- Dear Jeff,
-
- After I read the massive amount of work written about
US's abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, I wondered how should
American prisoners be treated? My research tell me that Afghan and Iraqi
resistance groups do not stoop themselves to such an indignity as perpetrated
by the US mercenary army.
-
- When asked about the treatment of the US prisoners, Afghan
resistant fighters responded " we are not lowering themselves to the
bestiality of the Americans, after all we have a scripture to follow."
- When I read the following article, I do not condemn criminals
and rapists in this country because it appears that most people consider
such indignifying actions acceptable, otherwise the common people seeing
the photos of Abu Ghraib should have shown some outrage.
-
- This society and its people have reached such magnitude
of sickness that seeing a US Marine shooting a wounded man in a mosque
in Falujah as just another entertainment they see on daily basis.
- The following article talks about the tortures and rapes
committed by the US forces in Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. Many decent
and good people are arrested and held there and tortured on daily basis,
the same is true in Guantanamo Bay also. It brings to ask the question
as to when some of these prisoners are released what would be their incentive
for not picking up arms against US forces?
-
- When Abdullah Mehsud, An Afghan, who was imprisoned in
Guantanamo Bay for two years, released and took up arms against the coward
regime of General Mushraf of Pakistan, the US officials wondered as to
why has this man did not keep away from militant activities? The answer
is simple. Any decent human being having witnessed the indignity imposed
on other Muslims would never put down arms against the evil forces of the
United States until they are defeated and humiliated in that part of the
world. And, I can tell you this, It will happen, it is just a matter of
time.
-
- Sincerely,
-
- Mohammed daud Miraki, MA, MA, PhD
- mdmiraki@ameritech.net
- www.afghandufund.org
-
- Papers Reveal Bagram Abuse
-
- * Prisoners subjected to 'mock executions'
- * Photographs of detainees being sexually humiliated
-
- By Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and James Meek
- The Guardian (UK)
-
- New evidence has emerged that US forces in Afghanistan
engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse, taking "trophy photographs"
of detainees and carrying out rape and sexual humiliation.
-
- Documents obtained by the Guardian contain evidence that
such abuses took place in the main detention centre at Bagram, near the
capital Kabul, as well as at a smaller US installation near the southern
city of Kandahar.
-
- The documents also indicate that US soldiers covered
up abuse in Afghanistan and in Iraq - even after the Abu Ghraib scandal
last year.
-
- A thousand pages of evidence from US army investigations
released to the American Civil Liberties Union after a long legal battle,
and made available to the Guardian, show that an Iraqi detained at Tikrit
in September 2003 was forced to withdraw his report of abuse after soldiers
told him he would be held indefinitely.
-
- Meanwhile, photographs taken in southern Afghanistan
showing US soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions
of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the
Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid "another public outrage", the documents
show.
-
- In the dossier, the Iraqi detainee claims that three
US interrogators in civilian clothing dislocated his arms, stuck an unloaded
gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, choked him with a rope until he
lost consciousness, and beat him with a baseball bat.
-
- "After they tied me up in the chair, then they dislocate
my both arms. He asked to admit before I kill you then he beat again and
again," the prisoner says in his statement. "He asked me: Are
you going to report me? You have no evidence. Then he hit me very hard
on my nose, and then he stepped on my nose until he broken and I started
bleeding."
-
- The detainee withdrew his charges on November 23 2003.
He says he was told: "You will stay in the prison for a long time,
and you will never get out until you are 50 years old."
-
- A medical examination by a US military doctor confirmed
the detainee's account, yet the investigation was closed last October.
"It is further proof that the army is not seriously investigating
credible allegations of abuse," said Jameel Jaffar, a lawyer for the
ACLU.
-
- The latest allegations from Afghanistan fit a pattern
of claims of brutal treatment made by former Guantánamo Bay prisoners
and Afghans held by the US, and reported by the Guardian last year. In
December the US said eight prisoners had died in its custody in Afghanistan.
-
- In a separate case, which the Guardian reveals today,
two former prisoners of the US in Afghanistan have come forward with claims
against their American captors.
-
- In sworn affidavits to a British-American human rights
lawyer, a Palestinian says he was sodomised by American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Another former prisoner of US forces, a Jordanian, describes a form of
torture which involved being hung in a cage from a rope for days.
-
- Both men were freed from US detention last year after
being held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Neither has been charged
by any government with any offence.
-
- Hussain Adbulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, a Palestinian living
in Jordan, told the lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, that he was sodomised
by US soldiers during his detention at Bagram air force base in 2002.
-
- He claims to have been blindfolded, tightly handcuffed,
gagged and had his ears plugged, forced to bend down over a table by two
soldiers, with a third soldier pressing his face down on the table, and
to have had his trousers pulled down.
-
- "They forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum,"
he reports. "It was excruciatingly painful ... Only when the pain
became overwhelming did I think I would ever scream. But I could not stop
screaming when this happened."
-
- In a second affidavit, the Jordanian citizen, Wesam Abdulrahman
Ahmed Al Deemawi, detained from March 15 2002 to March 31 2004, says that
during a 40-day period of detention at Bagram he was threatened with dogs,
stripped and photographed "in shameful and obscene positions"
and placed in a cage with a hook and a hanging rope. He says he was hung
from this hook, blindfolded, for two days although he was occasionally
given hour-long "breaks".
-
- The Guardian asked the US military's central command,
which has responsibility for Afghanistan, to respond to the allegations
on Wednesday. By the time of going to press last night no response had
been received other than an email from a Major Steven Wollman in Kabul,
saying he was researching the question.
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