Afghan Torture Accts
David Grace
May 20, 2005
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates'
Deaths
By TIM GOLDEN
Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them,
his American jailers continued to torment him.
The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known
only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the
detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2
a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an
American base. When he arrived in the interrogation
room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs
were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and
his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists
to the top of his cell for much of the previous four
days.
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the
two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21,
picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched
a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the
prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured
out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then
grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water
forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.
"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist
Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the
spray. "Drink!"
At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force
the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had
been pummeled by guards for several days, could no
longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he
could see a doctor after they finished with him. When
he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the
guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back
to the ceiling.
"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist
Claus as saying.
Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor
finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body
beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before
Army investigators learned a final horrific detail:
Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was
an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the
American base at the wrong time.
The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram
Collection Point - and that of another detainee,
Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in
December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page
confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation
into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New
York Times.
Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images
from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly
trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The
harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal
charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the
two deaths.
In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed
or carried out by interrogators to extract
information. In others, it was punishment meted out by
military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems
to have been driven by little more than boredom or
cruelty, or both.
In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers
describe one female interrogator with a taste for
humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate
detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They
tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back
and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of
his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner
is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum
mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy
to soften him up for questioning.
The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person
involved in the investigation who was critical of the
methods used at Bagram and the military's response to
the deaths.
Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in
2002, including some details of the two men's deaths,
have been previously reported, American officials have
characterized them as isolated problems that were
thoroughly investigated. And many of the officers and
soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said
the large majority of detainees at Bagram were
compliant and reasonably well treated.
"What we have learned through the course of all these
investigations is that there were people who clearly
violated anyone's standard for humane treatment," said
the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We're
finding some cases that were not close calls."
Yet the Bagram file includes ample testimony that
harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine and
that guards could strike shackled detainees with
virtual impunity. Prisoners considered important or
troublesome were also handcuffed and chained to the
ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for long
periods, an action Army prosecutors recently
classified as criminal assault.
Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file
suggests. Senior officers frequently toured the
detention center, and several of them acknowledged
seeing prisoners chained up for punishment or to
deprive them of sleep. Shortly before the two deaths,
observers from the International Committee of the Red
Cross specifically complained to the military
authorities at Bagram about the shackling of prisoners
in "fixed positions," documents show.
Even though military investigators learned soon after
Mr. Dilawar's death that he had been abused by at
least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry
moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram
interrogators, led by the same operations officer,
Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in
July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu
Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry
last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that
were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.
Last October, the Army's Criminal Investigation
Command concluded that there was probable cause to
charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with
criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from
dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary
manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also
cited for probable criminal responsibility in the
Habibullah case.
So far, only the seven soldiers have been charged,
including four last week. No one has been convicted in
either death. Two Army interrogators were also
reprimanded, a military spokesman said. Most of those
who could still face legal action have denied
wrongdoing, either in statements to investigators or
in comments to a reporter.
"The whole situation is unfair," Sgt. Selena M.
Salcedo, a former Bagram interrogator who was charged
with assaulting Mr. Dilawar, dereliction of duty and
lying to investigators, said in a telephone interview.
"It's all going to come out when everything is said
and done."
With most of the legal action pending, the story of
abuses at Bagram remains incomplete. But documents and
interviews reveal a striking disparity between the
findings of Army investigators and what military
officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.
Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died
of natural causes, even after military coroners had
ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those
autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan,
then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no
indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to
the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said,
were "in accordance with what is generally accepted as
interrogation techniques."
The Interrogators
In the summer of 2002, the military detention center
at Bagram, about 40 miles north of Kabul, stood as a
hulking reminder of the Americans' improvised hold
over Afghanistan.
Built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop for
the operations base they established after their
intervention in the country in 1979, the building had
survived the ensuing wars as a battered relic - a
long, squat, concrete block with rusted metal sheets
where the windows had once been.
Retrofitted with five large wire pens and a half dozen
plywood isolation cells, the building became the
Bagram Collection Point, a clearinghouse for prisoners
captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The B.C.P., as
soldiers called it, typically held between 40 and 80
detainees while they were interrogated and screened
for possible shipment to the Pentagon's longer-term
detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The new interrogation unit that arrived in July 2002
had been improvised as well. Captain Wood, then a
32-year-old lieutenant, came with 13 soldiers from the
525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg,
N.C.; six Arabic-speaking reservists were added from
the Utah National Guard.
Part of the new group, which was consolidated under
Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence
Battalion, was made up of counterintelligence
specialists with no background in interrogation. Only
two of the soldiers had ever questioned actual
prisoners.
What specialized training the unit received came on
the job, in sessions with two interrogators who had
worked in the prison for a few months. "There was
nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation
operation" like the one at Bagram, the noncommissioned
officer in charge of the interrogators, Staff Sgt.
Steven W. Loring, later told investigators.
Nor were the rules of engagement very clear. The
platoon had the standard interrogations guide, Army
Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary of
defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners
"humanely," and when possible, in accordance with the
Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush's final
determination in February 2002 that the Conventions
did not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda and that
Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of
prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they
"could deviate slightly from the rules," said one of
the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.
"There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners
of war, but nothing for terrorists," Sergeant Leahy
told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior
intelligence officers said, were to be considered
terrorists until proved otherwise.
