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Inside America's secret Afghan gulag

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1245055,00.html

'They said this is America . . . if a soldier orders
you to take off your clothes, you must obey'

We know about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but until now
Bagram and America's secret network of Afghan jails
have come under little scrutiny. In a major
investigation, Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg
discovered a familiar pattern of violent abuse and
sexual humiliation

Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg
Wednesday June 23, 2004 The Guardian

Syed Nabi Siddiqi, a 47-year-old former police officer
with piercing eyes and a long black beard, is lying
with his face pressed to the floor, his arms stretched
painfully behind his back. He is demonstrating one of
the milder humiliations and interrogation techniques
that he says happened to him after he was arrested by
the Coalition forces in Afghanistan last year as part
of Operation Enduring Freedom.

During the course of the next hour he will recount how
American soldiers stripped him naked and photographed
him, set dogs on him, asked him which animal he would
prefer to have sex with, and told him his wife was a
prostitute. He will tell also of hoods being placed
over his head, of being forced to roll over every 15
minutes while he tried to sleep, and of being kept on
his knees with his hands tied behind his back in a
narrow tunnel- like space, unable to move.

An in-depth investigation by the Guardian, including
interviews with former Bagram prisoners, senior US
military sources and human rights monitors in
Afghanistan, has uncovered widespread evidence of
detainees facing beatings, sexual humiliation and being
kept for long periods in painful positions. Detainees,
none of whom were ever charged with any offence, told
of American soldiers throwing stones at them as they
defecated and being stripped naked in front of large
groups of interrogators. One detainee said that, in
order to be released after nearly two years, he had to
sign a document stating that he had been captured in
battle when, in fact, he was arrested while driving his
taxi with four passengers in it.

At least five men have died while under detention,
three of which were classified as homicides. Two deaths
at Bagram airbase have been classified as homicides and
autopsies have indicated "blunt-force injuries". An
investigation into allegations of abuse and the deaths
in custody has just been completed by Brigadier General
Chuck Jacoby, the second highest-ranking US officer in
Afghanistan, and parts of it are due to be made public
next month.

While the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has come under the spotlight
of the international media as well as US investigators,
Bagram and the network of 19 US detention centres and
"fire bases" around Afghanistan have largely avoided
scrutiny. Until recently, human rights groups
investigating alleged abuses in Afghanistan were not
even sure how many of the secretive facilities existed.
While Bagram is visited regularly by the International
Committee of the Red Cross, witness testimonies suggest
that much of the abuse took place at these satellite
bases. Siddiqi's story and others like it involving
incidents from the end of the 2001 war to the present
day indicate that what has been happening in Abu Ghraib
is not an isolated occasion of rogue junior soldiers
acting independently, but part of an apparent strategy
of interrogation that was in place long before the
invasion of Iraq.

"In some ways, the abuses in Afghanistan are more
troubling than those reported in Iraq," said John
Sifton, the Human Rights Watch representative in the
area. "While it is true that abuses in Afghanistan
often lacked the sexually abusive content of the abuses
in Iraq, they were in many ways worse. Detainees were
severely beaten, exposed to cold and deprived of sleep
and water.

"Moreover, it should be noted that the detention system
in Afghanistan, unlike the system in Iraq, is not
operated even nominally in compliance with the Geneva
conventions. The detainees are never given an
opportunity to see any independent tribunal. There is
no legal process whatsoever and not even an attempt at
one. The entire system operates outside the rule of
law. At least in Iraq, the US is trying to run a system
that meets Geneva standards. In Afghanistan, they are
not."

A 'human sifting station'

An hour's drive from Kabul, on a dusty plain beneath
the majestic, snow-topped Panjshir mountains, sits
Bagram airbase. Outside the heavily guarded and
sandbagged main gate is a gaggle of small boys,
hustling DVDs of The Passion of the Christ and the
Baywatch satire, Son of the Beach, to GIs. Fleets of
trucks delivering fuel to the base wait in the sun for
clearance. Built in 1976, Bagram, formerly a military
centre for the Soviet forces, consists of three main
hangars, a control tower and various other single-
storey buildings, of which the detention centre is one.

