Dilawar
The young farmer's name was Dilawar. The New York Times reported on May 20, 2005:
"Four days before [his death,] on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.On the day that he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. However, he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares."
Dilawar's misfortune was to drive past the gate of an American base which had been hit by a rocket attack that morning. Dilawar and his fares were arrested at a checkpoint by a warlord, who was later suspected of mounting the rocket attack himself, and then turning over randam captures like Dilawar in order to win trust.
"Guards at Bagram routinely kneed prisoners in their thighs -- a blow called a "peroneal strike"...Whenever a guard did this to Dilawar, he would cry out, "Allah! Allah!" Some guards apparently found this amusing, and would strike him repeatedly to show off the behavior to buddies.One military policeman told investigators, "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny. ... It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.""
Dilawar was shackled from the ceiling much of the time, with his feet barely able to touch the ground. On the last day of his life, after 4 days at Bagram, an interpreter who was present said his legs were bouncing uncontrollably as he sat in a plastic chair. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
The New York Times reported that on the last day of his life, four days after he was arrested:
"Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face."Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"
At the interrogators' behest, 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."
The next time the prison medic saw Dilawar a few hours later, he was dead, his head lolled to one side and his body beginning to stiffen. A coroner would testify that his legs "had basically been pulpified." The Army coroner, Maj. Elizabeth Rouse, said: "I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus." She testified that had he lived, Dilawar's legs would have had to be amputated.
Despite the military's false statement that Dilawar's death was the result of "natural causes," Maj. Rouse marked the death certificate as a "homicide" and arranged for the certificate to be delivered to the family. The military was forced to retract the statement when a reporter for the New York Times, Carlotta Gall, tracked down Dilawar's family in Afghanistan and was given a folded piece of paper by Dilawar's brother. It was the death certificate, which he couldn't read, because it was in English.
The practice of forcing prisoners to stand for long periods of time, links Dilawar's treatment to a memo which bears Rumsfeld's own handwriting on that particular subject. Obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request, the memo may show how fairly benign-sounding authorizations for clear circumventions of the Geneva Conventions may have translated into gruesome practice on the battlefield.
The memo, which addresses keeping prisoners "standing" for up to four hours, is annotated with a note initialed by Rumsfeld reading: --I stand for 8--10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" Not mentioned in writing anywhere is anything about accomplishing this by chaining prisoners to the ceiling. There is evidence that, unable to support his weight on tiptoe for the days on end he was chained to the ceiling, Dilawars arms dislocated, and they flapped around uselessly when he was taken down for interrogation. The National Catholic Reporter writes "They flapped like a bird's broken wings"
Contradicting, on the record, a February 2003 statement by Rumsfeld's top commander in Afghanistan at the time, General Daniel McNeill, that "we are not chaining people to the ceilings," is Spc. Willie Brand, the only soldier disciplined in the death of Dilawar, with a reduction in rank. Told of McNeill's statement, Brand told Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes: "Well, he's lying." Brand said of his punishment: "I didn't understand how they could do this after they had trained you to do this stuff and they turn around and say you've been bad"
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