Bagram torture and prisoner abuse

In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. armed forces in 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (also Bagram Collection Point or B.C.P.) in Bagram, Afghanistan. The prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were chained to the ceiling and beaten, which caused their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners' deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners' legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged.

Location
The alleged torture and homicides took place at the military detention center known as the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, which had been built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1980–1989). A concrete-and-sheet metal facility that was retrofitted with wire pens and wooden isolation cells, the center is part of Bagram Air Base in the ancient city of Bagram near Charikar in Parvan, Afghanistan.

Detainees
In January 2010, the American military released the names of 645 detainees held at the main detention center at Bagram, modifying its long-held position against publicizing such information. This list was prompted by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in September 2009 by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers had also demanded detailed information about conditions, rules and regulations.

Habibullah
Habibullah died on December 4, 2002. Several U.S. soldiers hit the chained man with so-called "peroneal strikes," or severe blows to the side of the leg above the knee. This incapacitates the leg by hitting the common peroneal nerve. According to the New York Times:


 * By Dec. 3, Mr. Habibullah's reputation for defiance seemed to make him an open target. [He had taken at least 9 peroneal strikes from two MPs for being "noncompliant and combative."]
 *  ... When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Mr. Habibullah on Dec. 3, he was in one of the isolation cells, tethered to the ceiling by two sets of handcuffs and a chain around his waist. His body was slumped forward, held up by the chains. Sergeant Boland ... had entered the cell with [Specialists Anthony M. Morden and Brian E. Cammack]...
 * kneeing the prisoner sharply in the thigh, "maybe a couple" of times. Mr. Habibullah's limp body swayed back and forth in the chains.

When medics arrived, they found Habibullah dead.

Dilawar
Dilawar, who died on December 10, 2002, was a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver and farmer who weighed 122 pounds and was described by his interpreters as neither violent nor aggressive.

When beaten, he repeatedly cried "Allah!" The outcry appears to have amused U.S. military personnel, as the act of striking him in order to provoke a scream of "Allah!" eventually "became a kind of running joke," according to one of the MPs. "People kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,'" he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

The Times reported that:


 * On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.


 * "A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.


 * "Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen.


 * It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

There has been a movie created about the incident called Taxi to the Dark Side. In this movie they claim Dilawar was not captured driving past Bagram air base, but while driving through militia territory. He was stopped at a roadblock and given over to the U. S. Army for a monetary reward, because the militiamen who handed him over said he was a terrorist.

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui/Prisoner 650
Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistan citizen educated in the United States as a neuroscientist, was suspected of the attempted assault and killing of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan. She mysteriously disappeared in 2003 with her three children, and was allegedly detained for five years at Bagram; she was the only female prisoner. She was known to the male detainees as "Prisoner 650" and has been dubbed the "Mata Hari of al-Qaida" or the "Grey Lady of Bagram" by the media. In addition to former detainees of Bagram, Yvonne Ridley maintains that Siddiqui is the "Grey Lady of Bagram" – a ghostly female detainee, who kept prisoners awake "with her haunting sobs and piercing screams". In 2005 male prisoners were so agitated by her plight, Ridley said, that they went on hunger strike for six days. Siddiqui's family maintains that she has been abused.

“It is my judgment that Dr Siddiqui is sentenced to a period of incarceration of 86 years,” (for the attempted murder of US officers in Afghanistan said Judge Richard Berman, US District Court Judge of a Federal Court in Manhattan on Sept. 23 2010). Pakistani citizen Dr. Aafia Siddiqui denounced the trial saying “(an appeal would be) a waste of time. I appeal to God. " According to reports, 12-year old Ahmed (Dr Aafia’s son) was handed over to his aunt Fauzia Siddiqui in September 2008 after years of detention in a US military base in Afghanistan. Later on, a political activist group reported that a little girl named Fatima was dropped off in front of the home of Siddiqui's sister and the girl's DNA matched that of Ahmed (Dr Aafia's son).  Meanwhile, a Pakistani Senator and chairman of the Pakistani Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior, Senator Talha Mehmood, “slammed the US for keeping the child in a military jail in a cold, dark room for seven years.” The fate of Siddiqui's other son is unknown.

