WASHINGTON
- Thursday's recommendation by the US Army's Criminal
Investigation Division that 28 soldiers be charged in
connection with the beating deaths of two prisoners held
at a detention facility in Afghanistan in December 2002
has spurred new calls for an entirely independent
investigation of abuses of detainees by US forces in the
"war on terrorism".
The announcement, which said
that charges could include involuntary manslaughter and
maiming, as well as less serious offenses, came just shy
of two years after the two prisoners died. Human-rights
observers have deplored the military's failure to
immediately investigate the deaths, suggesting there may
have been an attempt to cover them up.
"Taking
22 months to investigate apparent homicides that
occurred in US-run overseas prisons is not conducive to
protecting prisoners from torture and abuse," said
Jumana Musa of Amnesty International USA shortly after
the announcement. "In fact, the failure to promptly
account for the prisoners' deaths indicates a chilling
disregard for the value of human life and may have laid
the groundwork for further abuses in Abu Ghraib [prison
in Iraq] and elsewhere.
"This announcement is
further evidence that the ill-treatment of detainees did
not start at Abu Ghraib, and will not stop without a
comprehensive independent investigation of the torture
scandal, including all identified and secret detention
facilities operated or accessed by the US," she added.
Thursday's announcement came amid reports that
the Pentagon is reviewing the case of four Iraqi
journalists who claimed last January that they had been
abused by US soldiers at a forward operating base near
Fallujah for some 50 hours after being detained near the
scene of a helicopter crash. The Pentagon initially
dismissed their allegations of being hooded, beaten,
slapped, forced to sit and stand in "stress positions
and acts of sexual humiliation as not credible and
possibly part of an anti-coalition information campaign"
to Reuters news agency, which employed the men.
But in light of the Abu Ghraib scandal, which
came to light in April, as well as a series of Pentagon
or Pentagon-commissioned reports released last summer
that suggested that abuses were much more widespread
than initially thought, the Defense Department was
apparently prevailed on to review the case, according to
an account published Thursday in the New York Times.
Thursday's army announcement comes amid
accusations by the former commander of the joint
interrogation center at Abu Ghraib that the actions of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in keeping inmates
at the prison in Iraq off official rosters appeared to
have been intended to speed their transfer to sites
outside Iraq, where they would not be protected by the
Geneva Conventions. The allegation by Lieutenant Colonel
Steven Jordan in testimony in February was included in
hundreds of pages of secret documents released on Friday
by the Center for Public Integrity. Jordan said the
approach had been authorized under an unwritten
agreement between the CIA and Colonel Thomas Pappas, the
top US military intelligence officer at the prison.
The army announcement also comes on the heels of
an investigative report by the Los Angeles Times in late
September that US Special Forces at a forward base near
Gardez, Afghanistan, beat and tortured eight Afghan army
soldiers in March, 2003, over more than a two-week
period until one of the captives died. The survivors
were then transferred to the custody of a nearby police
station and held there secretly until their wounds
healed, more than six weeks later. The Pentagon has
announced an investigation into that incident, as well.
At the same time, the navy announced that it had
charged three more members of the Navy Seals in
connection with the abuse of Iraqi prisoners between
October 2003 and April 2004, two of whom died after
beatings by US commandos. That brought to seven the
number of Navy Seals who face criminal charges over
abuses committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All of
these incidents have tended to confirm the contentions
of human-rights groups and others that abuses of
detainees held by the US military have been far more
widespread than the Pentagon has admitted to date - a
conclusion that also a central thesis of a new book,
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib published last month by New Yorker
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
In his
new book, Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal along
with CBS's 60 Minutes, also argued that senior
military and national-security officials in the Bush
administration were repeatedly warned by subordinates in
2002 and 2003 that prisoners held by the military were
subject to abuses, an accusation which the
administration has strongly denied since the Abu Ghraib
scandal first came to light.
"The roots of the
Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations
of a few army reservists, "as maintained by the
administration to date", but in the reliance of
[President George W] Bush and [Secretary of Defense]
Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of
coercion - and eye-for-eye retribution - in fighting
terrorism."
That policy, which was implicitly
supported by a series of memos drafted by politically
appointed lawyers in the Justice and Defense Departments
and the White House that have subsequently leaked to the
press, according to Hersh, migrated from Afghanistan to
Iraq, setting the stage for the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Amnesty's Musa said Thursday that any
independent investigation "should include a
determination whether administration officials bear
criminal liability for torture or inhuman treatment of
prisoners".
The latest case involved the death
of Mullah Habibullah in early December. According to an
autopsy report prepared at the time, the victim died of
a "pulmonary embolism due to blunt-force injuries to the
legs". The death was identified as a "homicide".
About a week later, a second Afghan detainee,
identified only as Dilawar, died as a result of
"blunt-force injuries to lower extremities complicating
coronary artery disease". Both victims were in their
20s.
In addition to involuntary manslaughter and
maiming, charges that were recommended by the division
include dereliction of duty and assault. The former
applies to soldiers - as yet unidentified - who failed
to restrain their comrades in beating or otherwise
abusing the prisoners.
Given the growing number
of abuse cases and what is known about them, many
civil-society groups and US lawmakers have called for an
independent investigation of detainee abuses outside the
control of the administration and the Pentagon. To date,
all investigations have been conducted under Defense
Department auspices.
Among the groups are the
American Bar Association, Human Rights Watch, Human
Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human
Rights), and Physicians for Human Rights, which has also
expressed concern about the failure of US medics and
doctors to stop or report the abuses that came to their
attention.
