Senate Panel's Report Links Detainees' Murders to Bush's Torture Policy

Thursday, 30 April 2009 06:13

A combination of "enhanced interrogation" techniques approved by high-level Bush administration officials coupled with a series of brutal beatings administered by military interrogators were directly responsible for the December 2002 deaths of two detainees at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, according to a report released last week by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The report classified their deaths as homicides. In other words, the two prisoners were tortured to death.

in February, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit two-pages from the Church report that had been classified. Those documents included details of two detainee deaths at Bagram in December 2002 believed to be Dilawar and Habibullah, but those pages did not identify the detainees who were killed by name.

The Armed Services 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.

At that time, a Special Mission Unit Task Force (SMU TF) was charged with interrogating prisoners believed to have been linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Armed Services Committee report says in October 2001 the SMU TF was sent to Afghanistan "with a mission" and the rest of the description contained in the report from that point was redacted.

"While SMU TF operators conducted a limited amount of direct questioning, or, "-screening' of detainees while on the battlefield, it appears that they did not conduct interrogations until at least October 2002,"- the report says. "Prior to that point, SMU personnel had observed interrogations conducted by Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF-180), which had assumed control of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan at the end of May 2002."

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