Binyam Mohamed
Mohamed arrived in the U.K. from Ethiopia in 1994 and sought asylum. In 2001 he converted to Islam and travelled to Pakistan followed by Afghanistan, by his own admission, to see whether Taliban-run Afghanistan was "a good Islamic country". Considered by the U.S. authorities as a would-be bomber, who fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, he was arrested in Pakistan at the airport by Pakistani immigration officials in April 2002 on his way back to the U.K. But Mohamed insisted the only evidence against him was obtained using torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004 before being secretly rendered to Guantánamo Bay. He alleges being beaten, scalded, cut and held captive in a black hole at the "Prison of Darkness", where he was deprived of sleep, blasted with sound, starved, beaten and hung up. In October 2008, the U.S. dropped all charges against him. Mohamed was reported as being very ill as a result of a hunger strike in the weeks before his release, while US authorities were reviewing his case. Mohamad also said to fellow Bagram detainee Moazzam Begg in an interview in February 2009 that the woman he and the other male detainees saw at Bagram, named "Prisoner 650", was Aafia Siddiqui, when Begg showed him a picture of her.

Others
Somali refugee Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, who worked for a funds transfer company, described his Bagram interrogation as "torture." Barre said he was picked up and thrown around the interrogation room when he wouldn't confess to a false allegation. He was then put into an isolation chamber that was maintained at a piercingly cold temperature for several weeks. He said he was deprived of sufficient rations during his time in isolation. He said, as a result of this treatment his hands and feet swelled, causing him such excruciating pain he couldn't stand up.

Zalmay Shah, a citizen of Afghanistan, was detained at Bagram air base and alleges mistreatment there. An article published in the May 2, 2007 issue of The New Republic contained excerpts from an interview with Zalmay Shah. He said he had originally cooperated closely with the Americans. He had worked with an American he knew only as "Tony" in the roundup of former members of the Taliban. According to the article:

Zalmay Shah was eventually released. He said that Americans continue to ask for his cooperation, but he now declines.

Others include Mohammed Salim and Moazzam Begg.

Investigation and prosecution
In October 2004, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also cited for probable criminal responsibility in the Habibullah case. Seven soldiers have been charged so far.

According to an article published in the October 15, 2004 New York Times 28 soldiers were under investigation. Some of the soldiers were reservists in the 377th Military Police Company under the command of Captain Christopher M. Beiring. The rest were in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion under the command of Captain Carolyn A. Wood.

On October 14, 2004, the Criminal Investigation Command forwarded its report from its investigation to the commanders of 28 soldiers.

As of November 15, 2005, 15 soldiers have been charged.

Involved but uncharged
Some interrogators involved in this incident were sent to Iraq and were assigned to Abu Ghraib prison.

PFC Corsetti was fined and demoted for not having permission to conduct an interrogation at Abu Ghraib.

Allegations of a widespread pattern of abuse
An editorial of the New York Times noted a parallel with the later abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq:


 * (W)hat happened at Abu Ghraib was no aberration, but part of a widespread pattern. It showed the tragic impact of the initial decision by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they were not going to follow the Geneva Conventions, or indeed American law, for prisoners taken in antiterrorist operations.


 * The investigative file on Bagram, obtained by The Times, showed that the mistreatment of prisoners was routine: shackling them to the ceilings of their cells, depriving them of sleep, kicking and hitting them, sexually humiliating them and threatening them with guard dogs -- the very same behavior later repeated in Iraq.

In November 2001, SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, was sent to Afghanistan, where he spent four months at Bagram. In early 2003, Banks issued guidance for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy although he has emphatically denied that he had advocated the use of SERE counter-resistance techniques to break down detainees.

U.S. government response
The United States government through the Department of State makes periodic reports to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. In October 2005, the report focused on pretrial detention of suspects in the War on Terrorism, including those held at Guantanamo Bay detention camp and in Afghanistan. This particular report is significant as the first official response of the U.S. government to allegations that there is widespread abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan. The report denies the allegations.

McCain Amendment
Main article: Detainee Treatment Act of 2005

The McCain amendment was an amendment to the United States Senate Department of Defense Authorization bill, commonly referred to as the Amendment on (1) the Army Field Manual and (2) Cruel, Inhumane, Degrading Treatment, amendment #1977 and also known as the McCain Amendment 1977. The amendment prohibited inhumane treatment of prisoners. The Amendment was introduced by Senator John McCain. On October 5, 2005, the United States Senate voted 90-9 to support the amendment.

Second secret prison
In May 2010, the BBC reported about nine prisoners who "told consistent stories of being held in isolation in cold cells where a light is on all day and night. The men said they had been deprived of sleep by US military personnel there." When the BBC inquired with the International Committee of the Red Cross about this, the ICRC revealed that since August 2009 it was informed by US authorities about inmates of a second prison where detainees are held in isolation and without access to the International Red Cross that is usually guaranteed to all prisoners.

Film
The 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side focuses on the murder of Dilawar.