Torture continues at US prisons in Afghanistan

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Torture continues at US prisons in Afghanistan
By Tom Eley
1 December 2009

Recent media reports reveal that the US military continues to carry on
torture and illegal detention in Afghanistan at a dungeon known to
inmates as “the black prison.”

The jail, located on the Bagram Air Base next to the notorious Bagram
prison north of Kabul, operates under the executive order of President
Obama. After entering office, Obama ordered the closure of Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) prison “black sites”—which were in fact no
longer active—but exempted those prisons run by the military’s Special
Operations, which was headed from 2003 until 2008 by General Stanley
McChrystal, now US commander of the Af-Pak theater.

US military officials recently said they had no plans to close the
Afghan jail and another like it at the Balad Air Base in Iraq, which
they claimed were needed to interrogate “high-value detainees.”

Two teenage Afghan boys told the Washington Post that they were
beaten, photographed naked, sexually humiliated, denied sleep, and
held in solitary confinement by American guards at the prison this
year. Interviewed at a juvenile detention center in Kabul, where they
have been transferred, “the teenagers presented a detailed, consistent
portrait” of the abuse they experienced, the newspaper reported. Their
descriptions of the prison were confirmed by two other former prisoners.

In addition to being punched and slapped, Rashid, who the Post
describes as “younger than 16,” said he was forced to view pornography
“alongside a photograph of his mother.” He was also forced to strip
naked in front of about a half-dozen US soldiers. “They touched me all
over my body,” he said. “They took pictures, and they were laughing
and laughing. They were doing everything.”

“That was the hardest time I have ever had in my life,” said Rashid,
who was arrested this spring. “It was better to just kill me. But they
would not kill me. ... I was just crying and crying. I was too young.”

On Saturday, the New York Times published interviews with three former
inmates who also spoke of the black prison near Bagram. Each informant
“was interviewed separately and described similar conditions,” the
Times notes, and “[t]heir descriptions also matched those obtained by
two human rights workers who had interviewed other former detainees at
the site.” One of the three men was arrested months after Obama’s
inauguration as US president, as were the two teenage boys interviewed
by the Post.

All of those interviewed by the Times and the Post maintained that
they were not “Taliban.” Without being charged with a crime, they were
seized by US soldiers, then bound, gagged, and hooded, and taken to
the “black prison.”

The jail, according to the Times’ sources, “consists of individual
windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb
glowing 24 hours a day.” The cells are small; one prisoner said his
was only slightly longer than the length of his body. US soldiers
throw food into the cells through slots in the door.

Prisoners are exposed to extreme cold and sleep deprivation. The
teenage boys told the Post that when they attempted to sleep on the
hard floor, US soldiers “shouted at them and hammered on their cells.”
Prisoners’ only respite from this extreme solitary confinement are
twice-a-day interrogations, during which some are beaten or humiliated.

“He kept asking me, ‘Tell us the truth.’ I told them the truth more
than 10 times,” Mohammad told the Post. “That I’m a farmer, my father
was a farmer, my brother was a farmer. But they said, ‘No, help us
with this case. Tell us the truth.’ That’s why he was slapping me.”

The prisoners are held in these conditions for weeks—35 to 40 days,
according to the Times—their families unaware of their fate. “For my
whole family it was disastrous,” said Hayatullah, a Kandahar resident
who said he was working in his pharmacy when he was arrested. “Because
they knew the Americans were sometimes killing people, and they
thought they had killed me because for two to three months they didn’t
know where I was.”

Hamidullah, who was held five and a half months in detention,
including five to six weeks in the black jail, said he heard the
sounds of other detainees being tortured and abused. “They beat up
other people in the black jail, but not me,” he said. “But the problem
was that they didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you
couldn’t sleep.”

Interrogators insisted he was a Taliban fighter named Faida Muhammad.
“I said, ‘That’s not me,’” he recalled. “They blamed me and said, ‘You
are making bombs and are a facilitator of bomb making and helping
militants,’” he said. “I said, ‘I have a shop. I sell spare parts for
vehicles, for trucks and cars.’”

The US military permits no contact with the outside world, and in
violation of international law, denies the International Committee of
the Red Cross access to the secret prison.

Gulham Khan, a 25-year-old sheep trader, who mostly delivers sheep and
goats for people who buy the animals in the livestock market in
Ghazni, was captured in late October 2008 and released in early
September this year. He told the Times, “They kept saying to me, ‘Are
you Qari Idris?’ I said, ‘I’m not Qari Idris.’ But they kept asking me
over and over, and I kept saying, ‘I’m Gulham. This is my name, that
is my father’s name, you can ask the elders.’”

Ten months after his initial detention, American soldiers went to the
group cell where he was then being held and told him he had been
mistakenly picked up under the wrong name, Khan told the Times. “They
said, ‘Please accept our apology, and we are sorry that we kept you
here for this time.’ And that was it. They kept me for more than 10
months and gave me nothing back.”

The Times noted, “In their search for him, Mr. Khan’s family members
spent the equivalent of $6,000, a fortune for a sheep dealer, who
often makes just a dollar a day. Some of the money was spent on bribes
to local Afghan soldiers to get information on where he was being
held; they said soldiers took the money and never came back with the
information.”

“This is something nobody can bear. It’s extraordinary,” said Malik
Mohammad Hassan, a tribal elder from the Jalalabad area, “They treated
us like wild animals.”

After Special Operations soldiers have finished interrogating the
prisoners, they are transferred to the regular Bagram prison where
they are packed into cages holding approximately 20 men each.

Bagram, which reputedly holds an estimated 700 inmates, is a hated
symbol of US imperialism to Afghans—so much that the Obama
administration has announced its intention to end its use as a prison.
Prisoners at Bagram are denied access to legal assistance or the right
to know the charges and evidence against them. There have been many
reports of torture there, among them at least two cases in which
prisoners were brutally beaten to death by US soldiers; one of these
cases is memorialized by the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

The revelations of torture and illegal detention continuing under
Obama give the lie to his claim that the war in Afghanistan is about
“protecting the American people” and “fighting terrorism.”

Washington aims to subjugate Afghanistan in order to place the US
military close to the region’s oil and gas reserves and to head off
the growing influence of other powers in the region. It is acutely
aware that defeat and withdrawal would spell a drastic weakening of
its global position.

These predatory aims require the US military to terrorize and
intimidate the entire Afghan population. It is notable that those
prisoners interviewed by the Times and the Post were ordinary
Afghans—a wood carver, a farmer, a sheep herder, a pharmacist, a
retired teacher, and a used parts dealer—all of whom denied any
involvement with the Taliban.

Obama’s decision to increase the US military presence in Afghanistan
by 30,000 soldiers and escalate the dirty colonial war will inevitably
result in more horrors perpetrated against the people of Afghanistan.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/afgh-d01.shtml

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