Vice-Admiral Albert Church: US abused/tortured prisoners to death in Afghanistan

The ACLU has managed to acquire incompletely redacted Federal documents that substantiate charges that US interrogators indeed did abuse/torture prisoners to death in Afghanistan as early as 2002.

Find the documents here.

A chilling passage from the report by Vice-Admiral Albert Church:

The behavior alleged in the Deember 2002 Bagram death cases was clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved interrogation policies or guidelines. In both instances the deaths followed interrogation sessions in which unauthorized techniques were allegedly employed, but in both cases these sessions were followed by further alleged abusive behavior outside of the interrogation booth.

The second page of the report details prisoners

being handcuffed to objects above their heads in order to keep them awake. Additionally, interrogations in both incidents involved physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of "compliance blows" which involved striking the PUC's legs with the MP's knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths. In one case a pulmonary embolism developed as a consequence of blunt force trauma...

This is the smoking gun. This is torture and abuse to the death.

I reverse myself: if these two cases can be proven; if it can also be proven that senior military and government officials knew of these two cases and/or approved them, then a special prosecutor must be named and charges must be pursued.

Comments

Hube said…

Wow. This sure just may BE a smoking gun.

Not good.

February 13, 2009 at 12:01 PM

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