2 Dozen G.I.'s to Face Trial or Other Punishment in Deaths of 2 Afghan Prisoners

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/02/politics/02abuse.html


About 2 Dozen G.I.'s to Face Trial or Other Punishment in Deaths of 2 Afghan Prisoners
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID ROHDE

Published: September 2, 2004


ASHINGTON, Sept. 1 - Army criminal investigators will recommend that about two dozen soldiers face criminal charges or administrative punishment in connection with the deaths of two prisoners at an American detention center in Afghanistan in December 2002, Army officials said Wednesday.

The Afghanistan charges, which follow an inquiry that took more than a year to complete, would include negligent homicide, dereliction of duty, and failure to report an offense, two Army officials said. The highest-ranking soldier facing punishment is a captain in a military police company, one of the officials said. One sergeant has already been charged with assault and two other offenses.

The charges, which were first reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday, would corroborate long-standing complaints from Afghan prisoners of forced nudity, sleep deprivation and, in some cases, beatings. These accusations, along with the accounts of prisoners, suggest that the military initially hid the deaths with false public statements, sent a troubled military intelligence unit to Iraq, took 18 months to investigate two homicides, and, according to prisoners interviewed in May, continue to use coercive techniques intended for hardened terrorists on average Afghans.

Army officials said the pending charges reflected the next step in the inquiry into two widely publicized prisoner-abuse cases in Afghanistan at the Bagram air base, 35 miles north of the Afghan capital of Kabul, which occurred long before the American military's attack against Iraq in March 2003, and the subsequent mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. "This is better late than never, but had the administration taken action on these crimes much earlier, these interrogation methods, as well as some of the soldiers involved, might not have found their way to Iraq," said Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch, which issued a report on prisoner abuses in Afghanistan in March.

In both Afghan cases, at the time of the men's deaths, Army officials publicly attributed them to natural causes. They did not disclose that Army pathologists declared both deaths "homicides" until journalists obtained copies of Army death certificates that had been given to Afghan families who did not speak English.

Human rights groups have cited the death of one prisoner, a 22-year-old farmer and part-time taxi driver named Dilawar, as an example of how outright abuse, as well as interrogation techniques intended for hardened terrorists, have been wrongly applied to Afghan prisoners later found to pose no threat to American forces. A military pathologist said Dilawar died from "blunt-force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease." Military authorities said the second man, Mullah Habibullah, 30, died of a pulmonary embolism, or a blood clot in the lung, caused by blunt-force injuries to his legs.

Army officials said Wednesday that investigators at the Army's Criminal Investigation Command were putting the finishing touches on their work. About two dozen military police and military intelligence soldiers have been implicated so far - most for witnessing an offense and not reporting it - but that figure could rise, said one Army official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigators' recommendations have not yet been forwarded to commanders for action.

Most of the soldiers who could face charges are from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., and the 377th Military Police Company, a Reserve unit based in Cincinnati. After serving at Bagram in 2002, some of the 519th went to Iraq, and some soldiers in the unit have been implicated in the abuses at Abu Ghraib in late 2003.

A high-level Army investigation said last week that military intelligence soldiers played a major role in directing and carrying out the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The report undercut earlier contentions by military officials and the Bush administration that a handful of renegade military police guards were largely to blame.

An Army official said that decisions on issuing formal charges would come in the next few weeks. The Army last month charged one member of the 377th company, Sgt. James P. Boland of Cincinnati, with assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty. Charges were brought against Sergeant Boland earlier than others because he is a reservist whose military service was about to end, an Army official said.

The findings of the initial investigation into the deaths were inconclusive, largely because many of the soldiers involved were reservists who had returned to the United States and were difficult to track down, said one Army officer. But the investigators were ordered to reopen the case, leading to the recommendations now pending, the officer said.

Afghan officials and American human rights groups have often warned of two dangerous factors. Detainees are immediately treated as enemy combatants who do not enjoy Geneva Convention protections and are held in indefinite secret detention.

At the same time, Afghan officials, human rights groups and former prisoners say, American forces often detain Afghans on faulty intelligence. Since the fall of the Taliban, American operations have been complicated by Afghan tribes and clans who play out long-running feuds by falsely identifying their enemies as members of Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters to American forces. There have also been repeated complaints of Afghans being detained on minimal evidence.