WASHINGTON, 27 December 2002 — US interrogators in Afghanistan have abused the rights of prisoners in the search for terrorists, skirting close to torture, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,” said an official the Post described as having overseen “the capture and transfer of accused terrorists.”
“I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the (Central Intelligence Agency),” the man said.
The US government will not release names or number of those captured in Afghanistan as troops drove the Taleban from power after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Some of those prisoners are housed in metal shipping containers surrounded by barbed wire at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where they are deprived of sleep and light under “stress and duress” techniques that sometimes spill over into the kinds of human rights abuses the US accuses other countries of committing, the Post said after interviewing espionage operatives. “There was a ‘before nine-11’ and there was an ‘after nine-11’,” said Cofer Black, who headed the CIA’s counterterrorist center, when he told a Sept. 26 joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees: “After 9-11 the gloves come off.”
Prisoners are also routinely forced to stand, kneel or sit in uncomfortable positions for hours at a time, the Post said. Those who do not crack under such methods are often shipped off to tougher countries.
“We don’t kick the (expletive) out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the (expletive) out of them,” an official told the Post under condition of anonymity. About 3,000 suspected Al-Qaeda members and supporters have been captured by the US. More than 600 of these are held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A government spokesman refused to comment on specific charges in the Post article. (AFP)
