The 9/11 Wars (18 page)

The precursor to the abuse in American facilities was the inaction of American special forces and CIA personnel who witnessed, or were made aware of, torture, abuse and mass executions without trial during or following the collapse of the Taliban. This was particularly widespread in the north of Afghanistan, where several thousand prisoners, a mixed bag of Pakistanis, Afghans and international volunteers, had been taken by General Dostum, alongside whom American military and CIA operatives had been fighting for several weeks in and around Kunduz. Many hundreds, if not thousands, were murdered, some apparently buried alive, others driven long distances loaded into container trucks from which, one of the drivers recalled, the bodies ‘spilled out like fish’ when they were later opened.
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US special forces at the very least knew this was happening even if they may not have been directly involved.

The most famous detainee in the north was John Walker Lindh, a young American who, after a long journey from California through radical Yemeni and Pakistani religious schools, had ended up fighting with the Taliban. Captured, he was refused medical treatment, was blindfolded with a rag with ‘shithead’ scrawled on it by soldiers, who, in another precursor of what was to come much later, then posed around him for a photograph.
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In Pakistan, American personnel were visiting prisons and holding centres established to handle the fugitives caught crossing the border and taking part in interrogations where their Pakistani counterparts beat detainees badly, denied them sleep or placed them in stress positions for many hours at a stretch.
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By December, CIA personnel in Bagram were forcing captives to stand for hours on end and wear spray-painted goggles with the deliberate aim of inflicting severe sensory deprivation to facilitate interrogation. By January, concerned British intelligence officers on the ground in Afghanistan were reporting mistreatment to their superiors, and assaults that would incur lengthy prison sentences in most nations were becoming widespread.
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In February President Bush made public his decision that captured al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects would be treated as non-combatants rather than prisoners of war and denied the protection of the Geneva Convention and thus subjected to an arbitrary regime that would allow the US military to hold and interrogate them for as long as was desired. This breached almost every broadly established standard of international law. What by most standards would be defined as cruel and unnatural was now enshrined as official policy.
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Bush’s announcement undoubtedly had an aggravating effect – one interrogator who served in Afghanistan told the
New York Times
that ‘giving [detainees] the [status] of soldier would have changed our attitudes toward them’ – but also simply legitimized something that was already happening.
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Kandahar prison, established at the airport 10 miles east of the city, had opened in early December and received its first major batch of detainees just as the fighting in Tora Bora was winding up and a few days before the inauguration of Hamid Karzai. For the next three months it would be the main holding centre for prisoners in Afghanistan. The interrogators at Kandahar had three tasks: to obtain ‘actionable intelligence’ to be passed to the special forces units and the CIA to initiate immediate operations in Afghanistan or elsewhere; to elicit information that would fill the vast gaps in the American understanding of the enemy they faced; and to ascertain whether detainees were the high-level al-Qaeda and Taliban figures they were believed to be and thus worthy of transfer to the new facility being constructed at Guantanamo Bay. The pressure to get information was very high, especially as it was believed that some of the detainees probably knew about forthcoming or planned terrorist attacks.

