"They asked me, `Do you know where you are now?' I said no. They said, `This is America. Do you accept American laws and rules?' I said: `If this is America, I will accept and obey the rules.' They said, `If a soldier orders you to take off your clothes, you must obey.' Then they took off our clothes and with gloves on they touched us everywhere they wanted."
He said that fingers were stuck in his anus.
While the detainees we spoke to described these incidents as humiliating, the Coalition authorities maintain that they are standard search techniques to ensure that prisoners do not bring weapons into jails. After 11 nights at Bagram, he was asked at two in the morning if he wanted to see his family and if he missed them.
"Then they said, `Do you forgive and forget?' I told them, `I will forgive all of you if you punish those people who reported me to you wrongly.' I told them that the reports came from people who had links with the government of the former communist regime and that they should not accept such reports. They promised me they would punish those people. They gave me a bottle of water and a box of biscuits and asked me to take them to my children."
In total, he was held for 45 days before being returned to his family.
"When I returned, my children who were studying at school had left their lessons and were working in the bazaar in the city because there was no one to feed them."
THE DRIVER'S STORY
Out in the wheat fields, not far from Siddiqi's home, a young man is helping to build a mud wall. Noor Aghah is 35, a father of four.
Wearing a kolla, the traditional hat, he comes down from the wall to talk and we sit in a field watched intently by a teenage boy with a slingshot, who breaks off momentarily to fell a bird perched in a nearby tree. Lighting a cigarette, Aghah tells his story.
He had applied for a job as a driver for a local militia commander at the end of 2001, working first in Gardez and then in Kabul before returning to Gardez. Then the commander was arrested as a suspect and, six days later, so was Aghah. After one month's detention at the Coalition center outside Gardez, a complex of fort-like mud buildings and modern metal warehouses, he was sent to Bagram, where he was to spend the next four months.
"They said, `Tell us what sort of work [the commander] used to do,'" he said of his initial detention in Gardez. "I said I hadn't seen anything. Then they forced me to drink 12 bottles of water and they didn't allow me to go to the toilet."
The interrogation continued along the same lines for one month, he said, with questions being asked all the time about his commander.
Along with other prisoners, he was handcuffed and kept kneeling in a narrow open space between two high walls with direct sun coming down on them for 10 hours during the day. This continued for 20 days until an American doctor instructed that a covering be put over the space and that the prisoners be given blankets and pillows.
"Every minute in Gardez they were beating us. Mostly they kick me," he said.
"At Bagram, we were totally forbidden to talk to other prisoners and when we were interrogated we were blindfolded," he said.
"Americans interrogated me with an interpreter. Twice a woman asked questions but it was mostly men. They interrogated me every day in Bagram for one month and then only every 20 days or so. They asked me if I was Taliban or al-Qaeda. In Gardez and also in Bagram, we were asked to take off our clothes and everyone saw us without clothes, six or seven people."
Eventually, he was released.
"In Bagram, they apologized and gave me a letter."
This pro forma letter declares that someone has been released from detention and is not a suspect, although it adds, "This certificate has no bearing on future misconduct."
He knew of two other men who had suffered similar treatment.
"I was surprised and confused because I was innocent," said Aghah. "Why should a person not involved in crime go to jail and be treated like this?"
He is unusual in being prepared to speak about what happened to him, although he does not want some of the more humiliating things that were done to him to be reported.
"Maybe if they read your report, they will arrest me again," Aghah said, with a laugh. "Maybe you won't know."
A CULTURE OF IMPUNITY
Fahim Hakim, a quietly spoken, thoughtful man, is the deputy head of the Independent Human Rights Commission set up in June 2002 as part of the Bonn agreeement signed by prime minister Hamid Karzai.
Its 330 members of staff across the country have the task of both promoting human rights and investigating abuses, and it has been Hakim's job to analyze the many complaints arising from the detentions. The commission had received 60 complaints, he said, some from the detainees themselves, and some from the families of men who are still inside.
He said that the complaints had come mainly from Gardez, Jalalabad and Kandahar.
"It was really shocking. We had this kind of mistreatment during the communist regime -- mass arrests, mass graves, killing of people, torture -- but in a country where there is a low rate of literacy and where we haven't had a well-trained and professional national police, this could be expected. But from those who are well-trained and professional, who are talking about human rights and democracy, it is a great shock."
The complaints he had heard, he said, were to do with the stripping of prisoners, with the feeling of their genitals, with their being made to defecate in front of the Coalition forces and with beatings.
