U.S.-Bound Karzai Decries New Prison-Abuse Report

JENNIFER LUDDEN, host:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Jennifer Ludden.

A year after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Bush administration is facing new questions this weekend about the abuse and death of prisoners in US military custody, this time in Afghanistan. The questions were raised by a two-part series published in The New York Times. The reporting was based on a leaked confidential file of an Army investigation into the alleged abuse. In yesterday's installment, reporter Tim Golden recounted the brutal deaths of two Afghans in custody at the American detention facility at Bagram. In tomorrow's piece, he writes that Army investigators initially tried to stop the case from going forward. We'll be speaking with Tim Golden in a few moments, but we begin with reaction from Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai flew to the United States today. Before leaving Kabul, he said he was shocked by The New York Times report and would bring up the issue in Washington. The BBC's Andrew North in Kabul said President Karzai's words were very strong.

Mr. ANDREW NORTH (BBC): He condemned these allegations. He said he was totally shocked. He said that several times. And he then said that he would be calling on the US government to prosecute those involved. And when he was, in fact, speaking in the Afghan language Dari, he called the allegations that he'd read in The New York Times against humanity. So definitely a real sense of anger there from what he this hearing.

LUDDEN: How much do Afghans know about this report? I mean, we saw that a Newsweek piece about alleged abuse of the Koran certainly spread around and helped spark some deadly anti-American riots there. Newsweek then retracted that article. Is this New York Times report being shared there?

Mr. NORTH: You certainly haven't seen quite the level of reaction as those allegations produced. I think because of the whole idea of this being an offense to the Koran, this caused a lot more reaction, but these allegations in The New York Times certainly have been reported. It was the lead story on the main radio stations here in Kabul today and I think that's why President Karzai is sending this very strong message. In the past, he's been criticized for being actually too soft on allegations of US abuse here.

LUDDEN: How do most Afghans view the United States today?

Mr. NORTH: Well, by and large, there is still a welcome for the international presence here. After almost 30 years of war, Afghans are tired of fighting. They want to see peace, and many of them believe that the international presence here is the best way of assuring that. And so certainly compared to Iraq, there is a lot more goodwill, but definitely in the last two months, there has been some signs of a change and it is more directed at the Americans, particularly concerned about heavy-handed tactics in their battle against the Taliban, down in the south and east of the country. In fact, President Karzai in his remarks today was saying that there is now going to be greater control of US operations particularly over the issue of American troops breaking into people's houses. This causes particular concern and he was actually saying these--such operations will stop, but certainly some here who feel that was more for domestic consumption. We'll have to see whether US military commanders here really do stop operations as a result of intervention by the government.

LUDDEN: Andrew North is the BBC correspondent in Kabul. Thank you so much.

Mr. NORTH: Thanks, Jennifer.

LUDDEN: Now to Tim Golden who obtained that still confidential file of the Army's investigation into prisoner abuse at Bagram.

Welcome.

Mr. TIM GOLDEN: Thank you.

LUDDEN: In yesterday's piece in The New York Times which was based on this confidential file, you chronicled the death of two prisoners in US custody in 2002. They were allegedly beaten to death over the course of days. Can you just briefly recap what happened to these two people?

Mr. GOLDEN: The two detainees were young Afghan men. One known by the first name Dilawar, the other Habibullah, who came into custody at the American prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, in December 2002. They both died very shortly after they arrived there--one, four days later; the other, five days later. And autopsies by the military very quickly determined that they had both suffered severe blunt force trauma to their legs in addition to other injuries. What it turned out was that they had been beaten repeatedly by military police guards. They had been treated very harshly in Mr. Dilawar's case by military interrogators, and both of them had been shackled to the ceiling of their cells for days.

LUDDEN: You also write that at least in the case of one of them, the military officers doing this were thought to have known that he was probably innocent, that he was a taxi driver who was basically in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mr. GOLDEN: Mr. Dilawar, who was the 22-year-old taxi driver, was picked up outside a different American base supposedly for being involved in a rocket attack on that base hours before he drove by with some passengers, but some of the interrogators there, the ones who spoke to him first, seemed to have figured out quite quickly that he was just a taxi driver, and as a consequence, they themselves were appalled by the treatment he subsequently received.

LUDDEN: Is there anything in the document that you revealed that suggests why, if the interrogators or if the personnel there, knew that this taxi driver was probably innocent, they continued to beat him until he died?