Kandahar was brutal from the start. On planes to the prison in December, detainees were locked down in painful positions, hit with rifle butts and verbally abused. On arrival they were, according to one military interrogator, ‘bound together in long chains’, marched down a ramp, screamed at by military policemen shouting ‘commands and obscenities audible even over the roar of the plane’ and ‘hurled’ to the ground. Screaming and struggling, anticipating rape or execution, the detainees then had their clothes, often soiled with excrement or urine during the flight, cut away. Naked, hooded and still in chains they then underwent a full intrusive medical examination, were interrogated rapidly to establish a provisional identity and then locked, twenty-five at a time, into tents equipped with a single toilet bucket and little else. Ringed with barbed wire, open sided, the tents were unprotected from the fierce cold of a southern Afghan desert winter night. If the detainees tried to communicate with each other, they were beaten.
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The early ‘rough treatment’ soon escalated. Detainees later claimed that guards and interrogators at Kandahar had assaulted them, made death threats, deprived them of sleep, urinated on them, burned them with cigarettes, inserted sticks or poured petrol into their anuses and, again in ways that would become all too familiar later, ‘took photographs of [them] completely naked’ and ‘stripped and piled [them] naked on each other while soldiers in full uniform took pictures and laughed’. One military translator complained to his hierarchy that special forces soldiers had used some kind of ‘electric device’ on one detainee. As the vast bulk of detainees were neither senior al-Qaeda nor senior Taliban and sometimes totally innocent of any involvement in violence, their interrogators inevitably failed to obtain any useful intelligence from them. Increasingly frustrated, they intensified their efforts to ‘get a result’.
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What was happening on the ground in Afghanistan was happening elsewhere. Through late 2001 and 2002 the CIA set up a system of secret prisons across the Middle East and Asia – with some facilities in Europe or on board ships in international waters too. Within this and the parallel military detention system practices flowed from one prison to another, from one theatre to another, sometimes passing through the White House or the Pentagon, where senior administration figures effectively signed off on what was already happening, sometimes simply transferring horizontally among those involved in the interrogations at a lower level.
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The treatment of Zayn al-Abidin Mohammed Hussein, a thirty-year-old Saudi-Arabian-born Palestinian better known as Abu Zubaydah and alleged to be a key militant, illustrates the steady intensification of violence in this period and the way, as each new level of abuse was reached in one location, it affected behaviour elsewhere. Detained in a joint local and American operation in Faisalabad, the sprawling eastern Pakistani industrial city in March 28, 2002, Abu Zubaydah was first transferred to a secret prison in Thailand and then passed through a series of facilities in eastern Europe before finally arriving in Guantanamo Bay. As such he was one of the first few dozen detainees in the 9/11 Wars to be subject to a ‘rendition’, a covert transfer to third countries or into US custody by the CIA of an individual seized overseas and one of the first to be shipped around the world through the new networks being established at the time. These saw planes flying suspects from Egypt to Azerbaijan, from Thailand to Libya, from Italy to Germany via Egypt, from Tanzania to Djibouti, from Zimbabwe to the Sudan.
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Abu Zubaydah’s itinerary was relatively mundane by comparison. The treatment he received was not, however. Though his interrogation was initially handled by the FBI, it was taken over by the CIA, who were convinced that more robust measures were needed to get significant information out of their prisoner. One problem may well have been that Abu Zubaydah was simply nowhere near as knowledgeable of al-Qaeda’s inner workings as he was believed to be. Over the next months he would be subjected to the full range of interrogation techniques seen in Afghanistan in previous months including dousing with freezing water, sensory and sleep deprivation, forced nudity and stress positions and the rediscovered practice of ‘waterboarding’, the repeated near drowning of a subject of interrogation by placing a cloth over the face and pouring water into the mouth.
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The introduction of waterboarding has been attributed to specialist private consultants who had researched Soviet, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese techniques and who were hired by the CIA to direct Abu Zubaydah’s questioning.
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Despite claims to the contrary such practices and thinking may have been relatively widespread. At least one former detainee in Afghanistan told the author he had undergone waterboarding – or a form of waterboarding – while in American detention shortly after being arrested near Jalalabad in October 2002.
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Once abuse had reached the level of nearly killing prisoners, it did not take long before the inevitable next stage of escalation was reached, and by late December 2002 detainees had begun to die. In Afghanistan, the first was Mullah Habibullah, a big, confident man wrongly accused of links to a Taliban commander from Oruzgan who died in his cell at Bagram after six days of violent beatings. The second fatal casualty was a taxi driver called Dilawar, detained with three other men on information from Bacha Khan Zadran, the warlord who had provided the false information which had led to the bombing of the convoy of elders near Gardez a year before, who, though he had been dumped as a political ally, was still being used as an intelligence source. Dilawar, a small, frail man innocent of any involvement in violence, was subjected to a series of assaults of extreme brutality. In the last sessions, as his legs were already so damaged, he was thrown against a wall. Dilawar too died in his cell.
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It is almost certain that there were other deaths that went unrecorded. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan NGO worker detained in Pakistan who ended up in Bagram in late 2002, claimed to have witnessed at least one murder, saying he saw ‘a prisoner shot dead after he had gone to the aid of an inmate who was being beaten and kicked by the guards’ and another ‘beaten until [he] heard no sound of him after the screaming’. Deghayes said the incident was followed by ‘panic in prison and the guards running about in fear saying to each other “the Arab has died” ’.
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Such events were but a way point on a continuing descent. In addition to Bagram and Kandahar and the various unofficial prisons on various smaller bases across the country, there was the network of secret detention centres in Afghanistan run by the CIA. Details of two are now known: the ‘Salt Pit’ and the ‘Dark Prison’, both apparently operational early in 2002 and both key facilities of the international system of ‘ghost’ prisons that the CIA had established across the world. Conditions in these were even worse than in Bagram. Cells measuring 2 by 3 metres contained ten men. Prisoners were kept for months in pitch-black cells, fed once a day. The use of extreme cold or heat to ‘prepare’ a subject for interrogation was routine.
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At least one, possibly half a dozen, detainees died in these two prisons. At least three others were killed elsewhere in Afghanistan at different forward operating bases in Gardez, in Kunar and in Gereshk in Helmand. In Gardez, the victim was an eighteen-year-old Afghan army recruit who died after being beaten with hoses and cables, immersed in cold water and subjected to electric shocks. In Kunar, it was a twenty-eight-year-old who approached American troops with information after a rocket attack and was beaten to death over a two-day period by a private contractor using ‘his hands and feet and a large flashlight’.
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The spiral of escalation and abuse throughout the global network being established by the CIA was to continue over coming years. Much would slowly become public, provoking horror and anger even among allies. Senior officials at MI6 later described, disingenuously given that British intelligence officers were happy to receive information from some of the ‘more muscular’ interrogations and indeed may have facilitated a number of them, being ‘as shocked as anybody’.
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In Afghanistan the detention, humiliation and abuse of thousands of often respected men was to have predictable consequences. Many of those rounded up in raids like those of Colonel Fetterman, by special forces or delivered by warlords’ militia to the CIA were innocent; some were allies who were playing key roles in stabilizing the country smeared by rivals in complex local Afghan politics; all were linked into extended familial and tribal networks which meant that violence against one was seen as violence against scores or even hundreds.
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One interrogator at Bagram said he felt he was on the receiving end of an invisible war, with barely identified individuals brought to him from out ‘beyond the wire’ by special forces teams and CIA operatives fighting a shadowy conflict that he knew little about. The same, however, could be said of the men out on the raids themselves, who appear to have had almost no understanding of who and what they were looking for. The three locations that had seen fatal beatings – Gardez, Asadabad and Gereshk – were among the first where violence against the coalition would start to surge. One village elder from near Kandahar who was accused wrongly of being a senior Taliban commander told his jailers shortly before his release after two years in Guantanamo Bay: ‘This is just me you brought [here] but I have six sons [and] ten uncles who will be against you … I don’t care about myself but have 300 male members of my family there in my country … If you want to build Afghanistan you can’t build it this way … I will tell anybody who asks me this is
zulm
[arbitrary rule or tyranny].’
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