Child rape cases in Afghanistan shock

KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 8 (UPI) — Rapes of boys and girls and other forms of violence against children go mostly unpunished in war-torn Afghanistan, says a U.N. official.

“In many cases of violence against children, there is a sense of impunity. People continue to violate children’s rights without any sense of feeling that they will be held accountable,” says Radhika Coomaraswamy, U.N. special representative for children in armed conflict, CNN reported.

She said she plans to release a report in October, following up on her trip to Afghanistan to set up a monitoring and reporting system on the violations committed against children.

Coomaraswamy said war and violence have destroyed Afghanistan’s administrative infrastructure, making it difficult for the government to act alone.

An official with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan told CNN women and young girls, in particular, are the least protected people in Afghanistan.

“With criminals and warlords in the political scene, we cannot expect justice to be served,” said the official, who goes by the name of Shaima.

She said family members of a 12-year-old girl who was gang raped vowed to commit suicide if justice is not served.

Coomaraswamy says sexual violence against young boys includes forcing boys to dress in female attire, dance and perform sexual acts, the report said.

Afghan children raped with ‘impunity,’ U.N. official says

By Atia Abawi
CNN
Aug 8, 2008
Story Highlights
# Young rape victim’s family vows to commit suicide unless justice is served
# Father of another rape victim sobs: “I just want justice”
# U.N. official says crimes are accompanied by a “sense of impunity”
The girl’s tragic case is one of many in war-torn Afghanistan, activists say.
The 12-year-old girl’s family members say they’ll take their own lives unless justice is served.
“We will all commit suicide; this is not living,” cries the mother of the girl, whose gang-rape occurred in Northern Afghanistan.
The girl’s adolescent voice pleads for help from Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan.
The girl’s elderly and immobilized father trembles and can only raise a quivering hand as he sobs. He is rendered helpless in a country where a man’s dignity and honor is protecting his family.
Her little brother sits in the back, far too young to understand the situation but still traumatized by the devastated cries around him. He wipes away his tears.
The children’s mother sobs. “We’ve been violated. We can’t live our lives. We can’t sit. We can’t sleep at night,” she says.
Video of the crushed family aired on the privately owned Ariana TV two weeks ago before it was posted on the Internet by an activist group, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
In a country riddled with corruption, despair and lawlessness, the family has risked their lives by coming forward.
They have since met with Karzai, according to an aide who said the president wept with the family and vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Karzai has fired the police chief from the city where the attack occurred, the aide said.
The family lives in a government-provided safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan.
“This is just an example among thousands of other cases,” says Shaima, a member of RAWA. “The rest go unnoticed by the media.”
Shaima is not her real name; she uses it to protect her identity. RAWA members themselves have often been targeted for raising taboo issues in a culture in which women and children are often treated as second-class citizens.
“Women and girls, especially young girls, are the most unprotected people of Afghanistan. They are raped, kidnapped and murdered,” Shaima says.
Just last week, a 3-year-old girl was kidnapped and raped by unidentified men, a government official confirms. The toddler was later released and, the official says, is recovering.
“Rapists are roaming around with impunity,” Shaima says, turning her attention to a man — said to be the son of a powerful official — who is accused of raping 22 girls in the northern province of Sar-I-Pul.
Sayed Nurallah says his 14-year-old daughter was one of the aforementioned victims. Nurallah says that coming forward with his daughter’s story makes him a target, which he firmly accepts. He says that seeking justice for his daughter is a matter of integrity.
“She wakes up in the middle of the night screaming,” Nurallah says of his daughter. “Her arms, legs, her body — she is always tense and frightened.”
Nurallah also pleads for justice. “I have one question for Mr. Karzai: If this was your little girl, what would you do?”
His firm tone changes to one of grief. He breaks into quiet sobs.
“I just want justice for my child,” he says.
Shaima says justice is hard to find.
“These criminals are never brought to justice, because police and government authorities are either involved or they can’t handle the crimes,” she explains. “With criminals and warlords in the political scene, we cannot expect justice to be served.”
Another factor that impedes victims from coming forward is some interpretations of Sharia, or Islamic law. Some authorities rule for a rape to be validated, victims must have four witnesses to the crime. If not, the victims can be charged with fornication or adultery.
Statistics quantifying crimes against children are hard to come by in Afghanistan, an impoverished nation ravaged by three decades of war.
In March, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said that deteriorating security in large parts of the country, a growing culture of criminal impunity, weak law enforcement institutions, poverty and other factors had contributed to increasing violence against women, such as rape and torture.
The commission also said that Afghan girls are often forced into marriages against their will.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. special representative for children in armed conflict, plans to release a report in October on the state of Afghan children.
Coomaraswamy went to Afghanistan this summer to establish a monitoring and reporting system on what is deemed as grave violations committed against children.
“In many cases of violence against children, there is a sense of impunity. People continue to violate children’s rights without any sense of feeling that they will be held accountable,” Coomaraswamy said.
She found that sexual violence against young boys is also a problem. In what is known as “bacha-bazi,” or “child’s play,” boys are forced to dress in female attire, dance and perform sexual acts.
“I can’t think of any country in the world in which children suffer more than in Afghanistan,” Coomaraswamy says. “In all our meetings with children, it takes a lot of time to make them smile. That to me shows that there is not happiness in their hearts.”
She hopes that the monitoring program will deter people from taking advantage of the vulnerability of children in the combat zone. Coomaraswamy does concede that the Afghan government alone cannot do much right now.
“War has completely destroyed that administrative infrastructure,” Coomaraswamy says, “even if they had the laws, it is impossible to implement.”
© 2008 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.

