When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan
Andy Worthington
1.7.09

.....it’s clear that they followed methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House— or variations introduced in a context where limits on abusive behavior had been reduced or eliminated, ostensibly to facilitate interrogation.

On Friday, I also wrote an article about torture for the ACLU’s Accountability Project, explaining how the hunger strikers at Guantánamo are part of the same torture machine — and, moreover, one that, unnervingly, is still operating today — but as a contribution to the specific topic of demonstrating to the US public, and the wider world, that torture techniques implemented by the Bush administration led to murders in US custody, I’m presenting below some relevant sections from my book The Guantánamo Files, from testimony provided by former prisoner Omar Deghayes, and from a recent report by investigator John Sifton, relating to ten murders in US prisons in Afghanistan, three of which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been investigated at all.

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The prelude to two notorious murders — and, very possibly, three others — in the US prison at Bagram airbase began in the summer of 2002, when 14 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg arrived at the prison, led by Lt. Carolyn Wood, and were soon joined by six Arabic-speaking reservists from the Utah National Guard. Lt. Wood took over interrogations from a team led by an interrogator who later wrote a book about his experiences, The Interrogators, using the pseudonym Chris Mackey. This is how I described what happened next in The Guantánamo Files.

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Murders in Bagram (from Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files)



Typically, the new recruits were unprepared for what awaited them. Some were counter-intelligence specialists with no background in interrogation, and only two had interrogated real prisoners before. They were also given few guidelines about how to behave. Speaking to the army’s criminal investigation unit in 2004, one of the reservists said that President Bush’s announcement, in February 2002, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda and that Taliban fighters did not have rights as prisoners of war, led the interrogators to believe that they “could deviate slightly from the rules.” “There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists,” he added, explaining that senior intelligence officers told them that the prisoners “were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.”

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In addition, Bagram became a place of even greater random brutality. Golden described how violence was sometimes used to extract information, or as punishment for rule-breaking, but that on other occasions “the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.” In statements to army investigators, soldiers mentioned a prisoner who was “forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went,” and another who was “made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.”

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lots more info:
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/07/0... /