Prisoners describe the cells as five by 10 metres, with
a large bucket serving as a toilet in the corner of
each cell and blankets for beds. The cells, which house
between 10 and 15 prisoners, are separated from each
other with wire fencing. They occupy the middle of what
one detainee called a "factory-like" space, with armed
US guards in corridors on each side. Prisoners are
taken from there to an interrogation facility, where
they are interviewed by both military and CIA personnel
and, according to one detainee, they are filmed during
this process and watched by other interrogators in
another room.

Some of the detainees are released after a few weeks;
others stay for many months; some are transferred to
Guantanamo Bay; still others are subjected to what is
referred to by one human rights organisation as
"RPing", or "Rumsfeld Processing". These are the
prisoners whom the Pentagon refuses to acknowledge, and
whose names do not appear in the records kept at
Bagram. Sometimes, according to this organisation, the
detainees may be "rendered" to Egyptian intelligence or
other foreign services for interrogation.

Well before the establishment of the interrogation
facilities at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq, there had
been an acknowledgement within the Pentagon - as early
as October 2001 - that America's war against al-Qaida
and the Taliban might lead to the use of torture. Soon
after the start of the Afghan war, lawyers at the
Pentagon - specialists on the Geneva convention,
international law and interrogation - were asked to
explore the legal issues involved in the prosecution of
this new war.

"There was a kind of sub rosa [secret] thought process
during at least the first few months of the prosecution
of the war on terror," a former Pentagon official told
the Guardian. Legal experts began quietly discussing
what methods could be used to extract information from
captured fighters in Afghanistan. "It did not include
electric probes in the genitals. But there were
certainly a range of psychological measures," the
official said. But that was in the upper echelons of
the Pentagon. On the ground, military intelligence
officials were developing their own sets of rules.

In those early stages, it was never envisaged that
America would preside over a large prisoner population
in Afghanistan. Bagram was supposed to be a giant
human- sifting station, with a swift turnover of
detainees. Its primary aim was to provide immediate
battlefield intelligence, and to select a relatively
small number of detainees thought to have strategic
information about al-Qaida, who would be sent on for
more detailed interrogation to Guantanamo.

In practice, Bagram has become a more permanent
facility, a repository for al-Qaida and Taliban
suspects and a dumping ground for people who ended up
there often because an enemy had maliciously told the
authorities that they were al-Qaida or Taliban members.
The gathering of intelligence has proceeded extremely
slowly.

"Once we were there six months, people began saying,
'We don't have Osama bin Laden, we don't have Ayman al-
Zawahiri.' All of a sudden it was like, 'We are going
to pressure interrogators,' " said a retired senior
military intelligence official. When America went to
war on Afghanistan, it had a severe shortage of
experienced interrogators, and it was desperately short
of Pashtu translators. But the Pentagon demanded
results. Interrogators were set a target number for
completed interrogations, and advised to limit each
session to under an hour. "Unless you were going to
come out with a good report that you were going to find
a nuclear bomb in the desert or Osama bin Laden in a
cave, they really didn't really want to devote the
time," said the official.

During the second half of 2002, Captain Carolyn Wood of
the 519th military intelligence battalion was the
officer demanding results. Wood, who was in charge of
the Bagram Collection Point, the main screening area,
was redeployed to Abu Ghraib last year, where she was
also in charge of interrogations. US military spokesmen
have said she laid down the same procedures that had
been established at Bagram.

"In Afghanistan, they had some interrogation rules of
engagement. When they deployed to Iraq, she brought
those rules with her," one spokesman said. "Those rules
were modified to make sure the right restraints were in
place." Last month, Pentagon officials described to the
Senate armed services committee Wood's instructions for
interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a supposedly
more moderate version of her guidelines for Bagram. The
captain's rules of engagement included sleep and
sensory deprivation, stress positions, dietary
manipulation, and the use of dogs.

Attorneys for soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib
scandal believe that Wood was instrumental in setting
policy for interrogations at the Iraqi prison - just as
she did in Afghanistan. "We do think she is an
important element in this case," said Gary Myers, the
lawyer for Staff Sgt Ivan Chip Frederick, who goes on
trial in Baghdad this week. "She was present, and we
are thinking she has knowledge."

