[NYTr] Army 'Faltered' in Investigating Afghan Torture
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The New York Times - May 22, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/international/asia/22abuse.html?ex=1274414400&en=35951e72c65a2185&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse
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 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 7
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 proposal 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 Dilawar,
a 22-year-old taxi driver. The file was obtained from a person involved in
the inquiry 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 former
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.
General McNeill, who has since been promoted, declined repeated requests to
clarify his remarks.
In retrospect, 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 throughout their time 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, some witnesses said.
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 to 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 later moved.
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
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