The deviations included the use of "safety positions"
or "stress positions" that would make the detainees
uncomfortable but not necessarily hurt them - kneeling
on the ground, for instance, or sitting in a "chair"
position against the wall. The new platoon was also
trained in sleep deprivation, which the previous unit
had generally limited to 24 hours or less, insisting
that the interrogator remain awake with the prisoner
to avoid pushing the limits of humane treatment.
But as the 519th interrogators settled into their
jobs, they set their own procedures for sleep
deprivation. They decided on 32 to 36 hours as the
optimal time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated
the practice of staying up themselves, one former
interrogator, Eric LaHammer, said in an interview.
The interrogators worked from a menu of basic tactics
to gain a prisoner's cooperation, from the "friendly"
approach, to good cop-bad cop routines, to the threat
of long-term imprisonment. But some less-experienced
interrogators came to rely on the method known in the
military as "Fear Up Harsh," or what one soldier
referred to as "the screaming technique."
Sergeant Loring, then 27, tried with limited success
to wean those interrogators off that approach, which
typically involved yelling and throwing chairs. Mr.
Leahy said the sergeant "put the brakes on when
certain approaches got out of hand." But he could also
be dismissive of tactics he considered too soft,
several soldiers told investigators, and gave some of
the most aggressive interrogators wide latitude.
(Efforts to locate Mr. Loring, who has left the
military, were unsuccessful.)
"We sometimes developed a rapport with detainees, and
Sergeant Loring would sit us down and remind us that
these were evil people and talk about 9/11 and they
weren't our friends and could not be trusted," Mr.
Leahy said.
Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, a tall, bearded
interrogator sometimes called "Monster" -he had the
nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other
soldiers said - was often chosen to intimidate new
detainees. Specialist Corsetti, they said, would
glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained
to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a
holding room. (A military police K-9 unit often
brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners
for similar effect, documents show.)
"The other interrogators would use his reputation,"
said one interrogator, Specialist Eric H. Barclais.
"They would tell the detainee, 'If you don't
cooperate, we'll have to get Monster, and he won't be
as nice.' " Another soldier told investigators that
Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to Specialist
Corsetti, then 23, as "the King of Torture."
A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army
investigators last June at Guantanamo said Specialist
Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an
interrogation at Bagram, held it against the
prisoner's face and threatened to rape him, excerpts
from the man's statement show.
Last fall, the investigators cited probable cause to
charge Specialist Corsetti with assault, maltreatment
of a prisoner and indecent acts in the incident; he
has not been charged. At Abu Ghraib, he was also one
of three members of the 519th who were fined and
demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during
questioning, another interrogator said. A spokesman at
Fort Bragg said Specialist Corsetti would not comment.
In late August of 2002, the Bagram interrogators were
joined by a new military police unit that was assigned
to guard the detainees. The soldiers, mostly
reservists from the 377th Military Police Company
based in Cincinnati and Bloomington, Ind., were
similarly unprepared for their mission, members of the
unit said.
The company received basic lessons in handling
prisoners at Fort Dix, N.J., and some police and
corrections officers in its ranks provided further
training. That instruction included an overview of
"pressure-point control tactics" and notably the
"common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling
blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee.
The M.P.'s said they were never told that peroneal
strikes were not part of Army doctrine. Nor did most
of them hear one of the former police officers tell a
fellow soldier during the training that he would never
use such strikes because they would "tear up" a
prisoner's legs.
But once in Afghanistan, members of the 377th found
that the usual rules did not seem to apply. The
peroneal strike quickly became a basic weapon of the
M.P. arsenal. "That was kind of like an accepted
thing; you could knee somebody in the leg," former
Sgt. Thomas V. Curtis told the investigators.
A few weeks into the company's tour, Specialist Jeremy
M. Callaway overheard another guard boasting about
having beaten a detainee who had spit on him.
Specialist Callaway also told investigators that other
soldiers had congratulated the guard "for not taking
any" from a detainee.
One captain nicknamed members of the Third Platoon
"the Testosterone Gang." Several were devout
bodybuilders. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, a group of
the soldiers decorated their tent with a Confederate
flag, one soldier said.
Some of the same M.P.'s took a particular interest in
an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known
to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina
wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the
legs and, at one point, chained him with his arms
straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway told
investigators. They also nicknamed him "Timmy," after
a disabled child in the animated television series
"South Park." One of the guards who beat the prisoner
also taught him to screech like the cartoon character,
Specialist Callaway said.
Eventually, the man was sent home.
The Defiant Detainee
The detainee known as Person Under Control No. 412 was
a portly, well-groomed Afghan named Habibullah. Some
American officials identified him as "Mullah"
Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander
from the southern Afghan province of Oruzgan.
He stood out from the scraggly guerrillas and
villagers whom the Bagram interrogators typically saw.
"He had a piercing gaze and was very confident," the
provost marshal in charge of the M.P.'s, Maj. Bobby R.
Atwell, recalled.
Documents from the investigation suggest that Mr.
Habibullah was captured by an Afghan warlord on Nov.
28, 2002, and delivered to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives
two days later. His well-being at that point is a
matter of dispute. The doctor who examined him on
arrival at Bagram reported him in good health. But the
intelligence operations chief, Lt. Col. John W.
Loffert Jr., later told Army investigators, "He was
already in bad condition when he arrived."
What is clear is that Mr. Habibullah was identified
at Bagram as an important prisoner and an unusually
sharp-tongued and insubordinate one.