However, a former member of the 205th military
intelligence brigade, which was in charge of Abu Ghraib
prison at the time of the abuse, said an officer of
Wood's rank would not have had a free hand in setting
policy either at Bagram or Abu Ghraib, but would be
following orders from a higher command. An army
spokeswoman said yesterday that Wood was on an advanced
course at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the training centre
for US military interrogators. She faces no charges in
connection with the Abu Ghraib scandal. She has,
however, been assigned a military lawyer.

The policeman's story

The journey to Syed Nabi Siddiqi's home in the village
of Shaikhan, near Gardez, a city about 60 miles to the
south of Kabul towards the Pakistan border, takes you
past the tanks of Coalition forces on the outskirts of
Kabul, past the Kochi nomad camel trains, strolling
languidly across the highway, past the cemeteries with
their traditional fluttering green, purple and yellow
banners, through almost biblical scenes of 10-year-old
goatherds and their charges, past the mine-clearers
whose long blue armoured tunics and helmets make them
look like medieval warriors, through the Tera Pass and
into the crowded, dusty chaos of Gardez, which has seen
regular warfare for much of the last quarter of a
century.

Siddiqi, who has nine children, had a job as a
policeman - he offers proudly to change into his
uniform - and had been promoted to the post of deputy
head of the crime department and the deputy in charge
of operational officers in Gardez at the time of his
arrest. However, he had had problems with his senior
officers. The day before his arrest, he said, he had a
meeting with his superior that turned into an argument.

"I said that there should be no corruption," said
Siddiqi, offering tea and sultanas. "I said that every
week there should be a visit to the jail which is under
the control of the security commander." Siddiqi said
that the local commander "knew nothing of how to deal
with prisoners. He was an illiterate man; he put people
in prison because he got money to do so."

The following day, when he returned to work, he was
told that he was dismissed and was arrested by four
soldiers, two Afghan and two from the Coalition forces.
He told the troops that he had a breathing problem for
which he needed medicine, so he was taken to the
pharmacy where the pharmacist was promptly arrested,
too, for no other reason, insists Siddiqi, than that
they spoke to each other. Both men were blindfolded and
taken to the Coalition detention centre in Gardez, one
of 20 such centres across the country.

An interpreter wearing a mask then told him to
cooperate and asked him if he knew Burhanuddin Rabbani,
the former president of Afghanistan. He said he did,
but had not seen him since he returned to his village.
He was then asked if he knew Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the
founder of the Islamist party, Ittehad-e-Islami. "I
said I had heard about him but had not met him."

After three or four days, he was taken away
blindfolded, he said, by a group of Americans. "They
were kicking me and beating me and shouting like
animals at me. They took off my uniform. I requested
them several times - 'If you don't respect me, please
respect my uniform.' I showed them my identity card
from the government of President Karsai. Then they
asked me which animals - they made the noise of goats,
sheep, dogs, cows - I had had sexual activities with.
They laughed at me. I said that such actions were
against our Afghan and Islamic tradition, but they
again asked me, 'Which kind of animals do you want to
have sex with?' Then they asked me to stand like this
[he indicates being bound to a pole] and beat me with a
stick from the back and kicked me. I still have pains
in my back as a result. They told me, 'Your wife is a
prostitute.' "

"All the time I kept saying, 'Why are you doing such
things?' and they laughed," he said. He and other
prisoners were then placed in a structure, 25m long by
2m wide. Siddiqi demonstrated how they were made to
kneel with their hands handcuffed behind their back in
great discomfort. "I saw many other people - young,
old, different ages." After he had been detained for 22
days, an American soldier wrote the number 22 on his
hand. He was told to make sure the number was not
erased or he would not be released. They were taken
outside, where he and other prisoners, still handcuffed
behind their backs, were dumped face first in two
helicopters, some piled on top of prisoners already in
the helicopter, he said. "I asked for water and my
medicines and they kicked me again."

They were flown to Kandahar, where, once they had been
taken out of the helicopters, he begged again for
water. "I was saying, 'Oh, mister, give me some water!'
Nobody cared. At the back of every detainee there was
an American standing.

