The Hindu : International : New evidence of prisoner abuse at Bagram

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Feb 19, 2005

International

International

New evidence of prisoner abuse at Bagram

By Suzanne Goldenberg and James Meek

By Suzanne Goldenberg

and James Meek

WASHINGTON, FEB. 18. New evidence has emerged that U.S. forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse, taking ``trophy photographs'' of detenus and carrying out rape and sexual humiliation.

Documents obtained by the London-based Guardian newspaper contain evidence that such abuses took place in the main detention centre at Bagram, near the capital Kabul, as well as at a smaller U.S. installation near the southern city of Kandahar.

The documents also indicate that U.S. soldiers covered up abuse in Afghanistan and in Iraq — even after the Abu Ghraib scandal last year.

A thousand pages of evidence from U.S. army investigations released to the American Civil Liberties Union after a long legal battle, and made available to the Guardian, show that an Iraqi detained at Tikrit in September 2003 was forced to withdraw his report of abuse after soldiers told him he would be held indefinitely.

Mock executions

Meanwhile, photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing U.S. soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid ``another public outrage'', the documents show.

In the dossier, the Iraqi detenu claims that three U.S. interrogators in civilian clothing dislocated his arms, stuck an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, choked him with a rope until he lost consciousness, and beat him with a baseball bat.

``After they tied me up in the chair, then they dislocate my both arms. He asked to admit before I kill you then he beat again and again,'' the prisoner says in his statement.

``He asked me: Are you going to report me? You have no evidence. Then he hit me very hard on my nose, and then he stepped on my nose until he broken and I started bleeding.''

The detenu withdrew his charges on November 23 2003. He says he was told: ``You will stay in the prison for a long time, and you will never get out until you are 50 years old.'' —

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