Mr. GOLDEN: Well, Mr. Dilawar was moved, as many detainees are, from one set of interrogators to another. Well, by the time he came into his fourth interrogation, his legs, an interpreter said, were bouncing in the plastic chair. His hands were numb. He seemed almost delirious. Nonetheless, he was tormented in the most brutal way by a couple of 21-year-old specialists who I suspect thought they were dealing with a real terrorist.

LUDDEN: You report that 27 soldiers and officers were deemed to be involved in these deaths. It suggests that the abuse was somewhat widespread, I mean, not a few bad apples. What kind of guidance were these soldiers getting for carrying out these interrogations?

Mr. GOLDEN: Well, there wasn't a lot of specific guidance. After President Bush determined on February 7th, 2002, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the fight against al-Qaeda and that Taliban prisoners would not be considered prisoners of war, the administration essentially said, `Treat prisoners humanely and to the extent consistent with military necessity,' a somewhat vague phrase, `treat them in accordance with the conventions.' But on the ground, one of the things that emerges strongly from the reporting that we did is that people understood that to mean that there was some bend in the rules. We had cases in which the lawyers at Bagram had a discussion only days before these men died. Was it inhumane, for instance, to shackle prisoners to the doors of their cells? And after some consideration, those lawyers for the military determined that it was not inhumane.

LUDDEN: So the military lawyers were there. They were aware of what was happening and they were assessing it as it was going on at Bagram?

Mr. GOLDEN: There's some debate about how effective the lawyers were in trying to keep a hold on conduct of guards and interrogators at the prison, but the lawyers did provide some advice and they did, so they say, try, for instance, to ban shackling of prisoners to the ceiling after Mr. Habibullah, the first of the detainees, died. The day after he died, however, Mr. Dilawar came in to the prison and he was immediately shackled to the ceiling, and he spent the better part of five days chained to the ceiling by his wrists.

LUDDEN: In yesterday's paper, you wrote that you were given this confidential document of this investigation by someone in the military who was critical not only of what happened but of the military's response after these two men's deaths. You've got the second part of your series coming out in tomorrow's paper. So can I ask you what was the response? How long did it take for the Army to begin investigating these deaths?

Mr. GOLDEN: Well, the Army initially began investigating immediately, and within about three weeks after the deaths, they'd interviewed a series of guards and interrogators, but those were very cursory interviews. And nonetheless despite the fact that you had findings from both autopsies that these men had died of homicides and that you had severe trauma to the legs of both men, the Army criminal investigators initially proposed closing the case without charging anyone. That recommendation was also made by the lawyers at Bagram, including the senior most lawyer on the base and the lawyer who was the adviser to the prison.

LUDDEN: So have any of the soldiers and officers involved been held to account?

Mr. GOLDEN: Well, the Army's criminal investigation commander rejected the proposal to close the case. They sent it back in April of 2003 for a lot more work, and when that work was not done very well by the agents in the field in Afghanistan, they eventually took over the case entirely, setting up a task force base in the United States that then went around the world really interviewing all of these soldiers who had either gone back to their homes or had been redeployed to other countries. And they finally found probable cause. They've charged 27 officers and soldiers with criminal wrongdoing ranging from involuntary manslaughter to dereliction of duty and in many of the cases lying to investigators in the first place.

LUDDEN: So have all those 27 been charged?

Mr. GOLDEN: No. So far only seven have been charged, but it appears that criminal action is likely against some others.

LUDDEN: You've got the second part of your series coming out tomorrow. What has the Pentagon said to you? I assume you've asked for a response for this article.

Mr. GOLDEN: Well, they really haven't challenged a word of it. It's all coming out of sworn witness statements and other documentary evidence. They've acknowledged that this investigation took way too long, but they haven't really addressed the issue of what command responsibility there may have been or what responsibility there may have been on the part of Pentagon officials in Washington for setting the policies that may have contributed to these two men's deaths. There's virtually no one above the rank of captain who has been subjected to a whole lot of scrutiny.

LUDDEN: Tim Golden is a reporter with The New York Times. The second part of his article comes out Sunday.

Thank you so much.

Mr. GOLDEN: Thank you.

LUDDEN: The Army declined to speak with NPR on tape about its investigation into abuses at the Bagram Collection Point while legal procedures are still pending. A spokesman we called, Jeremy Martin, said the Army does not tolerate detainee abuse, investigates allegations when they're made and prosecutes those who are found responsible. He said in an e-mail that since April 2004, there's been an 80 percent reduction in allegations of detainee abuse.

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