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U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases
2008-06-19
This is the second part of McClatchy's Guantanamo: Beyond the Law, a five-part series that is available in full at www.mcclatchydc.com) Muzi.com News 10072528-0 (muzi.com) KABUL, Afghanistan - American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were corralling livestock. Muzi.com News 10072528-1 (muzi.com) The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling. Muzi.com News 10072528-2 (muzi.com) Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment. Muzi.com News 10072528-3 (muzi.com) The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq , but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul , and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan . Muzi.com News 10072528-4 (muzi.com) "I was punched and kicked at Bagram. ... At Bagram, when they took a man to interrogation at night, the next morning we would see him brought out on a stretcher looking almost dead," said Aminullah, an Afghan who was held there for a little more than three months. "But at Guantanamo, there were rules, there was law." Muzi.com News 10072528-5 (muzi.com) Nazar Chaman Gul , an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said. Muzi.com News 10072528-6 (muzi.com) When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years. Muzi.com News 10072528-7 (muzi.com) According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government. Muzi.com News 10072528-8 (muzi.com) When U.S. soldiers raided the house he was visiting, acting on a tip from a tribal rival who was seeking revenge against another man, they apparently confused Gul with a militant with a similar name - who was also imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to an Afghan intelligence official and Gul's American lawyer. Muzi.com News 10072528-9 (muzi.com) The eight-month McClatchy investigation found a pattern of abuse that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times , which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo, hasn't previously been revealed. Muzi.com News 10072528-10 (muzi.com) Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida's 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida. Muzi.com News 10072528-11 (muzi.com) Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay . Muzi.com News 10072528-12 (muzi.com) Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them. Muzi.com News 10072528-13 (muzi.com) In an effort to assemble as complete a picture as possible of U.S. detention practices, McClatchy reporters interviewed 66 former detainees, double-checked key elements of their accounts, spoke with U.S. soldiers who'd served as detention camp guards and reviewed thousands of pages of records from Army courts-martial and human rights reports. Muzi.com News 10072528-14 (muzi.com) The Bush administration refuses to release full records of detainee treatment in the war on terrorism, and no senior Bush administration official would agree to an on-the-record interview to discuss McClatchy's findings. Muzi.com News 10072528-15 (muzi.com) The most violent of the major U.S. detention centers, the McClatchy investigation found, was Bagram, an old Soviet airstrip about 30 miles outside Kabul . The worst period at Bagram was the seven months from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, when interrogators there used techniques that when repeated later at Abu Ghraib led to wholesale abuses. Muzi.com News 10072528-16 (muzi.com) New detainees were shoved to the floor of a cavernous warehouse, a former Soviet aircraft machine shop that stayed dim all day, and kept in pens where they weren't allowed to speak or look at guards. Muzi.com News 10072528-17 (muzi.com) The Afghan government initially based a group of intelligence officers at Bagram, but they were pushed out. Mohammed Arif Sarwari , the head of Afghanistan's national security directorate from late 2001 to 2003, said he got a letter from U.S. commanders in mid-2002 telling him to get his men out of Bagram. Muzi.com News 10072528-18 (muzi.com) Sarwari thought that was a bad sign: The Americans, he thought, were creating an island with no one to watch over them. Muzi.com News 10072528-19 (muzi.com) "I said I didn't want to be involved with what they were doing at Bagram - who they were arresting or what they were doing with them," he said in an interview in Kabul . Muzi.com News 10072528-20 (muzi.com) The rate of reported abuse was higher among men who were held at the U.S. camp at Kandahar Airfield . Thirty-two out of 42 men held there whom McClatchy interviewed claimed that they were knocked to the ground or slapped about. But former detainees said the violence at Bagram was much harsher. Muzi.com News 10072528-21 (muzi.com) The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002 , when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists. Muzi.com News 10072528-22 (muzi.com) Dilawar died on Dec. 10 , seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse , the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him. Muzi.com News 10072528-23 (muzi.com) Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation." Muzi.com News 10072528-24 (muzi.com) After Habibullah died, a legal officer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan asked two military police guards at Bagram to demonstrate how they'd chained detainees' wrists above their heads in a small plywood isolation cell. Muzi.com News 10072528-25 (muzi.com) "Frankly, it didn't look good," Maj. Jeff Bovarnick , the legal adviser for the Bagram detention center from November 2002 to June 2003 , said during a military investigation hearing in June 2005 . Muzi.com News 10072528-26 (muzi.com) "This guy is chained up and has a hood on his head," Bovarnick continued. "The two MPs that were demonstrating this took about five minutes to get everything hook(ed) up; and I was thinking to myself, if this was a combative detainee, it must have been a real struggle for them to get him to comply, and the things they must have been doing to make him comply." Muzi.com News 10072528-27 (muzi.com) The only American officer who's been reprimanded for the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar is Army Capt. Christopher Beiring , who commanded the 377th Military Police Company from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003. Muzi.com News 10072528-28 (muzi.com) Beiring told investigators that he'd received no formal training in leading a military police company, "just the correspondence courses and on-the-job training." Muzi.com News 10072528-29 (muzi.com) Then-Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg , the Army lawyer who investigated Beiring in the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar, argued that: "The government failed to present any evidence of what are 'approved tactics, techniques and procedures in detainee operations.' " Muzi.com News 10072528-30 (muzi.com) On Berg's recommendation, the charges against Beiring were dropped, and he was given a letter of reprimand. Muzi.com News 10072528-31 (muzi.com) "It's extremely hard to wage war with so many undefined rules and roles," Beiring said in a phone interview with McClatchy . "It was very crazy." Muzi.com News 10072528-32 (muzi.com) The commander of the military intelligence section that worked alongside Beiring's military police company at Bagram, Capt. Carolyn Wood , declined to comment. Muzi.com News 10072528-33 (muzi.com) The soldier who faced the most serious charges, Spc. Willie Brand , admitted that he hit Dilawar about 37 times, including some 30 times in the flesh around the knees during one session in an isolation cell. Muzi.com News 10072528-34 (muzi.com) Brand, who faced up to 11 years in prison, was reduced in rank to private - his only punishment - after he was found guilty of assaulting and maiming Dilawar. Muzi.com News 10072528-35 (muzi.com) 'EVERYBODY STRUCK A DETAINEE' Muzi.com News 10072528-36 (muzi.com) U.S. soldiers' testimony in military investigations after the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar suggested that detainee abuse at Bagram occurred from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, a period of about seven months. Muzi.com News 10072528-37 (muzi.com) Soldiers who served at Bagram before that time said detainees were never beaten. Col. Matthew Bogdanos , a Marine Reserves officer who worked there from December 2001 to April 2002 , said in an interview that none of the soldiers or American operatives he knew had resorted to abusing detainees. Muzi.com News 10072528-38 (muzi.com) An Army interrogator who was based at Bagram in the spring of 2002 and later wrote a book under the pseudonym of Chris Mackey for security reasons, said in an e-mail exchange that while soldiers pushed the limits - such as using stress positions and sleep deprivation - he never saw or heard of detainees getting beaten. Muzi.com News 10072528-39 (muzi.com)
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