Torture by US military continues in Afghanistan, at a site specifically exempted from a Presidential order to shut down torture sites earlier this year.
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Recent media reports reveal that the US military continues to carry on
torture and illegal detention in Afghanistan at a dungeon known to
inmates as "the black prison."
The jail, located
on the Bagram Air Base next to the notorious Bagram prison north of
Kabul, operates under the executive order of President Obama. After
entering office, Obama ordered the closure of Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) prison "black sites"-which were in fact no
longer active-but exempted those prisons run by the military's
Special Operations, which was headed from 2003 until 2008 by General
Stanley McChrystal, now US commander of the Af-Pak
theater.
US military
officials recently said they had no plans to close the Afghan jail and
another like it at the Balad Air Base in Iraq, which they claimed were
needed to interrogate "high-value detainees."
Two teenage Afghan
boys told the Washington Post that they were beaten,
photographed naked, sexually humiliated, denied sleep, and held in
solitary confinement by American guards at the prison this year.
Interviewed at a juvenile detention center in Kabul, where they have
been transferred, "the teenagers presented a detailed, consistent
portrait" of the abuse they experienced, the newspaper reported.
Their descriptions of the prison were confirmed by two other former
prisoners.
In addition to being punched and slapped, Rashid, who the Post
describes as "younger than 16," said he was forced to view
pornography "alongside a photograph of his mother." He was
also forced to strip naked in front of about a half-dozen US soldiers.
"They touched me all over my body," he said. "They took
pictures, and they were laughing and laughing. They were doing
everything."
"That was the hardest time I have ever had in my life," said
Rashid, who was arrested this spring. "It was better to just kill
me. But they would not kill me. ... I was just crying and crying. I
was too young."
On Saturday,
the New York Times published interviews with three former
inmates who also spoke of the black prison near Bagram. Each informant
"was interviewed separately and described similar conditions,"
the Times notes, and "[t]heir descriptions also matched
those obtained by two human rights workers who had interviewed other
former detainees at the site." One of the three men was arrested
months after Obama's inauguration as US president, as were the two
teenage boys interviewed by the Post.
All of those interviewed by the Times and the Post
maintained that they were not "Taliban." Without being
charged with a crime, they were seized by US soldiers, then bound,
gagged, and hooded, and taken to the "black prison."
The jail, according to the Times' sources, "consists of
individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single
light bulb glowing 24 hours a day." The cells are small; one
prisoner said his was only slightly longer than the length of his
body. US soldiers throw food into the cells through slots in the
door.
Prisoners are exposed to extreme cold and sleep deprivation. The
teenage boys told the Post that when they attempted to sleep on
the hard floor, US soldiers "shouted at them and hammered on
their cells." Prisoners' only respite from this extreme
solitary confinement are twice-a-day interrogations, during which some
are beaten or humiliated.
"He kept asking me, 'Tell us the truth.' I told them the truth
more than 10 times," Mohammad told the Post. "That
I'm a farmer, my father was a farmer, my brother was a farmer. But
they said, 'No, help us with this case. Tell us the truth.' That's
why he was slapping me."
The prisoners are held in these conditions for weeks-35 to 40 days,
according to the Times-their families unaware of their fate.
"For my whole family it was disastrous," said Hayatullah, a
Kandahar resident who said he was working in his pharmacy when he was
arrested. "Because they knew the Americans were sometimes killing
people, and they thought they had killed me because for two to three
months they didn't know where I was."
Hamidullah, who
was held five and a half months in detention, including five to six
weeks in the black jail, said he heard the sounds of other detainees
being tortured and abused. "They beat up other people in the
black jail, but not me," he said. "But the problem was that
they didn't let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn't
sleep."
Interrogators
insisted he was a Taliban fighter named Faida Muhammad. "I said,
'That's not me,'" he recalled. "They blamed me and said,
'You are making bombs and are a facilitator of bomb making and helping
militants,'" he said. "I said, 'I have a shop. I sell
spare parts for vehicles, for trucks and cars.'"
The US military
permits no contact with the outside world, and in violation of
international law, denies the International Committee of the Red Cross
access to the secret prison.
Gulham Khan, a 25-year-old sheep trader, who mostly delivers sheep and
goats for people who buy the animals in the livestock market in
Ghazni, was captured in late October 2008 and released in early
September this year. He told the Times, "They kept saying
to me, 'Are you Qari Idris?' I said, 'I'm not Qari Idris.' But
they kept asking me over and over, and I kept saying, 'I'm Gulham.
This is my name, that is my father's name, you can ask the
elders.'"
Ten months after his initial detention, American soldiers went to the
group cell where he was then being held and told him he had been
mistakenly picked up under the wrong name, Khan told the Times.
"They said, 'Please accept our apology, and we are sorry that we
kept you here for this time.' And that was it. They kept me for more
than 10 months and gave me nothing back."
The Times
noted, "In their search for him, Mr. Khan's family members
spent the equivalent of $6,000, a fortune for a sheep dealer, who
often makes just a dollar a day. Some of the money was spent on bribes
to local Afghan soldiers to get information on where he was being
held; they said soldiers took the money and never came back with the
information."
"This is something nobody can bear. It's extraordinary,"
said Malik Mohammad Hassan, a tribal elder from the Jalalabad area,
"They treated us like wild animals."
After Special Operations soldiers have finished interrogating the
prisoners, they are transferred to the regular Bagram prison where
they are packed into cages holding approximately 20 men each.
Bagram, which reputedly holds an estimated 700 inmates, is a hated
symbol of US imperialism to Afghans-so much that the Obama
administration has announced its intention to end its use as a prison.
Prisoners at Bagram are denied access to legal assistance or the right
to know the charges and evidence against them. There have been many
reports of torture there, among them at least two cases in which
prisoners were brutally beaten to death by US soldiers; one of these
cases is memorialized by the documentary Taxi to the Dark
Side.
The revelations of torture and illegal detention continuing under
Obama give the lie to his claim that the war in Afghanistan is about
"protecting the American people" and "fighting
terrorism."
Washington aims to subjugate Afghanistan in order to place the US
military close to the region's oil and gas reserves and to head off
the growing influence of other powers in the region. It is acutely
aware that defeat and withdrawal would spell a drastic weakening of
its global position.
These predatory aims require the US military to terrorize and
intimidate the entire Afghan population. It is notable that those
prisoners interviewed by the Times and the Post were
ordinary Afghans-a wood carver, a farmer, a sheep herder, a
pharmacist, a retired teacher, and a used parts dealer-all of whom
denied any involvement with the Taliban.
Obama's decision to increase the US military presence in Afghanistan
by 30,000 soldiers and escalate the dirty colonial war will inevitably
result in more horrors perpetrated against the people of
Afghanistan.
Authors Bio:
Josh Mitteldorf, de-platformed senior editor at OpEdNews, blogs on aging at http://JoshMitteldorf.ScienceBlog.com. Read how to stay young at http://AgingAdvice.org.
Educated to be an astrophysicist, he has branched out from there to mathematical modeling in a variety of areas, including evolutionary ecology and economics. He has taught mathematics, statistics, and physics at several universities. He is an avid amateur pianist, and father of two adopted Chinese girls, now grown. He travels to Beijing each year to work with a lab studying the biology of aging. His book on the subject is "Cracking the Aging Code", http://tinyurl.com/y7yovp87.