U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases

U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080618/wl_mcclatchy/2969819


KABUL, Afghanistan - American soldiers herded the detainees into
holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were
corralling livestock.


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.


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.


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 .


"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."


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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 .


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


Sarwari thought that was a bad sign: The Americans, he thought, were
creating an island with no one to watch over them.


"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 .


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.


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.


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.


Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, "I believe the
injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required
amputation."


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.


"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 .


"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."


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.


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."


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.' "


On Berg's recommendation, the charges against Beiring were dropped,
and he was given a letter of reprimand.


"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."


The commander of the military intelligence section that worked
alongside Beiring's military police company at Bagram, Capt. Carolyn
Wood , declined to comment.


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.


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.


'EVERYBODY STRUCK A DETAINEE'


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.


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.


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.


Former detainees interviewed by McClatchy and by some human rights
groups, however, claimed that the violence was rampant from late 2001
until the summer of 2003 or later, at least 20 months.


Although they were at Bagram at different times and speak different
languages, the 28 former detainees who told McClatchy that they'd
been
abused there told strikingly similar stories:


-- Bashir Ahmad , a Pakistani who fought with the Taliban, said that
in the late spring or summer of 2003, U.S. troops would chain him to
the ceiling by his hands or feet. "Then they would punch me or hit me
with a wood rod," he said.


-- Brahim Yadel, a French citizen, said he was punched and slapped
during interrogations at Bagram in December 2001 .


-- Moazzem Begg , a British citizen, said he was assaulted regularly
at Bagram for most of 2002, until he was transferred to Guantanamo in
January 2003 .


-- Akhtar Mohammed , an Afghan, said that at Bagram during the spring
of 2003, "when they moved me to the interrogation room they covered
my
eyes, and took me up steep stairs. I always fell on the ground. And
when I fell down, they punched and kicked me."


-- Abdul Haleem , a Pakistani, said that U.S. soldiers threw him to
the ground at Bagram in 2003 and kicked him in the head, "like they
were playing soccer."


-- Adel al Zamel , a Kuwaiti, said guards frequently waved sticks at
him and threatened to rape him at Bagram during the spring of 2002.
During an interview in Kuwait City , Zamel shook his head and said he
remembered hearing detainees being beaten and "the cries from the
interrogation room" at Bagram.


He wasn't the only person to report sexual humiliation.


Sgt. Selena Salcedo , a U.S. military intelligence officer, said that
sometime between August 2002 and February 2003 she saw another
interrogator, Pfc. Damien Corsetti , pull down the pants of a
detainee
and leave his genitals exposed.


In a 2005 sworn statement in the court-martial of Corsetti, she said
she'd left the room and that when she'd returned the detainee was
bent
over a table and Corsetti was waving a plastic bottle near his
buttocks. She said she didn't know whether the detainee had been
raped.


Corsetti was acquitted of any wrongdoing. He didn't respond to a
request for comment submitted through his attorney. Salcedo pleaded
guilty to kicking a detainee - Dilawar - and grabbing his ears during
a December 2002 interrogation.


Soldiers who served at Bagram starting in the summer of 2002
confirmed
that detainees there were struck routinely.


"Whether they got in trouble or not, everybody struck a detainee at
some point," said Brian Cammack , a former specialist with the 377th
Military Police Company , an Army Reserve unit from Cincinnati . He
was sentenced to three months in military confinement and a
dishonorable discharge for hitting Habibullah.


Spc. Jeremy Callaway , who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at
Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was
uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the
detainees." He didn't go into detail.


"I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway, who served in the
377th from August 2002 to January 2003 .


Many human rights experts say the U.S. military began cracking down
on
detainee abuse at Bagram in 2004, in response to the public outcry
over pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq .


RETRIBUTION FOR 9-11


Asked why someone would abuse a detainee, Callaway told military
investigators: "Retribution for September 11, 2001 ."


When detainees first had their hoods removed on arriving at Bagram,
looming behind them was a large American flag and insignia of the New
York Police Department , a reminder of Sept. 11 .


Almost none of the detainees at Bagram, however, had anything to do
with the terrorist attacks.


Bovarnick, the former chief legal officer for operational law in
Afghanistan and Bagram legal adviser, said in a sworn statement that
of some 500 detainees he knew of who'd passed through Bagram, only
about 10 were high-value targets, the military's term for senior
terrorist operatives.


That hardly mattered.


Khaled al Asmr , a tall, gaunt Jordanian, was hauled off a U.S.
military cargo plane at Bagram in early 2002. Flown in from Pakistan
in heavy shackles and with a hood on his head, he was accused of
being
an al Qaida operative with possible connections to the Sept. 11
attacks.


Standing in an interrogation room, Asmr said, he'd already been
punched in the face several times by American guards. Two Americans
walked into the room, wearing civilian clothes. They pulled out
pistols and held them to either side of his head as a third American
man entered and walked up to Asmr, according to his account.


The third man leaned toward Asmr's face and whispered, his breath
warm, "I am here to save you from these people, but you must tell me
you are al Qaida."


Asmr, who told his story to a McClatchy reporter in Jordan , was
declared no longer an enemy combatant after a 2004 U.S. military
tribunal at Guantanamo. He said he'd known some al Qaida leaders, but
that was more than 15 years earlier, during the U.S.-backed Afghan
uprising against the Soviets.


Nazar Gul was of even less intelligence value. None of the Afghan
security or intelligence officials whom McClatchy interviewed said
they'd heard of Gul, making it unlikely that he was the dangerous
insurgent the U.S. said he was.