"Then they brought dogs close to us, they were biting
at us," he said, demonstrating how he and the other
prisoners had cowered and tried to protect themselves
from the dogs. "Then we were taken into another room
and they took off our trousers. Then they just beat us.
They took off my watch. In another room, they took our
photographs without any clothes on. They asked me, 'Are
you al-Qaida or Taliban?' I said, 'No, I am a
policeman.' Then they gave us a blue uniform." He
points out the colour from part of the pattern on the
carpet where we are sitting. "They blindfolded me and
shackled my hands and legs. It was very painful. Again
they started kicking me. Then they began to open my
legs and my arms." He demonstrated being spreadeagled.
He said he was beaten with a stick.

After his blindfold had been taken off, he found
himself with around 15 to 20 other prisoners, aged, he
said, from teenagers to the elderly. The prisoners were
not allowed to converse, but one man told him that he
was an Afghan soldier who had been wrongly reported as
being a member of a Pakistani militia. They were told
that they had to go to the toilet in front of everyone
else and American troops jokingly threw stones at them
while they did.

"One American soldier said, 'Why are you ashamed to
show your backside? Why are you so shy? See my
backside.' and he showed it to us." Here he paused.
"You know that we are Muslim. According to Muslim
tradition, if a person tells lies, he is not a real
Muslim. Everything I say is true."

Siddiqi said that they were made to roll over in the
night every 15 minutes or so in order that they could
not sleep. Then the interrogations started again. "It
was always, 'Are you Taliban or al-Qaida?'"

A civilian interrogator, whom Siddiqi described as
wearing black jeans, treated him sympathetically. "He
was a nice man. I told him that I am an innocent person
and he told me I would forget what had happened. I said
I would not forget it." After 12 days in Kandahar, he
was taken by helicopter to Bagram. He was again made to
lie on the floor, he said, once again demonstrating how
his face was forced on to the ground. "Then an American
asked, 'Who is the policeman?' and they got me up and
took my blindfold off. I saw computers and American
flags on the wall.

"They asked me, 'Do you know where you are now?' I said
no. They said, 'This is America. Do you accept American
laws and rules?' I said: 'If this is America, I will
accept and obey the rules.' They said, 'If a soldier
orders you to take off your clothes, you must obey.'
Then they took off our clothes and with gloves on they
touched us everywhere they wanted." He said that
fingers were stuck in his anus. (While the detainees we
spoke to described these incidents as humiliating, the
Coalition authorities maintain that they are standard
search techniques to ensure that prisoners do not bring
weapons into jails.) After 11 nights at Bagram, he was
asked at two in the morning if he wanted to see his
family and if he missed them.

"Then they said, 'Do you forgive and forget?' I told
them, 'I will forgive all of you if you punish those
people who reported me to you wrongly.' I told them
that the reports came from people who had links with
the government of the former communist regime and that
they should not accept such reports. They promised me
they would punish those people. They gave me a bottle
of water and a box of biscuits and asked me to take
them to my children."

In total, he was held for 45 days before being returned
to his family. "When I returned, my children who were
studying at school had left their lessons and were
working in the bazaar in the city because there was no
one to feed them."

The driver's story

Out in the wheat fields, not far from Siddiqi's home, a
young man is helping to build a mud wall. Noor Aghah is
35, a father of four. Wearing a kolla, the traditional
hat, he comes down from the wall to talk and we sit in
a field watched intently by a teenage boy with a
slingshot, who breaks off momentarily to fell a bird
perched in a nearby tree. Lighting a cigarette, Aghah
tells his story.

He had applied for a job as a driver for a local
militia commander at the end of 2001, working first in
Gardez and then in Kabul before returning to Gardez.
Then the commander was arrested as a suspect and, six
days later, so was Aghah. After one month's detention
at the Coalition centre outside Gardez, a complex of
fort-like mud buildings and modern metal warehouses, he
was sent to Bagram, where he was to spend the next four
months.