North Afghan police crack down on child sex abuse

Thu Aug 7, 2008
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan police have begun a crackdown on child sex abuse in the north of the country after several offenders were arrested recently, the Interior Ministry said on Thursday.
“The number of sexual assaults on children in northern Afghanistan has seen a significant increase,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
“In order to safeguard children and babies, the Interior Ministry has begun a series of crackdowns that up to now have generated positive results,” it said.
The statement comes after a man was arrested by police in the northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif on Thursday morning for sexually abusing a young boy in a video-game arcade.
Police received a tip-off the assault was taking place and as a result were able to arrest the man and close down the arcade hall, the ministry said.
The Afghanistan Human Rights Organization (AHRO) said it had received information last month that a group of men raped a 3-year-old girl in northern Jowzjan province.
“We are trying to find out more about the case,” said Maghfirat Samimi of the AHRO, but she could not give any further details due to the sensitivity of the case.
But Samimi expressed concerns over the increased number of rapes in the north of the country.
“We are very concerned. We have had many cases of rapes in northern Afghanistan. Children are being sexually exploited and we need to protect their rights,” said Samimi
Five armed men also raped a 12-year-old girl in northern Sar-I-Pol province in June and a 10-year-old girl was raped in Jowzjan province in January, AHRO said.
(Reporting by Jonathon Burch and Tahir Qadiry in Mazar-I-Sharif; Editing by Paul Tait)
Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

U.N. envoy denounces hidden abuse of Afghan boys

Mon Jul 7, 2008 3:01pm EDT

By Claudia Parsons

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Afghanistan must do more to end an age-old
practice of young boys being kept as sex slaves by wealthy and powerful patrons,
the U.N. special representative for children and armed conflict said on Monday.

Radhika Coomaraswamy said the practice, called “bacha bazi” — literally “boy
play” — was a taboo subject, but she had heard reports of warlords and military
commanders keeping young boys and “exploiting them in terrible ways.”

“What I found was nobody talks about it; everyone says ‘Well, you know, it’s
been there for 1,000 years so why do we want to raise this now?'” she told a
news conference at U.N. headquarters, reporting on a visit to Afghanistan last
week.

“That seems to be the general attitude among everyone, but somebody has to
raise it and it has to be dealt with.”

Known as “bacha bereesh,” boys without beards, the victims of such abuse are
teenage boys who dress up as girls and dance for male patrons at parties in
northern Afghanistan.

