U.S. Soldiers Prosecuted for torture in Afghanistan:

[amborin]

"...Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.


A sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell.

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.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: 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.

The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times....."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?scp=1&sq=died%20in%20captivity%20torture%20afghanistan&st=cse>

[JimGinPA]

1. That's Just Horrifying

You just know that same kind of thing was/is going on everywhere that we are holding detainees.


K&R

[Jennicut]

2. Sickening. And this was supposed to get us info? On what?

Truly stupid and horrible.

[ThirdWorldJohn]

3. This man was slowly murdered, of course.

The guards kneed this man in the thigh until his thigh was literally mush. He was reduced to begging for his God, Allah. And then finally for his Mother. The guards that aided in his murder are probably back in the USA now. Justice will never be achieved for this crime against this innocent man. Prosecuting Bush, Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz is the honorable and the least that we can do as a nation. See the evil that we do when we do nothing? And some Congress Men and women were told of the techniques. So we know that the harm that torture goes beyond the guilt of the actual torturers and goes to the highest levels of government. Bush and Cheney should be executed if found guilty. Bush can smirk all he wants after the guilty plea is delivered. That is why O'Rielly and the media that helped the Bush Regime is so scared. Because their hearts are also black with abetting the monsters while the rights of the people were trampled and dispiced by the liars on Fox News and the strong arm police that used tactics with no worry of justice handed to ythem. Fuck.

[Supersedeas]

4. Is that the one where Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark found no red flags