Documents Describe Torture at Bagram in Afghanistan
Friday's Guardian reports on documents it has received that disclose torture of prisoners at Bagram and Kandahar in Afhanistan. The documents allege that prisoners were subjected to mock exeuctions, sexually humiliated and, in some cases, raped. "Trophy" photographs were taken of the abuse and destroyed. The Guardian obtained the documents from the ACLU, which received them pursuant to it's Freedom of Information Act request.
Photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing US soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid "another public outrage", the documents show. Here's one case:
In the dossier, the Iraqi detainee claims that three US interrogators in civilian clothing dislocated his arms, stuck an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, choked him with a rope until he lost consciousness, and beat him with a baseball bat.
"After they tied me up in the chair, then they dislocate my both arms. He asked to admit before I kill you then he beat again and again," the prisoner says in his statement. "He asked me: Are you going to report me? You have no evidence. Then he hit me very hard on my nose, and then he stepped on my nose until he broken and I started bleeding."
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