“We feel that a campaign should be run to raise awareness about this issue
and to stop this practice,” she said.

“We talk about sexual violence against girls and women, which is also
terrible, but this hidden issue of sexual violence against boys should also be
dealt with seriously.”

Afghan police have tried to crack down on the practice and Islamic clerics
say those involved should be stoned for sodomy, which is forbidden under Islamic
law.

In a society where the sexes are strictly segregated, it is common for men to
dance for other men at weddings in Afghanistan. But in northern Afghanistan,
former warlords and mujahideen commanders have taken that a step further,
sometimes taking the boys as “mistresses.”

Police and security officials in northern Afghanistan say they have been
doing their best to arrest the men involved.

“It is sad to state that this practice that includes making boys dance,
sexual abuse and sometimes even selling boys, has been going on for years,”
General Asadollah Amarkhil, the security chief of Kunduz province, told Reuters
last year.

“We have taken steps to stop it to the extent that we are able,” he said.
Amarkhil said poverty, widespread in Afghanistan after nearly three decades of
war, forced teenage boys into compliance.

Coomaraswamy said raising awareness and prosecuting those responsible was the
first step to ending the practice as it would act as a deterrent to others.

She said she was also concerned about a rise in the recruitment of child
soldiers by the Taliban and others in recent months, as well as about civilian
casualties including children from U.S.-led coalition raids and air strikes.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Afghanistan: Violence against children rises, says UN envoy

New York, 8 July (AKI) – A surge in recruitment of child soldiers, the
maiming and killing of children, child detention and a serious humanitarian
situation are all posing major threats to children in Afghanistan, according to
the United Nations envoy on children and armed conflict who recently returned
from a five-day visit to the country.

“The deteriorating security situation in the country was of concern to
everybody everywhere. They are very worried about the kind of insecurity and
lawlessness that is now prevailing,” Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN
Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, told
reporters in New York on Monday.

Among the child rights violations Coomaraswamy investigated during her visit,
was the killing and maiming of children during military operations by the
Taliban and anti-government combatants, as well as by international forces in
Afghanistan.

The envoy held discussions with ISAF [the NATO-led International Security
Assistance Force] and OEF [the United State Operation Enduring Freedom]
commanders and said she had received updated guidelines on new procedures to
limit “collateral damage” – civilians killed in military raids.

“However, I must say even the religious leaders who were sympathetic to the
government complained bitterly about this type of collateral damage,” she added.

“There is therefore a need for the international forces to take these
complaints seriously, to put in place measures to prevent excesses, to have
prompt investigations and, where necessary, pay compensation.”

Coomaraswamy also stressed that she was concerned about children being
detained after military operations by Afghan and international forces, and that
there was a lack of guidelines and operating procedures on the issue.

On the issue of child soldiers, Coomaraswamy said that she had received
information from Afghan sources that there had been a surge in under-age
recruitment by the Taliban and other anti-government forces in the last few
months, especially from Pakistan.

She noted that the Taliban had recognized that the recruitment of children
was illegal through their own rule that mujahadeen fighters were not allowed to
take young boys with no facial hair onto the battle field.

“However, it seems that in the last few months this rule is not being obeyed
and that children are being used even as suicide bombers,” she added, saying
that she had three verified cases of failed suicide attempts by children.

Condemning attacks on schools, Coomaraswamy said such attacks “kill children
who are completely innocent of the politics around them” and urged community and
tribal leaders to unite to protect their schools, as well as to devise a
security plan that did not militarize schools or endanger children.

Citing a serious humanitarian problem in many of the conflict areas in
Afghanistan, the envoy urged all parties to give access to relief organizations
and praised the proposal by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to create “days of
tranquillity” in the country when military operations would be suspended to
allow immunization drives to take place. She noted that a previous polio
vaccination campaign had been a success.

“We hope the children then can be a bridge for the beginning of peace in
Afghanistan,” she said.