One of the 377th's Third Platoon sergeants, Alan J.
Driver Jr., told investigators that Mr. Habibullah
rose up after a rectal examination and kneed him in
the groin. The guard said he grabbed the prisoner by
the head and yelled in his face. Mr. Habibullah then
"became combative," Sergeant Driver said, and had to
be subdued by three guards and led away in an armlock.
He was then confined in one of the 9-foot by 7-foot
isolation cells, which the M.P. commander, Capt.
Christopher M. Beiring, later described as a standard
procedure. "There was a policy that detainees were
hooded, shackled and isolated for at least the first
24 hours, sometimes 72 hours of captivity," he told
investigators.
While the guards kept some prisoners awake by yelling
or poking at them or banging on their cell doors, Mr.
Habibullah was shackled by the wrists to the wire
ceiling over his cell, soldiers said.
On his second day, Dec. 1, the prisoner was
"uncooperative" again, this time with Specialist
Willie V. Brand. The guard, who has since been charged
with assault and other crimes, told investigators he
had delivered three peroneal strikes in response. The
next day, Specialist Brand said, he had to knee the
prisoner again. Other blows followed.
A lawyer for Specialist Brand, John P. Galligan, said
there was no criminal intent by his client to hurt any
detainee. "At the time, my client was acting
consistently with the standard operating procedure
that was in place at the Bagram facility."
The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his
jailers appears to have been almost exclusively
physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.'s were
assigned no interpreters of their own. Instead, they
borrowed from the interrogators when they could and
relied on prisoners who spoke even a little English to
translate for them.
When the detainees were beaten or kicked for
"noncompliance," one of the interpreters, Ali M.
Baryalai said, it was often "because they have no idea
what the M.P. is saying."
By the morning of Dec. 2, witnesses told the
investigators, Mr. Habibullah was coughing and
complaining of chest pains. He limped into the
interrogation room in shackles, his right leg stiff
and his right foot swollen. The lead interrogator,
Sergeant Leahy, let him sit on the floor because he
could not bend his knees and sit in a chair.
The interpreter who was on hand, Ebrahim Baerde, said
the interrogators had kept their distance that day
"because he was spitting up a lot of phlegm."
"They were laughing and making fun of him, saying it
was 'gross' or 'nasty,' " Mr. Baerde said.
Though battered, Mr. Habibullah was unbowed.
"Once they asked him if he wanted to spend the rest of
his life in handcuffs," Mr. Baerde said. "His response
was, 'Yes, don't they look good on me?' "
By Dec. 3, Mr. Habibullah's reputation for defiance
seemed to make him an open target. One M.P. said he
had given him five peroneal strikes for being
"noncompliant and combative." Another gave him three
or four more for being "combative and noncompliant."
Some guards later asserted that he had been hurt
trying to escape.
When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Mr. Habibullah on Dec.
3, he was in one of the isolation cells, tethered to
the ceiling by two sets of handcuffs and a chain
around his waist. His body was slumped forward, held
up by the chains.
Sergeant Boland told the investigators he had entered
the cell with two other guards, Specialists Anthony M.
Morden and Brian E. Cammack. (All three have been
charged with assault and other crimes.) One of them
pulled off the prisoner's black hood. His head was
slumped to one side, his tongue sticking out.
Specialist Cammack said he had put some bread on Mr.
Habibullah's tongue. Another soldier put an apple in
the prisoner's hand; it fell to the floor.
When Specialist Cammack turned back toward the
prisoner, he said in one statement, Mr. Habibullah's
spit hit his chest. Later, Specialist Cammack
acknowledged, "I'm not sure if he spit at me." But at
the time, he exploded, yelling, "Don't ever spit on me
again!" and kneeing the prisoner sharply in the thigh,
"maybe a couple" of times. Mr. Habibullah's limp body
swayed back and forth in the chains.
When Sergeant Boland returned to the cell some 20
minutes later, he said, Mr. Habibullah was not moving
and had no pulse. Finally, the prisoner was unchained
and laid out on the floor of his cell.
The guard who Specialist Cammack said had counseled
him back in New Jersey about the dangers of peroneal
strikes found him in the room where Mr. Habibullah
lay, his body already cold.
"Specialist Cammack appeared very distraught,"
Specialist William Bohl told an investigator. The
soldier "was running about the room hysterically."
An M.P. was sent to wake one of the medics.
"What are you getting me for?" the medic, Specialist
Robert S. Melone, responded, telling him to call an
ambulance instead.
When another medic finally arrived, he found Mr.
Habibullah on the floor, his arms outstretched, his
eyes and mouth open.
"It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it
looked like nobody cared," the medic, Staff Sgt.
Rodney D. Glass, recalled.
Not all of the guards were indifferent, their
statements show. But if Mr. Habibullah's death shocked
some of them, it did not lead to major changes in the
detention center's operation.
Military police guards were assigned to be present
during interrogations to help prevent mistreatment.
The provost marshal, Major Atwell, told investigators
he had already instructed the commander of the M.P.
company, Captain Beiring, to stop chaining prisoners
to the ceiling. Others said they never received such
an order.
Senior officers later told investigators that they
had been unaware of any serious abuses at the B.C.P.
But the first sergeant of the 377th, Betty J. Jones,
told investigators that the use of standing
restraints, sleep deprivation and peroneal strikes was
readily apparent.
"Everyone that is anyone went through the facility at
one time or another," she said.
