Westlaw. 5/20/05 NYT A1 The New York Times Page 11 Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers. Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones. When one of the First Platoon M. P.'s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man. "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." Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said. 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." In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague about which M. P.'s had delivered the blows. His estimate was never confirmed, but other guards eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly. Many M. P.'s would eventually deny that they had any idea of Mr. Dilawar's injuries, explaining that they never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of Mr. Dilawar's orange prison suit fell down again and again while he was shackled. "I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down while he was in standing restraints," the soldier told investigators. "Over a certain time period, I noticed it was the size of a fist." As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out more loudly to be released. But even the interpreters had trouble understanding his Pashto dialect; the annoyed guards heard only noise. "He had constantly been screaming, 'Release me; I don't want to be here.' and things like that," said the one linguist who could decipher his distress, Abdul Ahad Wardak. The Interrogation On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth interrogation. It quickly turned hostile. The 21-year-old lead interrogator, Specialist Glendale C. Walls II, later contended that Mr. Dilawar was evasive. "Some holes came up, and we wanted him to answer us truthfully," Westlaw. 5/20/05 NYT Al The New York Tinies Page 12 he said. The other interrogator, Sergeant Salcedo, complained that the prisoner was smiling, not answering questions, and refusing to stay kneeling on the ground or sitting against the wall. The interpreter who was present, Ahmad Ahmadzai, recalled the encounter differently to investigators. The interrogators, Mr. Ahmadzai said, accused Mr. Dilawar of launching the rockets that had hit the American base. He denied that. While kneeling on the ground, he was unable to held his cuffed hands above his head as instructed, prompting Sergeant Salcedo to slap them back up whenever they began to drop. Selena berated him for being weak and questioned him about being a man, which was very insulting because of his heritage," Mr. Ahmadzai said. When Mr Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair position against the wall because of his battered legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt and repeatedly shoved him back against the wall. "This went on for 10 or 15 minutes," the interpreter said. "He was so tired he couldn't get up." "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 "About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were actually questioning him, after that it was pushing, shoving, kicking and shouting at him," Mr. Ahmadzai said. "There was no interrogation going on." The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo instructing the M. P.'s to keep Mr. The next morning, Mr. Dilawar began yelling again. At around noon, the M.P.'s called over another of the interpreters, Mr. Baerde, to try to quiet Mr. Dilawar down. I told him, 'Look, please, if you want to be able to sit down and be released from shackles, you just need to be quiet for one more hour." *He told me that if he was in shackles another hour, he would die." Mr. Baerde said. Half an hour later, Mr. Baerde returned to the cell. Mr. Dilawar's hands hung limply from the cuffs, and his head, covered by the black hood, slumped forward. "He wanted me to get a doctor, and said that he needed a shot, Mr. Baerde recalled. "He said that he didn't feel good. He said that his legs were hurting." Westlaw. 5/20/05 NYT A1 The Netu York Tinies Page 13 Mr. Baerde translated Mr. Dilawar's plea to one of the guards. The soldier took the prisoner's hand and pressed down on his fingernails to check his circulation. "He's O.K.." Mr. Baerde quoted the M. P. as saying. "He's just trying to get out of his restraints." By the time Mr. Dilawar was brought in for his final interrogation in the first hours of the next day, Dec. 10, he appeared exhausted and was babbling that his wife had died. He also told the interrogators that he had been beaten by the guards. "But we didn't pursue that," said Mr. Baryalai, the interpreter. Specialist Walls was again the lead interrogator. But his more aggressive partner, "Josh had a rule that the detainee had to look at him, not me," the interpreter told investigators. "He gave him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table, slamming his chest into the table front." When Mr. Dilawar was unable to kneel, the interpreter said, the interrogators pulled him to his feet and pushed him against the wall. Told to assume a stress position, the prisoner leaned his head against the wall and began to fall asleep. "It looked to me like Dilawar was trying to cooperate, but he couldn't physically perform the tasks," Mr. Baryalai said. Finally, Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and "shook him harshly," the interpreter said, telling him that if he failed to cooperate, he would be shipped to a prison in the United States, where he would be "treated like a woman, by the other men" and face the wrath of criminals who "would be very angry with anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks." (Specialist Walls was charged last week with assault, maltreatment and failure to obey a lawful order; Specialist Claus was charged with assault, maltreatment and lying to investigators. Each man declined to comment.) A third military intelligence specialist who spoke some Pashto, Staff Sgt. W. Christopher Yonushonis, had questioned Mr. Dilawar earlier and had arranged with Specialist Claus to take over when he was done. Instead, the sergeant arrived at the interrogation room to find a large puddle of water on the floor, a wet spot on Mr. Dilawar's shirt and Specialist Claus standing behind the detainee, twisting up the back of the hood that covered the prisoner's head. "I had the impression that Josh was actually holding the detainee upright by pulling on the hood," he said. "I was furious at this point because I had seen Josh tighten the hood of another detainee the week before. This behavior seemed completely gratuitous and unrelated to intelligence collection." "What the hell happened with that water?" Sergeant Yonushonis said he had demanded. Westlaw. 5/20/05 NYT A1 The New York Tinies Page 14 "We had to make sure he stayed hydrated," he said Specialist Claus had responded. The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the incident. Mr. Dilawar, however, was already dead. The Post-Mortem The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." Similar injuries contributed to Mr. Habibullah's death. 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. After the second death, several of the 519th Battalion's interrogators were temporarily removed from their posts. A medic was assigned to the detention center to work night shifts. On orders from the Bagram intelligence chief, interrogators were prohibited from any physical contact with the detainees. Chaining prisoners to any fixed object was also banned, and the use of stress positions was curtailed. In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said. The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantanamo 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." 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. Westlaw. 5/20/05 NYT Al The Neto York Tinies "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." Photos: Dilawar, at left, was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who died while in custody of American troops. Below, a sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell. (pg. Al); Shahpoor visiting the grave of his brother Dilawar, who died in 2002 after mistreatment by soldiers at the Bagram detention facility. Most of his interrogators were said to believe he was innocent of any insurgent activity. (Photographs by Keith Bedford for The New York Times) (pg. A12); Asaldin holding Bibi Rashida, 3, daughter of his son Dilawar, at home in Yakubi. Army coroners ruled Dilawar's death a homicide.; Troops at the American base in Bagram, which houses a prison for suspected Taliban and Qaeda fighters. Photo directly above shows part of a copy of the death certificate for Dilawar, the 22-year-old farmer and part-time taxi driver who died there. (pg. A13) Chart: "Along the Chain of Command, Confusion and Contradiction" Statements below show differing perceptions of permissible conduct toward detainees. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill Commander of allied forces in Afghanistan INTERVIEW WITH THE NEW YORK TIMES, FEB. 7, 2003 "We are not chaining people to the ceilings I will say that our interrogation techniques are adapted, they are in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques." Col. Theodore C. Nicholas II Director of intelligence for the American task force in Afghanistan STATEMENT TO ARMY INVESTIGATORS, JUNE 11, 2004 "I did not put pressure on the interrogation cell to violate standards to gain information. I would rather not receive the information than harm an individual to produce it." Capt. Britton T. Hopper Company commander 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, Bagram, Aug. 2002-Jan. 2003 |