One of the major objectives of Coomaraswamy’s visit was to set in place the
monitoring and reporting process called for by the Security Council to assess
six grave violations against children in situations of armed conflict.

The monitoring and reporting mechanism – which sets up a task force at the
country level – will feed into a comprehensive report on the situation of
children and armed conflict in Afghanistan that will be presented to the
Security Council in October.

Trafficking in persons in Afghanistan: Field survey report

Source: International Organization for Migration (IOM)        
Date: 30 Jun 2008        
       
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/AMMF-7JEG5E/$File/full_report.pdf        

Executive Summary        

Trafficking in persons is a crime that can impair a personality and even destroy a human life and it gravely affects today’s Afghanistan as a source, transit and destination country. The traffickers ruthlessly exploit men, women and children by violating their basic human rights and this modern-day form of slavery continues to thrive with impunity.        

This research, the first of its kind, aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the trafficking phenomenon in, from and to Afghanistan, based on first-hand data, with a view towards developing effective counter trafficking strategies in the future. Research data was collected mainly from expert interviews and a field survey conducted in Kabul and nine border provinces, namely Khost, Nangarhar, Herat, Balkh, Faryab, Kunduz, Badakhshan, Kandahar and Farah, from July to September 2007. A total of 220 community informants, 20 victims of trafficking, 43 victims of kidnapping and 19 smuggled migrants were interviewed. The non- personal data of 115 victims of trafficking referred to and assisted by IOM between 2006 and 2007 was also used in the analysis, based on IOM’s case record.        

There are numerous factors making Afghan people extremely vulnerable to trafficking: more than two decades of conflict and the subsequent loss of lives and livelihoods, prolonged economic instability and deteriorating insecurity, to name a few examples. There are additional factors such as the common occurrence of violence against women, including forced marriage, rendering women particularly vulnerable. Children are another large pool of potential “targets” for trafficking with widespread poverty compelling up to one third of Afghan children to work in order to augment their family income. The majority of them are exposed to adverse working conditions outside of any protective mechanism. Afghanistan is facing a mass population displacement. Many of the displaced persons have no secure place to stay and end up living in camps or open areas deprived of any basic social services or means of livelihood. Women and children living under these conditions are particularly at risk o        
f being trafficked.        

In addition to factors related to the supply of potential victims, Afghanistan offers an environment favourable to facilitating the process of trafficking. Afghanistan shares borders with six countries and some parts are very difficult to control due to the terrain and trans-border tribal structures. In the absence of modern border management and a weakening of law and order, racketeers freely cross borders to traffic or smuggle people to or through neighbouring countries. With poppy production and smuggling of narcotics flourishing in the country, the tactics of criminal groups are more sophisticated than ever and their well-established networks contribute to cross-border trafficking operations.        
Copyright © IOM. All rights reserved.        

AFGHANISTAN: Juvenile justice system lacks resources

KABUL, 25 June 2008 (IRIN) – Shahla (not her real name), aged 14, fears the future: Her father has threatened to kill her when she is released from a juvenile centre in Herat Province, western Afghanistan.

“She was sentenced to one year in a reformatory because she escaped from home three months ago,” Hangama Anwary, a commissioner for children’s rights at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said on 25 June.

Shahla did not like the fiancée chosen for her by her father and had no option but to leave home, according to the AIHRC.

“Child law does not consider escaping from home a crime, but in reality many girls and women, including children, are penalised,” Anwary told dozens of judges and prosecutors in Kabul at the launch of a report on the plight of children in juvenile centres.

The report entitled Justice for Children: The situation of children in conflict with the law in Afghanistan was produced by the AIHRC in cooperation with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and sheds light on a series of problems and shortcomings in the country’s juvenile justice system [http://www.aihrc.org.af/Juvenile_Detention_eng.pdf].

“Forty-eight percent of children reported being beaten during detention and 36 percent said they were ill-treated in police custody,” the report said.

“Fifty-eight percent of children reported falling ill during their detention,” it said.

“The situation of girls is usually much worse than boys, and in many provinces there are no separate detention centres for girls; they are mostly locked up with adult female prisoners,” the report said.