Major Atwell said the death "did not cause an enormous
amount of concern 'cause it appeared natural."
In fact, Mr. Habibullah's autopsy, completed on Dec.
8, showed bruises or abrasions on his chest, arms and
head. There were deep contusions on his calves, knees
and thighs. His left calf was marked by what appeared
to have been the sole of a boot.
His death was attributed to a blood clot, probably
caused by the severe injuries to his legs, which
traveled to his heart and blocked the blood flow to
his lungs.
The Shy Detainee
On Dec. 5, one day after Mr. Habibullah died, Mr.
Dilawar arrived at Bagram.
Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of
Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village
of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota
sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks
earlier to drive as a taxi.
Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went
far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife,
young daughter and extended family. He never attended
school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha
Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields
surrounding the village and talk.
"He was a shy man, a very simple man," his eldest
brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.
On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had
asked him to gather his three sisters from their
nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday.
But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive
to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes
away, to look for fares.
At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back
toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by
American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the
target of a rocket attack that morning.
Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding
the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a
checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie
from one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers. In the trunk,
they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate
current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar's family said
the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said,
they had no electricity at all.)
The four men were detained and turned over to
American soldiers at the base as suspects in the
attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their
first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would
be unable to sleep. When a doctor examined them the
next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar
tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.
Mr. Dilawar's three passengers were eventually flown
to Guantanamo and held for more than a year before
being sent home without charge. In interviews after
their release, the men described their treatment at
Bagram as far worse than at Guantanamo. While all of
them said they had been beaten, they complained most
bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female
soldiers for showers and medical examinations, which
they said included the first of several painful and
humiliating rectal exams.
"They did lots and lots of bad things to me," said
Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker from Khost. "I was
shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I
was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head
against the desk."
For Mr. Dilawar, his fellow prisoners said, the most
difficult thing seemed to be the black cloth hood that
was pulled over his head. "He could not breathe," said
a man called Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr.
Dilawar's passengers.
Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9
inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was
quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones.
When one of the First Platoon M.P.'s, Specialist Corey
E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him
some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and
started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he
said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the
shackled man.
"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first
reaction was that he was crying out to his god,"
Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody
heard him cry out and thought it was funny."
Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention
center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for
themselves, Specialist Jones said.
It became a kind of running joke, and people kept
showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal
strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said.
"It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think
that it was over 100 strikes."
In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague
about which M.P.'s had delivered the blows. His
estimate was never confirmed, but other guards
eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly.
Many M.P.'s would eventually deny that they had any
idea of Mr. Dilawar's injuries, explaining that they
never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But
Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of
Mr. Dilawar's orange prison suit fell down again and
again while he was shackled.
"I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down
while he was in standing restraints," the soldier told
investigators. "Over a certain time period, I noticed
it was the size of a fist."
As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out
more loudly to be released. But even the interpreters
had trouble understanding his Pashto dialect; the
annoyed guards heard only noise.
"He had constantly been screaming, 'Release me; I
don't want to be here,' and things like that," said
the one linguist who could decipher his distress,
Abdul Ahad Wardak.
The Interrogation
On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth
interrogation. It quickly turned hostile.
The 21-year-old lead interrogator, Specialist Glendale
C. Walls II, later contended that Mr. Dilawar was
evasive. "Some holes came up, and we wanted him to
answer us truthfully," he said. The other
interrogator, Sergeant Salcedo, complained that the
prisoner was smiling, not answering questions, and
refusing to stay kneeling on the ground or sitting
against the wall.
The interpreter who was present, Ahmad Ahmadzai,
recalled the encounter differently to investigators.
The interrogators, Mr. Ahmadzai said, accused Mr.
Dilawar of launching the rockets that had hit the
American base. He denied that. While kneeling on the
ground, he was unable to hold his cuffed hands above
his head as instructed, prompting Sergeant Salcedo to
slap them back up whenever they began to drop.
"Selena berated him for being weak and questioned him
about being a man, which was very insulting because of
his heritage," Mr. Ahmadzai said.
When Mr. Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair
position against the wall because of his battered
legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt
and repeatedly shoved him back against the wall.
"This went on for 10 or 15 minutes," the interpreter
said. "He was so tired he couldn't get up."
"They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on
his bare foot with her boot and grabbed him by his
beard and pulled him towards her," he went on. "Once
Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas,
with her right foot. She was standing some distance
from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.
"About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were
actually questioning him, after that it was pushing,
shoving, kicking and shouting at him," Mr. Ahmadzai
said. "There was no interrogation going on."
The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo
instructing the M.P.'s to keep Mr. Dilawar chained to
the ceiling until the next shift came on.
The next morning, Mr. Dilawar began yelling again. At
around noon, the M.P.'s called over another of the
interpreters, Mr. Baerde, to try to quiet Mr. Dilawar
down.
"I told him, 'Look, please, if you want to be able to
sit down and be released from shackles, you just need
to be quiet for one more hour."
"He told me that if he was in shackles another hour,
he would die," Mr. Baerde said.
Half an hour later, Mr. Baerde returned to the cell.
Mr. Dilawar's hands hung limply from the cuffs, and
his head, covered by the black hood, slumped forward.
"He wanted me to get a doctor, and said that he needed
'a shot,' " Mr. Baerde recalled. "He said that he
didn't feel good. He said that his legs were hurting."
