The Practice of Torture by the American Army Was Widespread in Afghanistan
By Eric Leser
Le Monde
Tuesday 15 March 2005
Military reports, cited by Human Rights Watch, detail the treatment undergone by two Afghan prisoners who died in December 2002 at Baghram. The same interrogation techniques were then applied to detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. From our correspondent in New York.
American Army internal reports detailing the conditions under which two Afghan prisoners were beaten to death in December 2002 in Baghram prison, north of Kabul, demonstrate, according to the human rights defense organization Human Rights Watch, that the use of torture was systematic in Afghanistan. Close to thirty American soldiers could be indicted for having participated in the murders. Two of them from the 377th Military Police Company of Cincinnati (Ohio), Sergeant James Boland and Private Willie Brand, have been charged: for abuse and assault in the first case, for involuntary manslaughter in the second.
According to researcher and Afghanistan specialist for Human Rights Watch in New York John Sifton, who has obtained a clandestine copy of the Army's reports, the prisoners died in December 2002, a year before the photographs of tortures and humiliations were taken in the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison. "These documents are equivalent to police notes. They demonstrate the evolution of the inquiries, the testimonies, the proofs. The Bush Administration and the Pentagon describe the problems of torture as isolated incidents that are not part of an overall plan. The proofs show otherwise," Mr. Sifton explains to Le Monde. "The incidents are not isolated cases. We cannot assert that they were the norm, but Private Brand acknowledges, for example, that he beat some twenty other detainees. Blows and painful positions were used very frequently in Afghanistan. According to our own inquiries, almost all the prisoners who subsequently testified underwent abuse in 2002," he adds. The men of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion who established the interrogation methods at Baghram did the same thing later at Abu Ghraib. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched a suit to obtain the army's reports officially under the Freedom of Information Act; however, they have been refused, since the inquiry is not yet terminated and several indictments could still be pronounced. A Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Jeremy Martin, has asserted that "the investigations are being intensively conducted and ... [that] the guilty will be punished appropriately."
The two murdered prisoners were thirty-year-old Mullah Habibullah, the brother of a Taliban commander, and Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver. They died a week apart from one another and had been delivered to American troops by Afghan forces. The New York Times, in its March 12 edition, cites extracts from the reports Human Rights Watch obtained, which detail the treatments undergone.
"Violent Traumas"
The two detainees were "chained in their cells and frequently beaten." The investigators cite "credible information" according to which four guards regularly "kicked them in the groin and the legs," "threw them against walls and tables," "forced them to stay in painful positions during interrogations and poured water into their mouths until they suffocated."
The autopsies completed by doctors and cited in the reports indicate that Dilawar's legs were so damaged that amputations would have been necessary. Dilawar died of "violent trauma to the inferior extremities provoking coronary and arterial complications," according to a document dated July 6, 2004.
Mullah Habibullah died of a pulmonary embolism apparently linked to the presence of clots formed in his legs following blows received to them, according to a June 1, 2004 report.
Among the other soldiers under indictment, one "put his penis alongside the face" of a prisoner" and "simulated sodomization." "There were several other deaths in American prisons in Afghanistan before December 2002, and we would like to have information on this subject," explains John Sifton. He also wonders "the reason why, in this matter, in those at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, no member of American intelligence services, and notably of the CIA, has been indicted, even though they had overall control of the interrogations and the prisoners."
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