Juvenile centres lack funds

There are 501 children – 448 boys and 53 girls – in 30 juvenile centres across Afghanistan, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said.

“Most of them are accused of murder, theft, escaping from home, smuggling narcotics, sexual crimes and forgery,” said Deputy Justice Minister Abdul Qadir Adalatkhowa.

Almost all children in juvenile centres do not have access to proper education, vocational training, entertainment or other facilities which might promote their rehabilitation, the joint AIHRC/UNICEF report said.

Also, the food given to children in juvenile centres was very poor; recent food prices rises had further worsened their diet, commissioner Anwary said.

According to the Justice Ministry, which administers the juvenile centres, the government has earmarked only US$1 per day to cover the cost of keeping each child in a juvenile centre – including its food, education and health.

“Owing to the rise in food prices we have demanded that the per diem be increased from 50 Afghanis [US$1] to 70 Afghanis [$1.40],” Adalatkhowa said.

Dozens of children who are not accused of any wrongdoing also live in precarious conditions in Pul-e Charkhi jail, in Kabul, with their imprisoned mothers [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74491].

Afghanistan has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and in 2005 enacted a national juvenile code, which is deemed to be compliant with international conventions.

However, the country needs more resources, improved capacity and technical assistance to implement its legal commitments, experts say.

Justice for children in detention in Afghanistan

KABUL, 24 June 2008 – A new study on the situation of children in conflict with law by the Afghan Independent Human Right Commission (AIHRC) in collaboration with UNICEF will be released tomorrow, 25 June in Kabul.

The study urges full implementation of the Juvenile Code. The Government of Afghanistan adopted the Juvenile Code – Procedural Law for Dealing with Children in Conflict with the Law in March 2005 incorporating the basic principles of juvenile justice as expressed in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Following the enactment of this legislation, UNICEF supported awareness-raising, training and capacity-building programmes with law enforcement and judicial bodies and key stakeholders.

The report shows that children in detention continue to face rights violations including maltreatment, lack of access to education and health services. A punitive and retributive approach to juvenile justice seems to be still predominant in Afghanistan.

The new study offers an opportunity to evaluate the existing services for children in conflict with the law,”says UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan, Catherine Mbengue, “UNICEF strongly advocates measures to prevent and reduce detention or imprisonment of children and prevention programmes involving communities and children at risk- we need to invest more to prevent children coming into conflict with the law while we continue to assist children already in detention.”

The study, is the result of over a one year period of information gathering from 22 provinces, taking an analytical look at the structures of juvenile courts and juvenile rehabilitation centres in the country. The following provinces were covered by the study: Kabul, Kapisa, Parwan, Logar, Ghazni, Nangarhar, Laghman, Kunar, Takhar, Baghlan, Kunduz, Samangan, Balkh, Herat, Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Urozgan, Bamyan, Sari Pool, Panjshir, and Daikundi.

Following the launch of the report, AIHRC and UNICEF will be holding a workshop for judicial representatives in order to initiate a dialogue on the recommendations in order improve the situation of detained children within the justice system in Afghanistan.

Guantanamo prisoner details sleep deprivation

By BEN FOX

    June 19, 2008

    GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — A Guantanamo prisoner testified Thursday that U.S. troops made loud noises, kept the lights on in his cell, and frequently moved him around the prison to deprive him of sleep.

    Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan detainee charged with attempted murder, told a military court he does not know why he was subjected to the military’s “frequent flyer” sleep deprivation program in May 2004, nearly 17 months after he was arrested.

    “Day and night, they were shifting me from one room to another,” Jawad said.

    His testimony came in a pretrial hearing at the U.S. war crimes court. Lawyers and human rights groups have accused the military of using sleep deprivation to “soften up” Guantanamo detainees for questioning, but this was the first time a prisoner testified about such treatment.

    Jawad’s defense has asked the military judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, to dismiss the charges, saying the sleep deprivation amounted to torture. Prosecutors denied that allegation.