Mr. Baerde translated Mr. Dilawar's plea to one of the
guards. The soldier took the prisoner's hand and
pressed down on his fingernails to check his
circulation.
"He's O.K.," Mr. Baerde quoted the M.P. as saying.
"He's just trying to get out of his restraints."
By the time Mr. Dilawar was brought in for his final
interrogation in the first hours of the next day, Dec.
10, he appeared exhausted and was babbling that his
wife had died. He also told the interrogators that he
had been beaten by the guards.
"But we didn't pursue that," said Mr. Baryalai, the
interpreter.
Specialist Walls was again the lead interrogator. But
his more aggressive partner, Specialist Claus, quickly
took over, Mr. Baryalai said.
"Josh had a rule that the detainee had to look at him,
not me," the interpreter told investigators. "He gave
him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the
shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table,
slamming his chest into the table front."
When Mr. Dilawar was unable to kneel, the interpreter
said, the interrogators pulled him to his feet and
pushed him against the wall. Told to assume a stress
position, the prisoner leaned his head against the
wall and began to fall asleep.
"It looked to me like Dilawar was trying to cooperate,
but he couldn't physically perform the tasks," Mr.
Baryalai said.
Finally, Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and
"shook him harshly," the interpreter said, telling him
that if he failed to cooperate, he would be shipped to
a prison in the United States, where he would be
"treated like a woman, by the other men" and face the
wrath of criminals who "would be very angry with
anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks." (Specialist
Walls was charged last week with assault, maltreatment
and failure to obey a lawful order; Specialist Claus
was charged with assault, maltreatment and lying to
investigators. Each man declined to comment.)
A third military intelligence specialist who spoke
some Pashto, Staff Sgt. W. Christopher Yonushonis, had
questioned Mr. Dilawar earlier and had arranged with
Specialist Claus to take over when he was done.
Instead, the sergeant arrived at the interrogation
room to find a large puddle of water on the floor, a
wet spot on Mr. Dilawar's shirt and Specialist Claus
standing behind the detainee, twisting up the back of
the hood that covered the prisoner's head.
"I had the impression that Josh was actually holding
the detainee upright by pulling on the hood," he said.
"I was furious at this point because I had seen Josh
tighten the hood of another detainee the week before.
This behavior seemed completely gratuitous and
unrelated to intelligence collection."
"What the hell happened with that water?" Sergeant
Yonushonis said he had demanded.
"We had to make sure he stayed hydrated," he said
Specialist Claus had responded.
The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the
noncommissioned officer in charge of the
interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the
incident. Mr. Dilawar, however, was already dead.
The Post-Mortem
The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct.
He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical
examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail
was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities."
Similar injuries contributed to Mr. Habibullah's
death.
One of the coroners later translated the assessment at
a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the
tissue in the young man's legs "had basically been
pulpified."
"I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over
by a bus," added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the
coroner, and a major at that time.
After the second death, several of the 519th
Battalion's interrogators were temporarily removed
from their posts. A medic was assigned to the
detention center to work night shifts. On orders from
the Bagram intelligence chief, interrogators were
prohibited from any physical contact with the
detainees. Chaining prisoners to any fixed object was
also banned, and the use of stress positions was
curtailed.
In February, an American military official disclosed
that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had
arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself
been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was
suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then
turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a
ploy to win their trust, the military official said.
The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent
home from Guantanamo in March 2004, 15 months after
their capture, with letters saying they posed "no
threat" to American forces.
They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar's parents, who
begged them to explain what had happened to their son.
But the men said they could not bring themselves to
recount the details.
"I told them he had a bed," said Mr. Parkhudin. "I
said the Americans were very nice because he had a
heart problem."
In late August of last year, shortly before the Army
completed its inquiry into the deaths, Sergeant
Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his
own initiative to see an agent of the Criminal
Investigation Command. Until then, he had never been
interviewed.
"I expected to be contacted at some point by
investigators in this case," he said. "I was living a
few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had
been one of the last to see this detainee alive."
Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of
the detainee's last interrogation. "I remember being
so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said.
He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the
investigative file. By the time Mr. Dilawar was taken
into his final interrogations, he said, "most of us
were convinced that the detainee was innocent."
Ruhallah Khapalwak, Carlotta Gall and David Rohde
contributed reporting for this article, and Alain
Delaqueriere assisted with research.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Co
+++++
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/international/asia/22abuse.html
May 22, 2005
Abuse Inquiry Bogged Down in Afghanistan
By TIM GOLDEN
Despite autopsy findings of homicide and statements
by soldiers that two prisoners died after being struck
by guards at an American military detention center in
Bagram, Afghanistan, Army investigators initially
recommended closing the case without bringing any
criminal charges, documents and interviews show.
Within days after the two deaths in December 2002,
military coroners determined that both had been caused
by "blunt force trauma" to the legs. Soon after,
soldiers and others at Bagram told the investigators
that military guards had repeatedly struck both men in
the thighs while they were shackled and that one had
also been mistreated by military interrogators.
Nonetheless, agents of the Army's Criminal
Investigation Command reported to their superiors that
they could not clearly determine who was responsible
for the detainees' injuries, military officials said.
Military lawyers at Bagram took the same position,
according to confidential documents from the
investigation obtained by The New York Times.
"I could never see any criminal intent on the part of
the M.P.'s to cause the detainee to die," one of the
lawyers, Maj. Jeff A. Bovarnick, later told
investigators, referring to one of the deaths. "We
believed the M.P.'s story, that this was the most
combative detainee ever."
