May 20, 04:59 PM
Secret report of abuse in Afghanistan
The NYTimes has an article this morning detailing human rights abuses carried out during 2002 at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan, a former Soviet airforce base that the United States used as a place to hold prisoners, interrogate them, and often move them on to Guantanamo.
This is a story that every American needs to read. We need to demand that the military and the Bush administration take full responsibility for these abuses, carrying out real policy changes rather than merely secret investigations and a few military trials of low-ranking soldiers. We need to understand that these human rights violations are, most importantly, a violation of America’s most fundamental principles, but also extremely counterproductive in fighting terrorism and maintaining world peace.
Reporter Tim Golden’s article largely based on a secret, 2,000-page internal report obtained by the Times, shows that abuse at the prison was widespread and brutal. Violence was common and seemingly random, often carried out, the article says, when the poorly trained interrogators and guards simply could not communicate with the detainees through their incompetent translators and took the inability to understand as resistance to interrogation. In other instances there doesn’t appear to have been any motivation except taking pleasure in cruelty.
Matters were made worse because instructions on the rules of handling detainees were unclear but seemed to condone abuse:
The platoon had the standard interrogations guide, Army Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners “humanely,” and when possible, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush’s final determination in February 2002 that the Conventions did not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they “could deviate slightly from the rules,” said one of the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.
“There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists,” Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.
We probably never would have learned much about the nightmare that was Bagram if the abuse had not led to two prisoners dying from their injuries, which (as Slate tells it) prompted the Times to start investigating in 2003, in turn spurring the military’s own investigation and the report.
Even then the details would have remained sketchy, as they had for the last two years, if “a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military’s response to the deaths” had not given the Times a copy of the report.
The report, and interviews that the Times carried out, show “a striking disparity,” as Golden puts it, between the official (secret) investigation and the deceptive stories that the military told the public.
Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were “in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques.”
In fact, as Golden says in an audio slide show on the Times’ Web site, reporter Carlotta Gall first discovered that the military’s story did not check out when in early 2003 she visited the family of one of the murdered detainees, a farmer and taxi driver known only as Dilawar, and found that they had been given a death certificate that they could not read. In Englsh, it listed the cause of death as homicide.
Golden’s article begins with story of how Dilawar was murdered, despite the fact that most of the interrogators at the base actually believed he was innocent.
Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.
The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar’s face.
“Come on, drink!” the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. “Drink!”
At the interrogators’ behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.
“Leave him up,” one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.
Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
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