Not on Our Best Behavior

A phrase uttered by an American colonel at a press conference last summer at Bagram air base in Afghanistan has been stuck in my head for months: He spoke of “guests under control,” as in “I will not handle any questions pertaining to guests under control.”

It is an expansive notion of hospitality that can include such a concept -- the colonel’s Orwellian gem refers to the approximately 1,000 individuals who have been detained by coalition forces in Afghanistan since 2002, and presumably extends to the approximately 10,000 currently detained in Iraq, as well as the nearly 600 still being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The colonel coolly termed the last group “long-term guests of the coalition.”

The Bush administration has scrupulously prevented these detainees from speaking to anyone but representatives of the International Red Cross, whose continued access to prisoners depends on their discretion. But in recent months, more and more of the military’s “guests” have been released by their erstwhile hosts and have related disturbing accounts of their treatment in detention -- including allegations of torture -- to journalists and to human rights groups. While widely reported in the international press, only scattered accounts have appeared in the American media.

Take the “Tipton Three,” the British papers’ nickname for Shafiq Rasul, Rhuhel Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, all from the English Midlands town of Tipton. The three men, released last month after spending more than two years in Guantanamo’s cages, told their story to the Observer newspaper. They described being repeatedly beaten and interrogated with guns to their heads at a detention center in Kandahar before being sent in shackles to Guantanamo. There, the three say they each endured more than 200 interrogations, inhumane conditions, many more beatings and three months in solitary confinement after they were accused of being present at a videotaped meeting between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and Osama bin Laden. Though they were eventually vindicated when British intelligence officers confirmed they had been in England when the meeting took place, all three, ultimately, falsely confessed that they had been present. “I’d got to the point where I just couldn’t take any more,” Rasul told the Observer.

The three alleged that interrogations were so relentless that many detainees began manufacturing information about other prisoners to curry favor with their captors and earn “comfort items” such as toothbrushes and censored bestsellers. “They kept taking us and taking us, showing us photos saying: ‘This guy says you’ve done this, this guy says you’ve done that,’ ” said Rasul. Such methods make it unlikely that anything like truth, much less justice, will result from the planned closed-door military tribunals.

Jamal Harith, a fourth Guantanamo inmate released to Britain with the Tipton Three and interviewed by the Daily Mirror, told similar stories of beatings, mistreatment and deprivation, as have some former Guantanamo detainees returned to Afghanistan, one of whom added accounts of torture by electric shock to the growing heap of ugliness.

While it’s clear enough that the Tipton Three -- and more than 100 others summarily released from Guantanamo so far -- spent more than two years of their lives deprived of the most basic rights only to be vindicated in the end, none of the specifics of the former prisoners’ stories can be properly corroborated thanks to the veil of secrecy (a canvas hood might be a more appropriate metaphor) that the U.S. government has dropped over Guantanamo Bay. But reports coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan are equally disturbing, and suggest a pattern of indifference to international law consistent with the Bush administration’s behavior in other arenas.

Last month, Human Rights Watch released a report, slyly titled “Enduring Freedom,” on the treatment of Afghans in coalition custody at Bagram air base, the U.S. headquarters in Afghanistan, and other detention centers in the country. As at Guantanamo, only the testimony of released prisoners was available. The media’s “Ground Rules Agreement” that the military requires journalists to sign in exchange for press privileges at Bagram categorically states: “No interviews with detainees will be granted.” And, as at Guantanamo, detainees are considered “unlawful combatants,” not prisoners of war subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention. According to the report, former prisoners described “being held in detention for weeks, continuously shackled, intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time, and forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods. Some say they were kicked or beaten when arrested, or later as part of efforts to keep them awake.”

Roger King, a Bagram spokesman quoted by Human Rights Watch, admitted that the military does employ the milder of the “stress and duress” interrogation tactics (“We do force people to stand for an extended period of time.... Disruption of sleep has been reported as an effective way of reducing people’s inhibition about talking.”), although the State Department explicitly condemns all these methods -- from sleep deprivation and “forced prolonged standing” to “prolonged periods of solitary confinement, incommunicado detention, beatings and shackling” -- as torture when they are practiced by governments other than our own.

The Human Rights Watch report also details the case of two Afghans, aged 22 and 30, who died while in detention at Bagram in December 2002, and whose deaths were ruled homicides by U.S. military pathologists (one caused by “blunt force injuries to the lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease,” the other to a “pulmonary embolism due to a blunt force injury to the legs”), and a third who died in a detention facility near Asadabad in 2003.

Stories from Iraq, where coalition forces detain roughly 10,000 Iraqis, are depressingly similar. A July Amnesty International memorandum based on interviews with former prisoners described abuses identical to those alleged by Human Rights Watch in Afghanistan, as well as allegations of torture by electric shock. Amnesty has complained to coalition authorities of two deaths in custody, one from a heart attack during interrogation, the other by asphyxiation, apparently from being beaten while hooded. Other human rights groups on the ground in Iraq have reported all too many similar accounts.

Almost as disturbing as these allegations themselves is the nearly complete lack of outcry, or even attention they have aroused here in the U.S. We do not know what is being done in our name. Worse, we do not ask.