The investigators' move to close the case was among a
series of apparent missteps in an Army inquiry that
ultimately took almost two years to complete and has
so far resulted in criminal charges against seven
soldiers. Early on, the documents show, crucial
witnesses were not interviewed, documents disappeared,
and at least a few pieces of the evidence were
mishandled.
While senior military intelligence officers at Bagram
quickly heard reports of abuse by several
interrogators, documents show they also failed to file
reports that are mandatory when any intelligence
personnel are suspected of misconduct, including
mistreatment of detainees. Those reports would have
alerted military intelligence officials in the United
States to a problem in the unit, military officials
said.
Those interrogators and others from Bagram were later
sent to Iraq and were assigned to Abu Ghraib prison. A
high-level military inquiry last year found that the
captain who led interrogation operations at Bagram,
Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, applied many of the same harsh
methods in Iraq that she had overseen in Afghanistan.
Citing "investigative shortfalls," senior Army
investigators took the Bagram inquiry away from agents
in Afghanistan in August 2003, assigning it to a task
force based at the agency's headquarters in Virginia.
In October 2004, the task force found probable cause
to charge 27 of the military police guards and
military intelligence interrogators with crimes
ranging from involuntary manslaughter to lying to
investigators. Those 27 included the seven who have
actually been charged.
"I would acknowledge that a lot of these
investigations appear to have taken excessively long,"
the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Larry Di
Rita, said in an interview on Friday. "There's no
other way to describe an investigation that takes two
years. People are being held accountable, but it's
taking too long."
Mr. Di Rita said the Pentagon was examining ways to
speed up such investigations, "because justice delayed
is justice denied."
A spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Command,
Christopher Grey, would not discuss details of the
case, but played down the significance of the agents'
early proposal to close it. He said that the
investigation had been guided by a desire for
thoroughness rather than speed, and that it eventually
included more than 250 interviews around the world.
"Case agents make recommendations all the time," Mr.
Grey said. "But the review process looks at
investigations constantly and points to other things
that need to be completed or other investigative
approaches."
While the recommendation to close the case was
ultimately rejected by senior officials, documents
show that the inquiry was at a virtual standstill when
an article in The New York Times on March 4, 2003,
reported that at least one of the prisoner's deaths
had been ruled a homicide, contradicting the
military's earlier assertions that both had died of
natural causes. Activity in the case quickly resumed.
The details of the investigation emerged from a file
of almost 2,000 pages of confidential Army documents
about the death on Dec. 10, 2002, of a 22-year-old
taxi driver named Dilawar. The file was obtained from
a person involved in the investigation who was
critical of the abuses at Bagram and the military's
response to the deaths.
The file presents the fates of Mr. Dilawar and another
detainee who died six days earlier, Mullah Habibullah,
against a backdrop of frequent harsh treatment by
guards and interrogators who were in many cases poorly
trained, loosely supervised and only vaguely aware of
or attentive to regulations limiting their use of
force against prisoners they considered to be
terrorists.
According to interviews with military intelligence
officials who served at Bagram, only a small fraction
of the detainees there were considered important or
suspicious enough to be transferred to the American
military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for further
interrogation. Two intelligence officers estimated
that about 85 percent of the prisoners were ultimately
released.
Still, most new detainees at Bagram were hooded,
shackled and isolated for at least 24 hours and
sometimes as long as 72 hours, the commander of the
military police guards at Bagram, Capt. Christopher M.
Beiring, told investigators. Prisoners caught in
infractions like talking to one another were
handcuffed to cell doors or ceilings, often for half
an hour or an hour, but sometimes for far longer.
Interrogators trying to break the detainees'
resistance sometimes ordered that they be forced to
sweep the same floor space over and over or scrub it
with a toothbrush.
The responsibility of senior officers at Bagram for
carrying out such methods is not clear in the Army's
criminal report.
In several instances, the documents show Captain Wood
and her deputy, Staff Sgt. Steven W. Loring, sought
clarification about what techniques they could use.
"Numerous requests for strict guidance on P.U.C.
treatment have been voiced to the Staff Judge
Advocate," Sergeant Loring said, referring to the
detainees by the initials for Persons Under Control,
"but no training has been offered."
Major Bovarnick, the former legal adviser to the
detention center, told investigators that the
shackling of detainees with their arms overhead was
standard operating procedure when he arrived at Bagram
in mid-November 2002. On Nov. 26, after complaints
from the International Committee of the Red Cross, he
convened a group of military and C.I.A. officials at
Bagram to discuss methods of interrogation and
punishment, including shackling to fixed objects.
"My personal question then was, 'Is it inhumane to
handcuff somebody to something?' " he said. Referring
to his consultations with the two senior lawyers at
Bagram, he added, "It was our opinion that it was not
inhumane."
After the deaths, officers who served at Bagram said,
there was a similar debate over whether criminal
charges were warranted.
Military lawyers noted that the autopsies of the two
dead detainees had found severe trauma to both
prisoners' legs - injuries that a coroner later
compared to the effect of being run over by a bus.
They also acknowledged statements by more than half a
dozen guards that they or others had struck the
detainees. But the lawyers and other officers did not
press for a fuller accounting, two officers said in
interviews.
Instead, statements showed, they pointed to
indications that both detainees had some existing
medical problems when they arrived at Bagram, and
emphasized that it would be difficult to determine the
responsibility of individual guards for the injuries
they sustained in custody.
