In the Name of Freedom

I can almost picture Scotty (McClellan) terrier, or Dick Myers, or even Ronald Dumsfeld himself proudly noting that, in this instance, no one is accused of desecrating a Koran:

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.

Oh, and here's the real kicker--no pun intended: it turns out the guy was no more a terrorist than he was a tycoon. But for the soldiers assigned to "interrogation," it seems as if it was yet another case of frat boy pranks/blowing off steam (take yer pick).

For the benefit of those without a Times subscription, I'll provide some extended excerpts:

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!"...

When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

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...

In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is 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...

Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar's death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram...

With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."

These "techniques," justified in part due to the line of reasoning/brain-lock now all-too-common in the GWOT that detainees are not POWs and therefore not subject to Geneva Convention rules, include:

Sleep deprivation for up to 36 hours.
Chaining or shackling to cell ceilings and/or perimeter fences.
Pressure-point control tactics--I actually was told about a couple of these by someone I knew years ago who was a part-time cop. One pressure point is just behind your ear, where the jaw meets the skull. There are also pressure points between your knuckles. Press down hard at either spot, and you'll cause intense pain.
"Peroneal strikes"--these are blows delivered to the side of the leg, just above the knee. One can cause permanent damage. Reports suggest Dilawar received over one hundred such strikes, causing his legs to become, in the words of a coroner who examined the body, "pulpified."

And who was on the administering end? Meet your interrogators:

Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, a tall, bearded interrogator sometimes called "Monster" -he had the nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other soldiers said - was often chosen to intimidate new detainees. Specialist Corsetti, they said, would glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a holding room. (A military police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for similar effect, documents show.)

"The other interrogators would use his reputation," said one interrogator, Specialist Eric H. Barclais. "They would tell the detainee, 'If you don't cooperate, we'll have to get Monster, and he won't be as nice.' " Another soldier told investigators that Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to Specialist Corsetti, then 23, as "the King of Torture."

A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army investigators last June at Guantánamo said Specialist Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner's face and threatened to rape him, excerpts from the man's statement show.

Last fall, the investigators cited probable cause to charge Specialist Corsetti with assault, maltreatment of a prisoner and indecent acts in the incident; he has not been charged. At Abu Ghraib, he was also one of three members of the 519th who were fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning, another interrogator said. A spokesman at Fort Bragg said Specialist Corsetti would not comment.

Be all you can be...

I wonder when this country will wake up to the damage being done. I mean, this isn't payback--it's sadism, pure and simple. And even IF Dilawar had been guilty of something--although, and let's repeat it, evidently he WASN'T--the tactics used against him and the other prisoners has no place in civilized society (though, sadly, punishment only slightly less vicious is routinely practiced in US penitentiaries).

Geez--we've really gone over to the dark side.