    “In no sense is it torture. In no sense is it coercion,” said prosecutor and Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld. “In no sense is it such mistreatment that charges should be dismissed.”

    Prison records obtained by the defense show Jawad was moved between cells 112 times over two weeks in May 2004, sometimes after just a few minutes. The prisoner said bright lights were kept on in his cell, and guards made noises and played loud music to keep him awake.

    Jawad testified the sleep disruption caused his blood pressure to rise and resulted in unspecified “mental problems.” Records obtained by the defense show he tried to commit suicide on Dec. 25, 2003, even before he was subjected to the “frequent flyer” treatment.

    “Islam never permits suicide … but it was beyond my control,” he told the court through a Pashto interpreter. “That’s why I tried that.”

    U.S. authorities have used sleep disruption to prepare prisoners for interrogations, but Jawad’s lawyer, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, says his client had already supposedly confessed to throwing a grenade that wounded two American soldiers and their translator in Afghanistan. He had also already been interrogated at least 21 times before May 2004.

    Frakt said he believes the sleep deprivation was done for “sport” or as punishment. “Abnormal sleep deprivation is a form of mental torture,” he said.

    Vandeveld noted in cross-examination of a sleep expert called by the defense that Jawad was sometimes allowed to remain in his cell for up to four hours. He said the prisoner was offered treatment by military psychiatric personnel.

    Frakt has also filed a motion to dismiss the charges based on allegations that Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser to the military commissions, used what the military calls “unlawful command influence” to make sure the detainee went quickly to trial.

    Frakt said Hartmann pushed for charges against his client — even though prosecutors had said they weren’t ready — to try to garner public support for the military commissions.

    Hartmann was barred last month from participating in another Guantanamo trial after the judge in the case said he lacked impartiality.

    Hartmann testified Thursday that he acted within his authority to speed up the pace of prosecutions. He denied allegations that he mistreated military prosecutors under his supervision and had an abusive management style.

    The judge did not issue an immediate ruling on either motion.

U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases

By Tom Lasseter
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Wed Jun 18, 5:15 PM ET

    KABUL, Afghanistan – American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were corralling livestock.

    The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

    Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

    The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq , but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul , and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan .

    “I was punched and kicked at Bagram. … At Bagram, when they took a man to interrogation at night, the next morning we would see him brought out on a stretcher looking almost dead,” said Aminullah, an Afghan who was held there for a little more than three months. “But at Guantanamo, there were rules, there was law.”

    Nazar Chaman Gul , an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. “Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me,” he said.

    When the kicking started, Gul said, he’d cry out, “I am not a terrorist,” then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.

    According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn’t a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

    When U.S. soldiers raided the house he was visiting, acting on a tip from a tribal rival who was seeking revenge against another man, they apparently confused Gul with a militant with a similar name – who was also imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to an Afghan intelligence official and Gul’s American lawyer.

    The eight-month McClatchy investigation found a pattern of abuse that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times , which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo, hasn’t previously been revealed.

    Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida’s 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida.

    Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay .

    Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them.

    In an effort to assemble as complete a picture as possible of U.S. detention practices, McClatchy reporters interviewed 66 former detainees, double-checked key elements of their accounts, spoke with U.S. soldiers who’d served as detention camp guards and reviewed thousands of pages of records from Army courts-martial and human rights reports.

    The Bush administration refuses to release full records of detainee treatment in the war on terrorism, and no senior Bush administration official would agree to an on-the-record interview to discuss McClatchy’s findings.

    The most violent of the major U.S. detention centers, the McClatchy investigation found, was Bagram, an old Soviet airstrip about 30 miles outside Kabul . The worst period at Bagram was the seven months from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, when interrogators there used techniques that when repeated later at Abu Ghraib led to wholesale abuses.

    New detainees were shoved to the floor of a cavernous warehouse, a former Soviet aircraft machine shop that stayed dim all day, and kept in pens where they weren’t allowed to speak or look at guards.

