Detainees Were Also Murdered At Bagram in Afghanistan

By GottaLaff

By now, you pretty much know I'm all about exposing the ongoing mistreatment of prisoners at Gitmo, Bagram, and elsewhere. And speaking of Bagram...

...Jason Leopold posted this today:

A new report documenting the torture of more than two-dozen former prisoners held at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 comes several months after a bipartisan congressional committee linked the murder of two detainees held at the same prison facility to policies enacted by George W. Bush and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The April report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of prisoners held in U.S. Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded that a combination of various torture techniques coupled with a series of brutal beatings administered by military interrogators caused the deaths of the two prisoners in December 2002. [...]

According to the Armed Services Committee report, another detainee identified as Habibulllah was killed two days after Rumsfeld authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan. Dilawar was murdered six days after Habibullah was killed. The report labeled their deaths homicides. [...]

In fact, as the New York Times reported in May 2005, when Dilawar was murdered, “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.”

Does that last part sound familiar? It would if you've been reading my series about Fayiz al-Kandari.

The U.S. Military never produced any evidence to prove that either Habibullah or Dilawar had connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. The detainees interviewed by the BBC during a two-month investigation said they were also apprehended and indefinitely imprisoned at Bagram on suspicion of being members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

The details of the murders of Dilawar and Habibullah at the hands of military interrogators have been previously reported. But the Senate report included new information about the behind-the-scenes meetings that took place between high-level Pentagon officials in the months before their deaths where “enhanced interrogation” policies implemented at Bagram were discussed.

Those policies were also directly responsible for the torture of some of the prisoners who were interviewed by the BBC.

Previous reports, including one from the Army’s criminal investigative unit, pinned Dilawar and Habibullah’s murder on rogue soldiers and on-the-ground military officials but have never linked the murders directly to the interrogation policies enacted by the Bush administration.

They do now.

The report says, “The use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment at the hands of Bagram personnel, caused or were direct contributing factors in the two homicides.”

The report makes clear it was Rumsfeld’s interrogation directives and a Feb. 7, 2002 action memorandum signed by Bush suspending the Geneva Conventions for al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners that “opened the door” to the systematic abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The committee traced the murder of Dilawar and Habibullah’s to interrogation policies at Bagram that were first proposed by Pentagon officials in October 2001, just days after the U.S. launched an attack against the Taliban government.

Sleep well, BushCo. And let's hope that the ObamAdministration releases any and all innocents, like Fayiz, as quickly as is humanly possible.