Torture continues

Bagram prison has long had a reputation for torture by US agents in the forms of sleep deprivation, beatings, and sexual humiliation. The movie “A Taxi to the Dark Side” covers how one innocent detainee was tortured and killed at Bagram. It is a very ugly picture. The movie “Road to Guantanamo” also shows the horrific criminal reality that US agents have created. Oh, and there was no real accountability for these crimes, as usual.

The Geneva Convention just didn’t apply.

It is now confirmed that torture continues under the Obama administration. And the media still like to call it “abuse”. Obama has spoken out against this, but he has also stopped the release of photos that show our history of torture, and that stopped any accountability or justice for the victims of torture under the Bush administration.

There are hardly any photos from inside Bagram prison, and journalists are not allowed in there.

Prisoner Abuse Continues at Bagram Prison in Afghanistan

Azar, who is originally from Lebanon, is the manager of a construction company. He was on his way to Camp Eggers, the American military base near the presidential palace, when 10 armed FBI agents suddenly surrounded him. The men, all wearing bulletproof vests, put him in handcuffs, tied him up and pushed him into an SUV. Two hours later, they unloaded Azar at the Bagram military prison 50 kilometers (31 miles) northeast of Kabul.

As Azar later testified, he was forced to sit for seven hours, his hands and feet tied to a chair. He spent the night in a cold metal container, and he received no food for 30 hours. He claimed that US military officers showed him photos of his wife and four children, telling him that unless he cooperated he would never see his family again. He also said that he was photographed while naked and then given a jumpsuit to wear.

On that day, April 7, 2009, President Barack Obama had been in office for exactly 77 days.

This man was later ‘renditioned’ to the USA. That was covered in a post I wrote the other day.

Also ‘renditioned’ was a Lebanese-American named Ms. Cobos. She lived in Lebanon with her daughter, but was stripped searched, shackled, hooded, had ear phones to mask noise put on her and flown back to the US. She was treated in much the same manner as the man mentioned above, and in court papers, her attorney calls it psychological torture. She had no idea why she was being detained and was repeatedly pressured into a confession. She was not allowed to call her young daughter for several days. She has since been accused of fraud, which is not a terrorism crime. This information came from her court papers.

Here is a copy of her attorney’s motion to dismiss the charges.

Bagram is reportedly worse than Guantanamo. They have no right to an attorney; they live in cages that hold 20-25 men, with one toilet behind a curtain per cage. It smells horrible, according to released inmate’s reports. (Some are now being moved to the new facility.) Some men have been held there for years without knowing why.

In July of this year, the prisoners at Bagram held a protest.

Hundreds of prisoners at the US-run Bagram jail in Afghanistan are refusing basic privileges to protest about their basic rights, officials say. Inmates have refused to participate in a project which allows prisoners to talk to their families via video phone, the Red Cross says. …. The prisoners are reported to be protesting against what they say are a lack of basic rights such as access to lawyers or independent reviews of their status.

….. A number of former detainees alleged they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs at the base. Of 27 ex-inmates the BBC spoke to around the country over two months, only two said they had been treated well.

Three detainees who were held at the ‘black site’ at Bagram do not claim they were tortured, but they do state this:

None said they had been tortured, though they said they heard sounds of abuse going on and certainly felt humiliated and roughly used. “They beat up other people in the black jail, but not me,” Hamidullah said. “But the problem was that they didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep."

I would think I was being tortured if I was not allowed to sleep.

Other prisoners do claim that they were tortured at Bagram at the ‘black site’. As usual, the NYT terms this as ‘abuse’ when it is done by Americans, and for other countries they call it ‘torture’.

2 Afghans allege abuse at US site

Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.

The accounts could not be independently substantiated. But in successive, on-the-record interviews, the teenagers presented a detailed, consistent portrait suggesting that the abusive treatment of suspected insurgents has in some cases continued under the Obama administration, despite steps that President Obama has said would put an end to the harsh interrogation practices authorized by the Bush administration.

One of them also made the claim that he was forced to look at pornography alongside a photo of his mother. Another one claimed he was stripped naked and underwent a medical evaluation in front of about six US soldiers, who laughed at him and touched him inappropriately. (Why are there so many sexual perverts in the US military? I guess it is just a reflection of our society.)

A recent poll in the US showed that 54% of Americans now say torture is ‘often justified’ or ‘sometimes justified’.

Pretty fricking unbelievable.

Several activists groups are petitioning the Obama administration to stop covering up torture that was done under the Bush administration. They say it is a violation of international law for the Obama administration to suppress the release of photos of torture.

Don’t cover up torture, 29 groups petition Obama

"Your actions ... indicate a troubling willingness to sweep torture under the rug, rather than openly address our nation’s regrettable recent history," the letter (PDF) tells Obama.

It appears, at this time, that the reason for sweeping torture under the rug is to allow torture to continue. Our president, Secretary of Defense and Congress are enabling this. They are suppressing the evidence so that there will be no prosecution under the Obama administration, and it appears that torture will continue under the Obama administration.

Maybe with the next administration we will get some accountability and a return to the rule of law.

h/t to Greenwald:

Convention Against Torture, signed and championed by Ronald Reagan, Article II/IV:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . . Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.