"They said, 'Tell us what sort of work [the commander]
used to do,' " he said of his initial detention in
Gardez. "I said I hadn't seen anything. Then they
forced me to drink 12 bottles of water and they didn't
allow me to go to the toilet." The interrogation
continued along the same lines for one month, he said,
with questions being asked all the time about his
commander.

Along with other prisoners, he was handcuffed and kept
kneeling in a narrow open space between two high walls
with direct sun coming down on them for 10 hours during
the day. This continued for 20 days until an American
doctor instructed that a covering be put over the space
and that the prisoners be given blankets and pillows.
"Every minute in Gardez they were beating us. Mostly
they kick me," he said.

"At Bagram, we were totally forbidden to talk to other
prisoners and when we were interrogated we were
blindfolded," he said. "Americans interrogated me with
an interpreter. Twice a woman asked questions but it
was mostly men. They interrogated me every day in
Bagram for one month and then only every 20 days or so.
They asked me if I was Taliban or al-Qaida. In Gardez
and also in Bagram, we were asked to take off our
clothes and everyone saw us without clothes, six or
seven people."

Eventually, he was released. "In Bagram, they
apologised and gave me a letter." (This pro forma
letter declares that someone has been released from
detention and is not a suspect, although it adds, 'This
certificate has no bearing on future misconduct.') He
knew of two other men who had suffered similar
treatment.

"I was surprised and confused because I was innocent,"
said Aghah. "Why should a person not involved in crime
go to jail and be treated like this?" He is unusual in
being prepared to speak about what happened to him,
although he does not want some of the more humiliating
things that were done to him to be reported. "Maybe if
they read your report, they will arrest me again,"
Aghah said, with a laugh. "Maybe you won't know."

'A culture of impunity'

Fahim Hakim, a quietly spoken, thoughtful man, is the
deputy head of the Independent Human Rights Commission
set up in June 2002 as part of the Bonn agreeement
signed by prime minister Hamid Karzai. Its 330 members
of staff across the country have the task of both
promoting human rights and investigating abuses, and it
has been Hakim's job to analyse the many complaints
arising from the detentions. The commission had
received 60 complaints, he said, some from the
detainees themselves, and some from the families of men
who are still inside.

He said that the complaints had come mainly from
Gardez, Jalalabad and Kandahar. "It was really
shocking. We had this kind of mistreatment during the
communist regime - mass arrests, mass graves, killing
of people, torture - but in a country where there is a
low rate of literacy and where we haven't had a well-
trained and professional national police, this could be
expected. But from those who are well trained and
professional, who are talking about human rights and
democracy, it is a great shock."

The complaints he had heard, he said, were to do with
the stripping of prisoners, with the feeling of their
genitals, with their being made to defecate in front of
the Coalition forces, and with beatings. "There were a
group of people kept naked in one room and given a
bucket in the one room and asked to use that and it was
traditionally, culturally, socially not possible for
them and, to their surprise and shock, Coalition forces
would come and say, 'It's very easy, aim at that.' "

"There was taunting language - 'Do you know what is
happening next door? Your wife is naked there. Our
colleagues are playing with her,' " said Hakim. "There
was deprivation of sleep and being made to kneel was
the common complaint. There were complaints, too, of
beating and kicking. They came here to liberate us, to
make us free of this intimidation and oppression, but
this will be overshadowed by this sort of behaviour."

His colleague, Zia Langari, said, "Traditionally,
[detainees] do not want to make this sort of thing
known because of the shame involved. If a man says that
he has had to be naked, he gets a bad name for himself,
so, because of the fear and shame, they will not
disclose this to the public. Some of them ask that the
sexual abuse they suffered not be disclosed."

Langari said that all the detainees interviewed said
that they had received sexual abuse. This may in many
cases have been strip searches involving anal and
genital examinations and which US officials have argued
were necessary to ensure that weapons were not brought
into jails. "Maybe the Americans say that this is part
of an investigation technique practice everywhere, but
for Afghans it is not acceptable," said Langari. "They
could x-ray them if they are suspicious of them."