Gul's American attorney, Ruben L. Iniguez , went to Afghanistan and
Pakistan in 2006 to check the details of his story of working as a
guard for the Afghan government, and later said in sworn court
filings
- which included videotaped testimony by witnesses - and in an
interview with McClatchy that every fact checked out.


A LAWLESS PLACE


The mistreatment of detainees at Bagram, some legal experts said, may
have been a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of
war, which forbids violence against or humiliating treatment of
detainees.


The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to death for
such
mistreatment.


At Bagram, however, the rules didn't apply. In February 2002 ,
President Bush issued an order denying suspected Taliban and al Qaida
detainees prisoner-of-war status. He also denied them basic Geneva
protections known as Common Article Three, which sets a minimum
standard for humane treatment.


Without those parameters, it's difficult to say what acts were or
were
not war crimes, said Charles Garraway , a former colonel and legal
adviser for the British army and a leading international expert on
military law.


Bush's order made it hard to prosecute soldiers for breaking such
rules under the military's basic law, the Uniform Code of Military
Justice, in large part because defense attorneys could claim that
troops on the ground didn't know what was allowed.


In sweeping aside Common Article Three, the Bush administration
created an environment in which abuse such as that at Bagram was more
likely, said Garraway, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War
College .


"I think it's completely predictable, because you no longer have
standards," he said.


In 2006, Bush pushed Congress to narrow the definition of a war crime
under the War Crimes Act, making prosecution even more difficult.


UNTRAINED, UNDISCIPLINED


The military police at Bagram had guidelines, Army Regulation 190-47,
telling them they couldn't chain prisoners to doors or to the
ceiling.
They also had Army Regulation 190-8, which said that humiliating
detainees wasn't allowed.


Neither was applicable at Bagram, however, said Bovarnick, the former
senior legal officer for the installation.


The military police rulebook saying that enemy prisoners of war
should
be treated humanely didn't apply, he said, because the detainees
weren't prisoners of war, according to the Bush administration's
decision to withhold Geneva Convention protections from suspected
Taliban and al Qaida detainees.


The military police guide for the Army correctional system, which
prohibits "securing a prisoner to a fixed object, except in
emergencies," wasn't applicable, either, because Bagram wasn't a
correctional facility, Bovarnick told investigators in 2004.


"I do not believe there is a document anywhere which states that ...
either regulation applies, and there is clear guidance by the
secretary of defense that detainees were not EPWs," enemy prisoners
of
war, Bovarnick said.


Compounding the problem, military police guards and interrogators
lacked proper training and received little instruction from
commanders
about how to do their jobs, according to sworn testimony taken during
military investigations and interviews by McClatchy .


The guards who worked there from the summer of 2002 to the spring of
2003 were all reservists from the 377th Military Police Company ,
based in Cincinnati , and many of the military intelligence
interrogators serving at the same time were from the Utah Army
National Guard .


Good order and discipline had evaporated.


1st Sgt. Betty Jones said during a 2004 interview with investigators
that a fellow military police sergeant and his men on several
occasions were "drunk to the point that they could not go to duty."


Salcedo, the military intelligence soldier, said in her statement at
Corsetti's court-martial that she and others drank alcohol during
their time at Bagram, and at one point smoked hashish on the roof of
a
building.


Cammack told McClatchy that one of his sergeants drove a John Deere
Gator, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle, to a nearby town and traded
with locals for bottles of vodka.


"Really, nobody was in charge ... the leadership did nothing to help
us. If we had any questions, it was pretty much 'figure it out on
your
own,' " Cammack said. "When you asked about protocol they said it's a
work in progress."


PENTAGON RESPONSE


Senior Pentagon officials refused to be interviewed for this article.
In response to a series of questions and interview requests, Col.
Gary
Keck , a Defense Department spokesman, released this statement:


" The Department of Defense policy is clear - we treat all detainees
humanely. The United States operates safe, humane and professional
detention operations for unlawful enemy combatants at war with this
country."


No U.S. military officer above the rank of captain has been called to
account for what happened at Bagram.


The head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan when prisoners were being
abused at Bagram, then-Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill , declined an
interview
request. McNeill was later made the commander of all NATO forces in
Afghanistan , a post he held until recently.


His predecessor, then-Maj. Gen. Franklin L. "Buster" Hagenbeck , said
in an e-mail exchange that from late 2001 to 2002, his attention
wasn't on detainee facilities.


"Unfortunately, I have nothing to add to your reporting ... I was
focused on battling the Taliban and al Qaida, as well as
reconstruction and coordinating with the nascent Afghan government,"
Hagenbeck wrote. "I do not personally know of any abuses while I was
there, and we focused on treating all with dignity and respect -
even,
and perhaps especially, those persons in our custody."


Hagenbeck is now the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at
West Point .


Capt. Carolyn Wood , who led the interrogators at Bagram, was sent to
Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2003 and assumed control of interrogation
operations there that August.


A military investigation that followed the Abu Ghraib scandal - known
as the "Fay-Jones Report" for the two generals who authored it -
found
that from July 2003 to February of 2004, 27 military intelligence
personnel there allegedly encouraged or condoned the abuse of
detainees, violated established interrogation procedures or
participated in abuse themselves.


The abuse resembled what former Bagram detainees described.


A key factor in serious cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the report
found, was the construction of isolation areas, a move requested by
Wood, who said that "based on her experience" such facilities made it
easier to extract information from detainees.


Wood remains an active-duty military intelligence officer.


( Matthew Schofield contributed to this report from Paris and Lyon,
France .)