Wouldn't you know it. The New York Times joins Newsweek in treasonous shame today, with a slimy, terrorist friendly eight page "expose" based on anonymous leaks entitled
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths. Leave it to the queen of the coastal media to go to such lengths to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Will they ever stop with this anti-american, anti-bush garbage? Listen to this bleeding heart liberal tripe:
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...When he arrived in the interrogation room...his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
Yawn. They've been chaining people to ceilings since the Inquisition. I don't hear anybody calling for the Spanish to apologize!
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face...An interrogator told Mr. 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.
"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.
So what? That's what terrorists deserve. They wouldn't have had that fine young Mr. Claus tormenting that slime in that way if he wasn't a dirty Islamic killer.
It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
Oh. Well I'm sure it was just that one incident. Mistakes happen right? Boys will be boys.
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. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.
Well you can't say they aren't inventive. Ye Olde American Ingenuity.
But wait a second, how is the liberal New York Times supposed to know that all of this stuff happened? It's probably just based on a bunch of angry terrorist ex-detainees. Of course they're going to make stuff up about their captors. Where's the pictures?
The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military's response to the deaths. American officials have characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated.
Well, see, the government is doing something about it. These bad apples will be brought to justice, and the spread of liberty will continue!
"What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that there were people who clearly violated anyone's standard for humane treatment," said the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We're finding some cases that were not close calls."
See, Mr. Accountability himself has admitted that chaining innocent men to the ceiling and kicking shackled men in the groin is indeed "not a close call." But again, the actions of one or two young soldiers should not tarnish the efforts of the entire US military in the spread of freedom and the liberation of oppressed peoples.
Yet the Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with virtual impunity. Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file suggests. Senior officers frequently toured the detention center, and several of them acknowledged seeing prisoners chained up for punishment or to deprive them of sleep.
That's preposterous. Any officer who was present would have taken notice of this type of activity and put a stop to it immediately, just like they did at Abu Ghraib. As soon as they found out about Abu Ghraib the soldiers involved were punished and the appropriate low level commanders reprimanded.
Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar's death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry moved slowly. 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. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.
Oh. So this was before Abu Ghraib. So if the army knew this type of thing was going on already, why weren't they more prepared to deal with Abu Ghraib?
But regardless, I'm sure the people responsible were brought up on charges and court marshaled.
Last October, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter.
Aha! The wheels of justice are always turning in this great nation.
So far, only the seven soldiers have been charged...No one has been convicted in either death.
Oh, well...you know, innocent until proven guilty.
"There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists," Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.
But...oh, whatever. Do I have to read eight pages of this crap? It's getting old...I think I'll go watch the golf channel.
They decided on 32 to 36 hours as the optimal time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated the practice of staying up themselves...A military police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for similar effect, documents show...Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to Specialist Corsetti as "the King of Torture"...Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner's face and threatened to rape him, excerpts from the man's statement show...he was also one of three members of the 519th who were fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning
Yada yada...haven't we been over all of this already?
...the "common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee...were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army doctrine...former police officers tell a fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because they would "tear up" a prisoner's legs...the usual rules did not seem to apply... "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg...One captain nicknamed members of the Third Platoon "the Testosterone Gang." Several were devout bodybuilders...a group of the soldiers decorated their tent with a Confederate flag...an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina wire. The soldiers...at one point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air... nicknamed him "Timmy," after a disabled child in the animated television series "South Park." One of the guards who beat the prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character... "There was a policy that detainees were hooded, shackled and isolated for at least the first 24 hours, sometimes 72 hours of captivity...The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been almost exclusively physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.'s were assigned no interpreters of their own...When the detainees were beaten or kicked for "noncompliance," one of the interpreters, Ali M. Baryalai said, it was often "because they have no idea what the M.P. is saying."... the interrogators had kept their distance that day "because he was spitting up a lot of phlegm."..."They were laughing and making fun of him, saying it was 'gross' or 'nasty,' " Mr. Baerde said.... Some guards later asserted that he had been hurt trying to escape... 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...he exploded, yelling, "Don't ever spit on me again!" and kneeing the prisoner sharply in the thigh, "maybe a couple" of times. Mr. Habibullah's limp body swayed back and forth in the chains..."It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared," the medic recalled.
Spread of freedom, liberty is on the march, defeated dictators...terrorists
Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.
"He was a shy man, a very simple man," his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.
On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.
At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.
The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.
Mr. Dilawar's three passengers were eventually flown to Guantánamo and held for more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at Guantánamo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and humiliating rectal exams.
Support president Bush and our troops...freedom is on the march...
Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds.
"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny."
It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."
Hmm, that new Range Rover sure would look good in my garage...
"They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on his bare foot with her boot and grabbed him by his beard and pulled him towards her," he went on. "Once Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas, with her right foot. She was standing some distance from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.
I think there's a new Desperate Housewives on tonight. I wonder if Laura Bush is going to watch.
One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, 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," added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.
Honey, I just saw on Fox, those goddamned pinko activist liberals are filibustering one of President Bush's judges because she's a Christian black woman! Get out that template we downloaded from the website, it's time to make our voices heard.
The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no threat" to American forces.
They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar's parents, who begged them to explain what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves to recount the details.
"I told them he had a bed," said Mr. Parkhudin. "I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem."
Are they still blathering on about those goddamned terrorists? Where's their rage at the killing of innocent brain dead people who asked not to be kept alive artificially?
In late August of last year, shortly before the Army completed its inquiry into the deaths, Sergeant Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his own initiative to see an agent of the Criminal Investigation Command. Until then, he had never been interviewed.
"I expected to be contacted at some point by investigators in this case," he said. "I was living a few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had been one of the last to see this detainee alive."
Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee's last interrogation. "I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said.
He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, "most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."
Whatever. Jonah Goldberg told me it wasn't that big a deal.