Why
US fed detainees to Afghan torture
system By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Starting in late 2005, United
States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) forces in Afghanistan began turning
detainees over to the Afghan National Directorate
of Security (NDS), despite its well-known
reputation for torture.
Interviews with
former US and NATO diplomats and other evidence
now available show that United States and other
NATO governments become complicit in NDS torture
of detainees for two distinctly different reasons.
For the European members of NATO -
especially the British and Dutch - the political
driving factor was the need to distance
themselves from a US detainee
policy already tainted by accounts of US torture.
The US and Canada supported such
transfers, however, in the belief that NDS
interrogators could get better intelligence from
the detainees.
The transfers to the NDS
were a direct violation of the United Nations
Convention against Torture, which forbids the
transfer of any person by a state party to
"another state where there are substantial grounds
for believing that he would be in danger of being
subjected to torture".
The first official
shift in policy was the adoption by NATO in
December 2005 of a "96-hour rule" requiring
transfer of Afghan detainees to the Afghan
government within four days.
The British
and Dutch unwillingness to continue turning their
detainees over to the United States was in
response to published reports of US torture of
detainees at a secret detention facility at Bagram
air base near the capital, Kabul.
Ronald
Neumann, then US ambassador to Afghanistan, told
Inter Press Service (IPS) the "initial impetus"
for the 96-hour rule came from the "discomfort" of
the British and Dutch about "being associated with
US handling of detainees".
A former NATO
diplomat who served in Afghanistan at the time
confirmed Neumann's recollection. "The British and
Dutch privately expressed their concerns that
perceptions of US detainee policy could damage the
mission," he said.
But under the new
96-hour rule, the detainees were turned over the
NDS, which had long had a reputation for torturing
suspected enemies of the state, starting when it
was the secret police and intelligence agency
during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. That
reputation had continued under the government of
President Hamid Karzai.
The impetus for
the US and Canadian forces in Afghanistan to
transfer detainees to the NDS, however, was the
desperate need for intelligence on the Taliban.
By the time US and Canadian military
commanders began large-unit sweeps in areas where
the Taliban had been operating in 2004-2005, the
George W Bush administration had already decided
to consider all Afghans in detention as "unlawful
combatants".
But most of the Afghans
picked up in those sweeps were not Taliban
fighters. After US and NATO forces began turning
over detainees to the NDS, the intelligence
agency's chief Amrullah Saleh told NATO officials
that the agency had to release two-thirds of the
detainees who had been transferred to it,
according to the NATO diplomat.
Matt
Waxman, the US deputy assistant secretary of
defense for detainee affairs until the end of
2005, recalled in an interview with IPS that there
had been "a lot of concern both in the Pentagon
and in the field" about "over-broad detention" in
Afghanistan, but also "counter-pressures" for
"more aggressive detention operations".
United States ambassador Neumann told IPS
that the US military turned detainees over to the
NDS because of "the intelligence benefit and so we
didn't have a revolving door" - a reference to the
fact that many detainees who had been turned over
to local authorities had been set free.
In
an interview with the Ottawa Citizen published on
May 16, 2007, Canadian Brigadier General Jim
Ferron, then the intelligence chief for NATO's
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
command in Afghanistan, referred to the
intelligence motive for both detention and
transferring detainees to NDF.
"The
detainees are detained for a reason," said Ferron.
"They have information we need."
But he
complained that much of the information provided
by detainees was "not truthful and is aimed at
deceiving military forces". Ferron explained that
detainees went through "basic questioning" by NATO
interrogators about "why they joined the
insurgency" and the information was then turned
over to NDS.
Ferron clearly implied that
the NDS interrogators could do a better job of
getting the truth out of the detainees than NATO
interrogators. The "best information" was what was
being gleaned by the NDS, he said, and ISAF "would
like to make it more a part of our daily
intelligence".
Ferron said senior NDS
officials had assured him that "detainees are
treated humanely". But only three weeks earlier,
the Toronto Globe and Mail had published a series
of investigative articles based on interviews with
detainees turned over by the Canadians who had
been tortured by NDS.
Even though they had
just initiated the 96-hour rule under which
detainees were turned over to NDS, British and
Dutch diplomats were very concerned about the NDS
reputation for torture, according to the NATO
diplomat. "They knew if they turned their
detainees over to the Afghans, they would be
tortured," recalled the diplomat.
Largely
because of their awareness of the risk of NDS
torture, the British and Dutch turned over
relatively few detainees, according to the NATO
diplomat.
The British and Dutch also
joined with US officials in trying to get the
Afghan government to shift responsibility for
detainees from NDS to the Afghan Ministry of
Defense, the NATO diplomat recalled.
But
there were two problems: under Afghan law, there
was no provision for long-term legal internment,
and a 1987 Afghan law gave NDS the responsibility
for handling security cases through its own
"security courts".
The US and its two
European NATO allies wanted Karzai to remove those
legal obstacles to long-term detention by the
Defense Ministry. "The idea was that Karzai would
declare a state of emergency, so the government
could hold people for the length of the conflict,"
the diplomat said.
The plan also
envisioned the renovation of the Pul-I Charkhi
prison to add a new wing for security detainees,
for which the Ministry of Defense would be
responsible.
But Karzai refused to declare
a state of emergency, according to the NATO
diplomat, because he didn't want to make
concessions to the Afghan parliament to get it.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak
"wanted nothing to do with detainee policy", said
the NATO diplomat.
In early November 2007,
a detainee turned over to the NDS by Canadian
forces told Canadian diplomats in an NDS jail in
Kandahar in early November 2007 that he had been
beaten with an electrical cable and a rubber hose,
and the Canadians found the torture instruments
nearby.
The Canadian government then
halted its transfers of detainees to the NDS. And
in February 2008, Amnesty International called on
NATO defense ministers to suspend all transfers of
detainees from ISAF to Afghan authorities, given
the substantial risk of torture and ill-treatment.
Despite that appeal, however, the United
States continued to transfer its detainees to NDS.
During 2009, ISAF transferred a total of
350 detainees to NDS, according to official data
provided to IPS by a knowledgeable US source. An
even more detainees were transferred to NDS by US
troops operating separately from the NATO command,
according to the source.
Gareth
Porter is an investigative historian and
journalist specializing in US national security
policy. The paperback edition of his latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in 2006.
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