    The Afghan government initially based a group of intelligence officers at Bagram, but they were pushed out. Mohammed Arif Sarwari , the head of Afghanistan’s national security directorate from late 2001 to 2003, said he got a letter from U.S. commanders in mid-2002 telling him to get his men out of Bagram.

    Sarwari thought that was a bad sign: The Americans, he thought, were creating an island with no one to watch over them.

    “I said I didn’t want to be involved with what they were doing at Bagram – who they were arresting or what they were doing with them,” he said in an interview in Kabul .

    The rate of reported abuse was higher among men who were held at the U.S. camp at Kandahar Airfield . Thirty-two out of 42 men held there whom McClatchy interviewed claimed that they were knocked to the ground or slapped about. But former detainees said the violence at Bagram was much harsher.

    The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002 , when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

    Dilawar died on Dec. 10 , seven days after Habibullah died. He’d been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was “falling apart” and had “basically been pulpified,” said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse , the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

    Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation.”

    After Habibullah died, a legal officer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan asked two military police guards at Bagram to demonstrate how they’d chained detainees’ wrists above their heads in a small plywood isolation cell.

    “Frankly, it didn’t look good,” Maj. Jeff Bovarnick , the legal adviser for the Bagram detention center from November 2002 to June 2003 , said during a military investigation hearing in June 2005 .

    “This guy is chained up and has a hood on his head,” Bovarnick continued. “The two MPs that were demonstrating this took about five minutes to get everything hook(ed) up; and I was thinking to myself, if this was a combative detainee, it must have been a real struggle for them to get him to comply, and the things they must have been doing to make him comply.”

    The only American officer who’s been reprimanded for the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar is Army Capt. Christopher Beiring , who commanded the 377th Military Police Company from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003.

    Beiring told investigators that he’d received no formal training in leading a military police company, “just the correspondence courses and on-the-job training.”

    Then-Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg , the Army lawyer who investigated Beiring in the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar, argued that: “The government failed to present any evidence of what are ‘approved tactics, techniques and procedures in detainee operations.’ ”

    On Berg’s recommendation, the charges against Beiring were dropped, and he was given a letter of reprimand.

    “It’s extremely hard to wage war with so many undefined rules and roles,” Beiring said in a phone interview with McClatchy . “It was very crazy.”

    The commander of the military intelligence section that worked alongside Beiring’s military police company at Bagram, Capt. Carolyn Wood , declined to comment.

    The soldier who faced the most serious charges, Spc. Willie Brand , admitted that he hit Dilawar about 37 times, including some 30 times in the flesh around the knees during one session in an isolation cell.

    Brand, who faced up to 11 years in prison, was reduced in rank to private – his only punishment – after he was found guilty of assaulting and maiming Dilawar.

    ‘EVERYBODY STRUCK A DETAINEE’

    U.S. soldiers’ testimony in military investigations after the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar suggested that detainee abuse at Bagram occurred from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, a period of about seven months.

    Soldiers who served at Bagram before that time said detainees were never beaten. Col. Matthew Bogdanos , a Marine Reserves officer who worked there from December 2001 to April 2002 , said in an interview that none of the soldiers or American operatives he knew had resorted to abusing detainees.

    An Army interrogator who was based at Bagram in the spring of 2002 and later wrote a book under the pseudonym of Chris Mackey for security reasons, said in an e-mail exchange that while soldiers pushed the limits – such as using stress positions and sleep deprivation – he never saw or heard of detainees getting beaten.

    Former detainees interviewed by McClatchy and by some human rights groups, however, claimed that the violence was rampant from late 2001 until the summer of 2003 or later, at least 20 months.

    Although they were at Bagram at different times and speak different languages, the 28 former detainees who told McClatchy that they’d been abused there told strikingly similar stories:

    — Bashir Ahmad , a Pakistani who fought with the Taliban, said that in the late spring or summer of 2003, U.S. troops would chain him to the ceiling by his hands or feet. “Then they would punch me or hit me with a wood rod,” he said.

    — Brahim Yadel, a French citizen, said he was punched and slapped during interrogations at Bagram in December 2001 .