"No one blow could be determined to have caused the
death," the senior staff lawyer at Bagram, Col. David
L. Hayden, said he had been told by the Army's lead
investigator. "It was reasonable to conclude at the
time that repetitive administration of legitimate
force resulted in all the injuries we saw." Both Major
Bovarnick and Colonel Hayden declined requests for
comment.
As late as Feb. 7 - nearly two months after the first
autopsy reports had classified both deaths as
homicides - the American commander of coalition forces
in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said in an
interview that he had "no indication" that either man
had been injured in custody.
Asked repeatedly to clarify his remarks, General
McNeill, who has since been promoted, said last week
through his spokesman, Col. Lewis M. Boone, that he
would answer questions sent to him by e-mail. But
after telling a reporter on Thursday that the
responses would be delivered momentarily, Colonel
Boone said he had heard nothing from the general and
could not account for what had happened.
In retrospect, many of the investigators' initial
interviews with guards, interrogators and interpreters
at the detention center appear cursory and sometimes
contradictory. As transcribed, many of the statements
are little more than a page or two long.
Most of the guards who admitted punching the detainees
or kneeing them in the thighs said they did so in
order to subdue prisoners who were extraordinarily
combative. But both detainees were shackled at the
hands and feet virtually all of the time they were at
Bagram. One of them, Mr. Dilawar, weighed only 122
pounds and was described by interpreters as neither
violent nor aggressive. Both detainees also complained
of being beaten and seemed to have trouble walking,
yet they were not seen by doctors after their initial
examinations.
The early interviews also included statements by two
of the interpreters that they had been so troubled by
the abusive behavior of some interrogators that they
had gone to the noncommissioned officer in charge of
the military intelligence group, Staff Sergeant
Loring, to complain. One of the interrogators,
Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, refused speak to the
agents at all, and another told of the guards' beating
one of the detainees who died.
Even so, investigators failed to interview some
crucial witnesses, including the officer in charge of
the interrogators, Captain Wood, and the commander of
the military police company, Captain Beiring. They
also neglected an interrogator who had been present
for most of Mr. Dilawar's questioning. When he finally
went to investigators at his own initiative, he
described one of the worst episodes of abuse.
Many of the guards who later provided important
testimony were also initially overlooked. Computer
records and written logs that were supposed to record
treatment of the detainees were not secured and later
disappeared. Blood taken from Mr. Habibullah was
stored in a butter dish in the agents' office
refrigerator, from which it was only recovered - or
"seized" as a report explains it - when the office was
moved months later.
The record of the investigation indicated that Army
investigators almost entirely stopped interviewing
witnesses within three weeks after Mr. Dilawar's
death. And although Major Bovarnick, the detention
center's legal adviser, said he told Captain Beiring
after the first death "that there would be no
shackling to the ceiling ever again," the issue was
largely ignored in the initial investigation.
While the Army's criminal inquiry continued, General
McNeill ordered a senior officer, Col. Joseph G.
Nesbitt, to conduct a separate, classified examination
of procedures at the detention center. That led to
changes including prohibitions against the shackling
of prisoners for sleep deprivation and interrogators'
making physical contact with detainees.
Documents from the criminal investigation suggested
that Colonel Nesbitt was also dismissive of the notion
that the two deaths pointed to wider wrongdoing. He
concluded that military police guards at the detention
center "knew, were following and strictly applying"
proper rules on the use of force, documents showed,
and he cited a "conflict between obtaining accurate,
timely information and treating detainees humanely."
Senior officials at the Criminal Investigation
Command's headquarters took a different view. On April
15, 2003, they rejected the field agents' proposal to
close the case, sending it back "for numerous
investigative, operational, administrative and
security classification-related issues, which required
additional work, pursuit, clarification or scrutiny."
Four months later, the headquarters officials
reassigned the case to the task force that eventually
implicated the 27 soldiers.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Co
+++++
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050521/ap_on_re_mi_ea/afghan_prisoner_abuse
Karzai Wants More Control of U.S. Forces
By DANIEL COONEY, Associated Press Writer
May 21, 2005 - 53 minutes ago
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai called on
Saturday for control of U.S. military operations in
Afghanistan and demanded the United States take strong
action against soldiers who abuse prisoners, following
a report of alleged maltreatment of detainees at the
main U.S. base here.
Karzai said he was "shocked" by allegations of abuse
by poorly trained U.S. soldiers made by the New York
Times in its Friday edition. The report cited a
2,000-page confidential file on the Army's criminal
investigation into the deaths of two Afghans at the
Bagram base in December 2002.
Karzai said he will bring up the issue when he meets
American leaders during a four-day visit to the United
States starting Saturday.
"We want the U.S. government to take very, very strong
action to take away people like that are working with
their forces in Afghanistan," Karzai told reporters
before leaving Kabul. "Definitely ... I will see about
that when I am in the United States."
He also demanded greater control over U.S. military
operations here, including a stop to raids by American
troops on Afghans' homes without the knowledge of his
administration.
"No operations inside Afghanistan should take place
without the consultation of the Afghan government,"
the president said.
But he added that the actions of those responsible for
the abuse should not be seen as reflective of all
Americans.
"The people of the United States are very kind
people," he said. "It is only one or two individuals
who are bad and such individuals are found in any
military in any society everywhere, including
Afghanistan."
