(2007) A young husband and father, Dilawar, driving his taxi from Yakubi, Afghanistan, picked up three passengers in Khost on December 1st, 2002; soon afterward he and his fares were taken captive by Afghan militiamen, who turned them over for a bounty fee to the US air base in Bagram, where Taliban detainees were being collected and interrogated. Five days later, Dilawar - PUC (person under control) #412 - was pronounced a homicide, from deep bruises all over his body and "blunt force injuries" to his "pulpified" legs, on a death certificate signed by a coroner.

Following journalist Carlotta Gall's investigation into the taxi driver's death, when New York Times reporter Tim Golden questioned Bagram's base commander Gen McNeill about the fatality of his prisoner, he denied awareness of anyone's dying of trauma; other than the death certificate (given only to Dilawar's family), the official report of Dilawar's death and that of another detainee (blood clot to lungs from brutal infliction of injuries) shortly before referred only to "natural causes."

Director/writer Alex Gibney, who also narrates this disturbing, Oscar-winning (best for 2008) documentary, takes a long, hard look at cruelty as American policy under the Bush administration.

By 2006 over 83,000 people had been taken into US detention centers from Iraq and Afghanistan, none of whom had been granted a hearing for the offenses they were assumed to have committed (thus denied the right of habeas corpus, the basis of American jurisprudence); of the more than 100 deaths of detainees by then, at least a few dozen were the result of murder by their American guards while dozens more prisoners committed suicide (at least two at Gitmo). Meanwhile, thrice rebuked by the US Supreme Court for wanting to use military tribunals, legislation has passed granting immunity to President Bush ("We do not condone torture" - as he has defined torture), Vice President Cheney, and high-level officers and officials of the Pentagon and their administration from being charged with crimes against humanity, such as torture.

A handful of low-ranking soldiers, some of whom Gibney interviewed on camera, were later prosecuted and punished for their involvement as interrogators (given minimal training) at Bagram; their intelligence unit's commander, Capt Carolyn Wood, went on to Abu Ghraib for her next assignment.

During his five horrific days of confinement and mistreatment, Dilawar's arms were shackled to the ceiling of his isolation cell, forcing him to stand after being beaten; a hood was placed over his head, and he was subjected to sleep deprivation. The beatings were administered repeatedly because he cried and screamed from pain and torment but offered no information about a rocket attack for which he was supposedly responsible; Spc Glendale Walls, who said he thought Dilawar was innocent after interrogating him for three days, though he was ordered to get tougher, admitted to watching four MPs beat and kick Dilawar, though he was chained, "for amusement" to hear him yell "Allah." Later after Dilawar's death, the commander of the Afghan militia, who had turned over the taxi driver to the Americans, was captured for launching the rocket attacks.

From above Capt Wood had come pressure to produce intelligence: Do what you think needs to be done. The architect of the "dark side" of interrogation techniques, VP Dick Cheney, spoke of using "any means at our disposal," justifying being "mean, dirty, and nasty" as necessary when dealing with terrorists who struck on 9/11. Legal counsel John Woo, in consultation with Alberto Gonzales, drafted the memos, underwriting the legal rationale for ignoring Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, creating "a fog of ambiguity" (slippery definitions and distinctions separating harsh treatment from torture) from which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could recommend psychological humiliation (focused on the Islamic cultural sensitivity to sexual matters - e.g., forced nakedness with other men, masturbation, contact with women or their underwear) and physical stress to break prisoners.

Even though Rumsfeld was eventually forced to rescind his recommendations, confusion about the rules in the field spread and mutated. As proof we have the evidence of Abu Ghraib where Gen Miller brought the mindset from Guantánamo Bay (prison site in Cuba established with the belief that US laws would not apply there) where Rumsfeld's recommendations were authorized.

The experiments of Dr Donald Hebb, who had discovered methods of breaking down a person's defenses within 48 hours, employing an individual's fears and phobias, were believed to be valuable tools in the hands of interrogators. Though no single technique in isolation (with the exception of waterboarding) may be regarded as torture, a Republican appointee, Albert Mora, general counsel to the Navy, raised concerns that several methods in combination and with pressure to increase frequency and duration, their accumulated effects certainly would constitute inhumane abuse as torture.

Offering examples of effective techniques, without needing apologies for their implementation, former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan, referencing experts in the field of interrogation, points out that torture is not the best way to get information from a resistant subject. A British citizen eventually released after having endured years of incarceration and abusive treatment in Bagram and Guantánamo Bay, Moazzam Begg, speaks from first-hand knowledge of the conditions and the conduct of his interrogators; ironically he was interviewed by US personnel about Dilawar's death.

According to Professor Alfred McCoy, an enumeration of the methods used on Mohammed al-Qahtani, suspected of being the 20th hijacker from 9/11, would constitute a genealogy and history of CIA torture over the past 50 years.

After hearing a litany of "These guys are the worst of the worst" from the Bush administration, independent research has demonstrated that this designation applies to less than 10% of "enemy combatants" held in American detention. The really "worst of the worst" - Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants along with the Taliban leadership - remain free in the mountains of western Pakistan and elsewhere.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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