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Group claims US torture in Afghan prison
(AP)
Updated: 2005-12-19 08:49
The United States operated a secret prison in Afghanistan as recently as last
year, torturing detainees with sleep deprivation, chaining them to the walls and
forcing them to listen to loud music in total darkness for days, a human rights
group alleged Monday.
The prison was run near Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, New York-based Human
Rights Watch said in a report based on the accounts of several detainees at the
U.S. prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.
According to the report, the detainees were kept in total darkness åK½ï¿½ they
called the facility "Dark Prison" åK½ï¿½ and were tortured and mistreated by American
and Afghan guards in civilian clothes, an indication the facility may have been
operated by the CIA.
"They were chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and kept in
total darkness with loud rap, heavy metal music, or other sounds blared for
weeks at a time," the report said.
"Some detainees said they were shackled in a manner that made it impossible
to lie down or sleep, with restraints that caused their hands and wrists to
swell up or bruise."
Human Rights Watch did not speak with the detainees directly because the
United States has not allowed rights organizations to visit detainees at
Guantanamo or other overseas detention sites.
Instead, the detainees' accounts were given to their lawyers, who passed them
on to the rights group. The group said the allegations were credible enough to
warrant an official investigation.
"We're not talking about torture in the abstract, but the real thing," said
John Sifton, terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch.
"U.S. personnel and officials may be criminally liable, and a special prosecutor
is needed to investigate."
The report said Benyam Mohammad, an Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee who
grew up in Britain, claimed he was held at the facility in 2004.
"It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time," he was
quoted as telling his lawyer. "They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of
sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days."
Mohammad went on to say that he was forced to listen to Eminem and Dr. Dre
for 20 days before the music was replaced by "horrible ghost laughter and
Halloween sounds."
"The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night," he was quoted as
saying. "Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads
against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."
The report said the prison was closed after several detainees were
transferred to a U.S. military detention center near Bagram, just north of
Kabul, late last year.
The United States' handling of detainees has come under increasing scrutiny
in recent weeks.
Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, is suing the CIA for
wrongful imprisonment and torture, saying he was seized in Macedonia on Dec. 31,
2003, and taken by CIA agents to Afghanistan, where he was allegedly abused
before being released in Albania in May 2004.
CIA officials have not commented on the allegations.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, has said the United States
acts within the law and argued that Europeans are safer because of tough U.S.
tactics, but she refused to discuss intelligence operations or address questions
about clandestine CIA detention centers.
Senior members of the European Parliament, meanwhile, have proposed setting
up an investigative committee to determine whether U.S. agents held terror
suspects in secret European prisons.
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