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Journalism of Courage
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. At the interrogators’ behest, a military police 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 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.
Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw 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 Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
The findings of Dilawar’s autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what killed him was the same sort of “blunt force trauma to the lower extremities” that led to Habibullah’s death. A coroner later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing, 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,” the coroner, Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, added.
The story of 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 file of the Army’s criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
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. Habibullah was shackled by the wrists to the wire ceiling over his cell, soldiers said. On his second day, December 1, the prisoner was “uncooperative” again, this time with Spc. Willie V. Brand.
The guard, who has since been charged with assault and other crimes, told investigators he had delivered three peroneal strikes—potentially disabling blows to the side of the leg, just above the knee—in response. The day after that, Brand said, he had to knee the prisoner again. Other blows followed. By December 3, Habibullah’s reputation for defiance seemed to make him an open target.
When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Habibullah on December 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. When Boland returned to the cell some 20 minutes later, he said, Habibullah was not moving and had no pulse.
Habibullah’s autopsy, which was completed on December 8, showed bruises or abrasions on his chest, arms, head and neck. There were deep contusions on his calves, knees and thighs. His death was attributed to a blood clot, probably caused by severe injuries to his legs, which traveled to his heart and blocked the blood flow to his lungs. On December 5, one day after Habibullah died, Dilawar arrived at Bagram.
Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse.
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.
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. —NYT
