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Afghan Prisoners Abused by U.S. Military to Retaliate for 9/11
By Anand Gopal, Christian Science Monitor
Posted on June 18, 2008, Printed on June 18, 2008
https://www.alternet.org/story/88620/
Dozens and perhaps hundreds of terrorism suspects held in U.S.
detention centers around the globe have been wrongfully imprisoned, an
investigation revealed on Sunday. The finding is the latest in a series
of allegations and setbacks in U.S. efforts to prosecute such suspects.
Analysts say that some of these setbacks may force Washington to
fundamentally change the way it approaches the detention of "enemy
combatants."
McClatchy newspapers' eight-month investigation of U.S. detention practices in 11 countries found that many of the wrongfully detained have also been abused. McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees and
spoke with former prison guards as well as several current and former
U.S. military legal advisers.
While international attention has
focused on abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the U.S. naval
base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, "sadistic violence" first appeared in
U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan.
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 [a U.S. detention base north of Kabul] 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
Guantánamo Bay.
The report goes on to say:
Specialist
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.
Asked why someone would abuse a detainee, Callaway told military investigators: "Retribution for September 11, 2001."
According to the McClatchy investigation, however, most detainees in Bagram were not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Major
Jeff Bovarnick, the former chief legal officer for operational law in
Afghanistan and Bagram legal adviser, said in a sworn statement that of
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.
In March, the Associated Press
reported that a U.S. military investigation revealed that detainee
abuse occurred at Bagram. In April, The New York Times reported that the U.S. turned over dozens of detained men to Afghan authorities, who then held secret trials where "witnesses [did] not appear in court and cannot be
cross-examined. There [were] no sworn statements of their testimony."
Instead, The Times writes,
[T]he trials
appear to be based almost entirely on terse summaries of allegations
that are forwarded to the Afghan authorities by the United States
military. Afghan security agents add what evidence they can, but the
cases generally center on events that sometimes occurred years ago in
war zones that the authorities may now be unable to reach.
"These
are no-witness paper trials that deny the defendants a fundamental
fair-trial right to challenge the evidence and mount a defense," said
Sahr MuhammedAlly, a lawyer for the advocacy group Human Rights First
who has studied the proceedings. "So any convictions you get are
fundamentally flawed."
The latest allegations by
McClatchy come at a moment when U.S. detention policy is suffering
major setbacks. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that habeas
corpus, or the right to challenge one's detention, applies to inmates
held at Guantánamo Bay, meaning that these detainees have the right to
challenge their detention in a court of law. The ruling undermines the
premise of U.S. detentions -- that prisoners are "enemy combatants" held during wartime and therefore not subject to Constitutional law, reports the BBC.
Analysts say that the ruling will change the way Washington detains and prosecutes prisoners, reports NPR .
"I
think that the decision today is the end of Guantanamo as we know it,"
said Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal, who represents one of the
detainees.
Andrew McBride, who
wrote a brief on behalf of former GOP attorneys general siding with the
administration, called it a watershed decision: "For the first time in
history, it does inject judicial supervision into the conduct of war."
The New York Times writes in a news analysis about Guantánamo:
"To
the extent that Guantánamo exists to hold detainees beyond the reach of
U.S. courts, this blows a hole in its reason for being," said Matthew
Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department.
And without that, much will change.
The decision granted detainees the right to challenge their detention
in civilian courts, meaning that federal judges will now have the power
to check the government's claims that the 270 men still held there are
dangerous terrorists. That will force officials to answer questions
about evidence that they have long deflected despite international
criticism and expressions of support, from President Bush on down, for
closing the camp.
The findings also come at a
time when U.S.- and Afghan-run prisons are under increased scrutiny in
Afghanistan. Taliban fighters attacked a prison in Kandahar on Friday,
resulting in the escape of hundreds of prisoners, reports The Christian Science Monitor. The prison had witnessed frequent protests because of alleged mistreatment. Last month, more than 200 inmates launched a week-long hunger strike in protest of dismal living conditions and abuse, the Associated Press reported.
[S]ome
of those on the hunger strike had been held without trial for over two
years. Others were given lengthy prison sentences after short trials. …
47 of the prisoners had stitched their mouths shut during the strike …
The
Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said … that the prisoners
had complained that foreign troops searched their homes on the basis of
faulty intelligence and that they were tortured and humiliated during
investigations.
These kind of lines always frightens me......
Good post (but thats nothing new to you lol)