The U.S. military, responding to the allegations,
defended its treatment of detainees, saying it would
not tolerate maltreatment.
The military's spokesman in Kabul, Col. James Yonts,
said, "Military and civilian members are expected to
abide by the highest standards and when their actions
contradict these standards appropriate action will be
taken. The command has made it very clear that any
incidents of abuse will not be tolerated."
In Washington, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said
President Bush was "alarmed by the reports of prisoner
abuse," and wants them thoroughly investigated. He
said seven people are being investigated about abuse
at Bagram Air Base.
"What the military and what the president supported is
investigations, holding people to account," Duffy
said. "We've taken steps, we've taken new policies to
ensure that this doesn't happen again, and we're
holding people to account."
The Times reported that the file of the criminal
investigation "depicts poorly trained soldiers in
repeated incidents of abuse," which in some instances
"was directed or carried out by interrogators to
extract information."
It reported that one of the two Afghans, a 22-year old
taxi driver called Dilawar, had been pummeled by
guards for several days and chained with his arms to
the ceiling. Most of the interrogators believed he was
an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the
base at the wrong time, the newspaper said.
The Army has publicly acknowledged the two deaths and
announced in October that up to 28 U.S. soldiers face
possible charges in connection with what were ruled
homicides.
In December, Pentagon officials confirmed that eight
deaths of detainees in Afghanistan have been
investigated since mid-2002. Hundreds of people were
detained during and after the campaign by U.S.-led
forces to oust the hardline Taliban regime in late
2001.
Following the outcry over abuse at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq, the military also initiated a review
of its detention facilities in Afghanistan and later
said it had modified some of its procedures, although
the review's findings have yet to be made public.
+++++
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050521/wl_nm/afghan_usa_abuse_dc
Afghan president 'shocked' by U.S. abuse report
By Robert Birsel
May 21, 2005 - 37 minutes ago
KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid
Karzai said on Saturday he was shocked by a U.S. Army
report on abuse of detainees in Afghanistan, saying
his government wanted custody of all Afghan prisoners
and control over U.S. military operations.
The abuse described in the report, including details
of the deaths of two inmates at an Afghan detention
center, happened in 2002 and emerged from a nearly
2,000-page file of U.S. Army investigators, The New
York Times reported on Friday.
"It has shocked me thoroughly and we condemn it,"
Karzai said at a news conference. "We want the U.S.
government to take very, very strong action, to take
away people like that."
Karzai, a staunch ally in the U.S.-led war against
terrorism, was due to leave on a U.S trip on Saturday
and meet President Bush for talks.
Karzai wants to forge a broad long-term partnership
with his most important ally but he said he would also
reiterate a request for the return of Afghan prisoners
and control over U.S. military operations.
The United States commands a foreign force in
Afghanistan of about 18,300, most of them American,
fighting Taliban insurgents and hunting militant
leaders, including Osama bin Laden.
Karzai's visit to Washington follows violent
anti-American protests in Afghan cities prompted by a
Newsweek report that U.S. interrogators had desecrated
the Koran. Sixteen people were killed and many wounded
in the violence.
Newsweek retracted the report, but the International
Committee of the Red Cross subsequently said it had
told the Pentagon of allegations U.S. personnel had
mishandled the Muslim holy book.
In his weekly radio address, Bush emphasized close
ties with Afghanistan and said he would discuss with
Karzai progress his country has made since the ousting
of the Taliban by U.S. forces in 2001.
He did not mention the protests or the abuse report.
"We're helping Afghanistan's elected government
solidify these democratic gains and deliver real
change," Bush said. "A nation that once knew only the
terror of the Taliban is now seeing a rebirth of
freedom, and we will help them succeed."
HOUSE SEARCHES CRITICIZED
Many Afghans have criticized U.S. troops for what are
seen as heavy-handed tactics, such as breaking into
people's homes in the middle of the night in their
search for militants.
At the news conference, Karzai said searches should be
carried out in cooperation with Afghan forces.
"No operations inside Afghanistan should take place
without the consultation of the Afghan government," he
said.
"They should not go to our people's homes any more
without the knowledge of the Afghan government. ... If
they want any person suspected in a house, they should
let us know and the Afghan government would arrange
that."
Karzai said he would also ask for "the return of
prisoners to Afghanistan, all of them."
The United States is holding more than 500 prisoners
from its war on terrorism at the Guantanamo Bay naval
base on Cuba. Many of them were detained in
Afghanistan after the Taliban overthrow.
U.S. forces are also believed to be holding several
hundred Afghans in Afghanistan.
The U.S. Army report centers on the death of a
22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar and that
of another detainee, Habibullah, who died at the U.S.
base at Bagram, north of Kabul, six days earlier, in
December 2002.
According to the report, Dilawar was chained by his
wrists to the top of his cell for several days before
he died and his legs had been pummeled by guards.
"The file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in
repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment,
which has resulted in criminal charges against seven
soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths," The New
York Times said.
In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers
described mistreatment ranging from a female
interrogator stepping on a detainee's neck and kicking
another in the genitals to a shackled prisoner being
made to kiss the boots of interrogators, according to
the newspaper.
U.S. officials have characterized incidents of
prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002 as isolated problems
that were thoroughly investigated, the newspaper said.
Two army interrogators have been reprimanded and
seven soldiers have been charged, the newspaper said.
//////\\\\\\
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
__________________________________
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