"There were a group of people kept naked in one room and given a bucket in the one room and asked to use that and it was traditionally, culturally, socially not possible for them and, to their surprise and shock, Coalition forces would come and say, `It's very easy, aim at that.'"
"There was taunting language -- `Do you know what is happening next door? Your wife is naked there. Our colleagues are playing with her,'" said Hakim. "There was deprivation of sleep and being made to kneel was the common complaint. There were complaints, too, of beating and kicking. They came here to liberate us, to make us free of this intimidation and oppression, but this will be overshadowed by this sort of behavior."
His colleague, Zia Langari, said, "Traditionally, [detainees] do not want to make this sort of thing known because of the shame involved. If a man says that he has had to be naked, he gets a bad name for himself, so, because of the fear and shame, they will not disclose this to the public. Some of them ask that the sexual abuse they suffered not be disclosed."
Langari said that all the detainees interviewed said that they had received sexual abuse. This may in many cases have been strip searches involving anal and genital examinations and which US officials have argued were necessary to ensure that weapons were not brought into jails.
"Maybe the Americans say that this is part of an investigation technique practice everywhere, but for Afghans it is not acceptable," said Langari. "They could X-ray them if they are suspicious of them."
Horia Mosadiq, an Afghan human rights worker who has interviewed many former detainees, said that many felt humiliated. Some told of having their pubic and underarm hair shaved by female US soldiers, she said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has access to Bagram every two weeks, but it is part of its established policy that it does not release details of its reports. It has not been able to gain such access to the other detention centers where many of the alleged abuses have taken place. Other human rights organizations have also failed in their attempts to visit them.
Davood Moradian, an Afghan who lectures at St Andrews University's international relations department, said: "Bagram seems to be run with exactly the same culture of impunity as the [Afghan] warlords run their private prisons. My impression is that the detainees are mainly poor people who do not have connections and footsoldiers, rather than the top people."
The Americans are now, in the wake of the revelations of Abu Ghraib, conducting an investigation. Earlier this month, Barno, speaking at the sandbagged Coalition HQ, said that a "top to bottom" review of detention facilities was being undertaken by his deputy, General Chuck Jacoby. Barno said that much of the intelligence gleaned from these interrogations had been "extremely useful" in safeguarding the lives of Coalition soldiers and identifying targets.
"That said, regardless of any intelligence value, I will tell you without hesitation that intelligence procedures have got to be done in accordance with the approriate standards ... All our forces will treat every detainee here with dignity and respect."
Last week a US spokesman in Kabul said procedures at US-run detention centers in the country had been changed as a result of Jacoby's interim findings, but he would not say how.
The deaths of three prisoners in custody are also being reviewed. Two died in Bagram in December 2002. A death certificate for a man, known simply as Dilawar, aged 22, from Yakubi in eastern Afghanistan, and signed by Major Elizabeth Rouse, pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, states that the cause of death was "blunt-force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease." Another prisoner, Mullah Habibullah, brother of a former Taliban commander, died the same month. Two of their fellow prisoners, Abdul Jabar and Hakkim Shah, told the New York Times last year that they were routinely kept naked, hooded, shackled and with their hands chained to the ceiling day and night.
The circumstances of their deaths have still to be determined, said Fahim Hakim. The third suspicious death is that of Abdul Wali, a former commander, who died four days after he presented himself for questioning at the request of the governor of Kunar. He died after reportedly undergoing interrogation by a private contract employee of the CIA.
It has been argued that whatever the American troops may have done, its abuses pale into insignificance beside what the Taliban did to their prisoners. Until 2001, public executions and amputations as punishment were carried out at the national stadium in Kabul.
However, human rights monitors point out that the action of the Coalition forces and their presence in the country is posited on ending "uncivilized" behavior and installing a system of fairness and justice. Though Bagram and its satellite detention centers have so far been a largely hidden corner of America's new gulag, there are signs that the treatment of detainees there is now beginning to come under scrutiny from Washington.
Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democrat member of the Senate subcommittee on foreign operations, who has campaigned about prison abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq, told reporters: "The abuses in Afghanistan were no less egregious than at Abu Ghraib, but because there were no photographs -- at least, to our present knowledge -- they have not received enough attention.
"Prisoners in Afghanistan were subjected to cruel and degrading treatment, and some died from it. These abuses were part of a wider pattern stemming from a White House attitude that `anything goes' in the war against terrorism, even if it crosses the line of illegality."
"Not only should these incidents be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators punished, but we need rules to prevent it from happening again," he said.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Part 1 appeared yesterday.
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