Horia Mosadiq, an Afghan human rights worker who has
interviewed many former detainees, said that many felt
humiliated. Some told of having their pubic and
underarm hair shaved by female US soldiers, she said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has access
to Bagram every two weeks, but it is part of its
established policy that it does not release details of
its reports. It has not been able to gain such access
to the other detention centres where many of the
alleged abuses have taken place. Other human rights
organisations have also failed in their attempts to
visit them. "We have asked for access many times but in
general there has been no response," said Nazia Hussein
of Amnesty International, "so it is very difficult to
determine what conditions are like."

Davood Moradian, an Afghan who lectures at St Andrews
University's international relations department, said:
"Bagram seems to be run with exactly the same culture
of impunity as the [Afghan] warlords run their private
prisons. My impression is that the detainees are mainly
poor people who do not have connections and
footsoldiers, rather than the top people."

The Americans are now, in the wake of the revelations
of Abu Ghraib, conducting an investigation. Earlier
this month, General Barno, speaking at the sandbagged
Coalition HQ, said that a "top to bottom" review of
detention facilities was being undertaken by his
deputy, General Chuck Jacoby. Barno said that much of
the intelligence gleaned from these interrogations had
been "extremely useful" in safeguarding the lives of
Coalition soldiers and identifying targets. "That said,
regardless of any intelligence value, I will tell you
without hesitation that intelligence procedures have
got to be done in accordance with the approriate
standards . . . All our forces will treat every
detainee here with dignity and respect."

Last week a US spokesman in Kabul said procedures at
US- run detention centres in the country had been
changed as a result of Brig Gen Jacoby's interim
findings, but he would not say how.

The deaths of three prisoners in custody are also being
reviewed. Two died in Bagram in December 2002. A death
certificate for a man, known simply as Dilawar, aged
22, from Yakubi in eastern Afghanistan, and signed by
Major Elizabeth Rouse, pathologist with the Armed
Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, states
that the cause of death was "blunt-force injuries to
lower extremities complicating coronary artery
disease". Another prisoner, Mullah Habibullah, brother
of a former Taliban commander, died the same month. Two
of their fellow prisoners, Abdul Jabar and Hakkim Shah,
told the New York Times last year that they were
routinely kept naked, hooded, shackled and with their
hands chained to the ceiling day and night. The
circumstances of their deaths have still to be
determined, said Fahim Hakim. The third suspcious death
is that of Abdul Wali, a former commander, who died
four days after he presented himself for questioning at
the request of the governor of Kunar. He died after
reportedly undergoing interrogation by a private
contract employee of the CIA.

It has been argued that whatever the American troops
may have done, its abuses pale into insignificance
beside what the Taliban did to their prisoners. Until
2001, public executions and amputations as punishment
were carried out at the national stadium in Kabul.
However, human rights monitors point out that the
action of the Coalition forces and their presence in
the country is posited on ending "uncivilised"
behaviour and installing a system of fairness and
justice. Though Bagram and its satellite detention
centres have so far been a largely hidden corner of
America's new gulag, there are signs that the treatment
of detainees there is now beginning to come under
scrutiny from Washington. Senator Patrick Leahy, the
Democrat member of the Senate subcommittee on foreign
operations, who has campaigned about prison abuses in
both Afghanistan and Iraq, told the Guardian: "The
abuses in Afghanistan were no less egregious than at
Abu Ghraib, but because there were no photographs - at
least, to our present knowledge - they have not
received enough attention.

"Prisoners in Afghanistan were subjected to cruel and
degrading treatment, and some died from it. These
abuses were part of a wider pattern stemming from a
White House attitude that 'anything goes' in the war
against terrorism, even if it crosses the line of
illegality. Not only should these incidents be
thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators punished,
but we need rules to prevent it from happening again."

Behind the wire: Bagram's secrets Until recently what
goes on inside Bagram, as well as the number and
identities of inmates who have been held there, has
been shrouded in secrecy. Earlier this month, in
response to a question from the Guardian, Lieutenant
General David Barno, the head of US forces in
Afghanistan, revealed that more than 2,000 people have
been detained at the base since the war, and that there
are currently 400 detainees being held without charge.

Last week a US spokesman in Kabul said procedures at
the prison had been changed in response to the interum
findings of an internal investigation.

The interpreter in Afghanistan was Noor Ahmed.

_______________________________________________________

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Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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