercenary, he was fighting Americans and we had to be real careful around him, Neely said. "We were actually told Hicks tried to bite through the hydraulic cables on the C-130 en route to Guantanamo. So everyone was on edge."

Neely was 21 when he was sent to Guantanamo. On June 2, 2002, his 22nd birthday, Neely received an "achievement medal" for "exceptional meritorious service while serving as a Military Policeman (MP) in support of Operation 'Enduring Freedom', Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Nearly seven years later, Neely went public and revealed details about the abuses he witnessed and one that he participated in while he was at Guantanamo. Like Hicks, who Neely said reminded him "of a guy I would have just gone out and have a beer with," he has been suffering all of these years. It was as if he were being tortured every time he saw or heard about a detainee being beaten or worse during the six months he worked at the prison facility. I can feel his pain. Literally.

Neely's a cop in Houston now. He's got a wife and three kids. He told me, "there has not been a day that goes by that I have not re-lived what I did or saw in Guantanamo." Hicks reached out to Neely last year after he saw him on a BBC special. Neely had flown to London to meet a couple of former British detainees he used to guard and to apologize for the way they were treated. He and Hicks are pretty close now.