U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases

[sabra]

Source: McClatchy Newspapers

KABUL, Afghanistan — American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul, and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.

"I was punched and kicked at Bagram. ... At Bagram, when they took a man to interrogation at night, the next morning we would see him brought out on a stretcher looking almost dead," said Aminullah, an Afghan who was held there for a little more than three months. "But at Guantanamo, there were rules, there was law."

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38775.html

---

This picture from a U.S. court martial file, drawn by military polygraph examiner George Chigi III, shows how Afghan detainee Dilawar was shackled by his wrists to the ceiling of an isolation cell at Bagram Air Base before being beaten to death in December 2002.

Recommend reading the whole article!

[MasonJar]

1. How could anybody do this to any other living creature? Another war

crime perpetrated by the Bush War Crime Family and Associates.

[Ian David]

2. I could do this to Dennis Miller

Fortunately for both Dennis Miller and myself, there are laws preventing me from doing so.

I think it needs to stay that way.

Got that, Cha-chee?

[Supersedeas]

3. Nothing to see here

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

Accountability is all we have left.

[acmavm]

5. Good grief, what is there to say? What kind of assholes is the

military made up of? Maybe someone should stand and beat the shit out of a few of them for hours at a time. Waterboard their asses.

Disgraces to the country, the uniform, and the human race.

[coalition_unwilling]

15. Still support our troops? ??

I have always found that slogan particularly inane, serving as little more than cnde for support for Bush policy.

[Fredda Weinberg]

6. Unfortunately, this was public knowledge ... or should have been

I was researching this for a name you might recognize while it was happening. But DU got distracted, I'm afraid ...

[pattmarty]

7. God bless America!!!!!

:sarcasm:

[countryjake]

8. I can't kick this hard enough! The forgotten Invasion...

where this week, the report was that the American military is again quietly training Afghani "special forces", in hidden location, to presumably do their dirty work for them. Not reconstruction, alternative sustenance farming, or simply how to recoup in a land that's been devastated...nope, specially trained squads, honed to do the bidding of our occupying forces, and to carry out whatever "necessary" security measures might be deemed required in the take-over and control of a sovereign nation.

The ease with which so many proclaim, "hey, let's put our troops where they can really fight this War on Terra", or "look over there, this could be success, if only the Iraqi brigades were re-deployed to the country that really needs its ass kicked", simply leaves me shaking my head.

Sorry to get off on my own rant, but the atrocities being committed by our soldiers in Afghanistan weren't totally unknown to many of us, it's simply hard to be heard over the din of revenge-crazed warmongers who see cultures that will not comply and seek to destroy them.


Here's more on the torture that our government got away with, in our name:


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html

[Judi Lynn]

9. If you'd heard what they did to the Afghan cab driver, Dilawar, you wouldn't be able to forget it.

He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when they got him. He had never been connected in any way to any of the fighting.

While they were battering, kicking, beating him, they also mocked him when he cried out, as reported by other prisoners. He's mentioned in this article, as well:

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation."

Here's his photo:


Dilawar is mentioned in this Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

[High Plains]

10. And now those soldiers are back home and wearing police uniforms.

[saigon68]

12. And seriously ready

To kick some minority ass.

[silverojo]

11. I'll tell you who the REAL war heroes are

Anybody who spoke up and said, "Hell, NO, I'm not doing this!"

[countryjake]

13. kick

[coalition_unwilling]

14. Torture is as American

as apple pie. Check out us involvement in Vietnam if you dont believe me. Specifically the Phoenix Program.