    — Moazzem Begg , a British citizen, said he was assaulted regularly at Bagram for most of 2002, until he was transferred to Guantanamo in January 2003 .

    — Akhtar Mohammed , an Afghan, said that at Bagram during the spring of 2003, “when they moved me to the interrogation room they covered my eyes, and took me up steep stairs. I always fell on the ground. And when I fell down, they punched and kicked me.”

    — Abdul Haleem , a Pakistani, said that U.S. soldiers threw him to the ground at Bagram in 2003 and kicked him in the head, “like they were playing soccer.”

    — Adel al Zamel , a Kuwaiti, said guards frequently waved sticks at him and threatened to rape him at Bagram during the spring of 2002. During an interview in Kuwait City , Zamel shook his head and said he remembered hearing detainees being beaten and “the cries from the interrogation room” at Bagram.

    He wasn’t the only person to report sexual humiliation.

    Sgt. Selena Salcedo , a U.S. military intelligence officer, said that sometime between August 2002 and February 2003 she saw another interrogator, Pfc. Damien Corsetti , pull down the pants of a detainee and leave his genitals exposed.

    In a 2005 sworn statement in the court-martial of Corsetti, she said she’d left the room and that when she’d returned the detainee was bent over a table and Corsetti was waving a plastic bottle near his buttocks. She said she didn’t know whether the detainee had been raped.

    Corsetti was acquitted of any wrongdoing. He didn’t respond to a request for comment submitted through his attorney. Salcedo pleaded guilty to kicking a detainee – Dilawar – and grabbing his ears during a December 2002 interrogation.

    Soldiers who served at Bagram starting in the summer of 2002 confirmed that detainees there were struck routinely.

    “Whether they got in trouble or not, everybody struck a detainee at some point,” said Brian Cammack , a former specialist with the 377th Military Police Company , an Army Reserve unit from Cincinnati . He was sentenced to three months in military confinement and a dishonorable discharge for hitting Habibullah.

    Spc. Jeremy Callaway , who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was uncomfortable following orders to “mentally and physically break the detainees.” He didn’t go into detail.

    “I guess you can call it torture,” said Callaway, who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003 .

    Many human rights experts say the U.S. military began cracking down on detainee abuse at Bagram in 2004, in response to the public outcry over pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq .

    RETRIBUTION FOR 9-11

    Asked why someone would abuse a detainee, Callaway told military investigators: “Retribution for September 11, 2001 .”

    When detainees first had their hoods removed on arriving at Bagram, looming behind them was a large American flag and insignia of the New York Police Department , a reminder of Sept. 11 .

    Almost none of the detainees at Bagram, however, had anything to do with the terrorist attacks.

    Bovarnick, the former chief legal officer for operational law in Afghanistan and Bagram legal adviser, said in a sworn statement that of some 500 detainees he knew of who’d passed through Bagram, only about 10 were high-value targets, the military’s term for senior terrorist operatives.

    That hardly mattered.

    Khaled al Asmr , a tall, gaunt Jordanian, was hauled off a U.S. military cargo plane at Bagram in early 2002. Flown in from Pakistan in heavy shackles and with a hood on his head, he was accused of being an al Qaida operative with possible connections to the Sept. 11 attacks.

    Standing in an interrogation room, Asmr said, he’d already been punched in the face several times by American guards. Two Americans walked into the room, wearing civilian clothes. They pulled out pistols and held them to either side of his head as a third American man entered and walked up to Asmr, according to his account.

    The third man leaned toward Asmr’s face and whispered, his breath warm, “I am here to save you from these people, but you must tell me you are al Qaida.”

    Asmr, who told his story to a McClatchy reporter in Jordan , was declared no longer an enemy combatant after a 2004 U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo. He said he’d known some al Qaida leaders, but that was more than 15 years earlier, during the U.S.-backed Afghan uprising against the Soviets.

    Nazar Gul was of even less intelligence value. None of the Afghan security or intelligence officials whom McClatchy interviewed said they’d heard of Gul, making it unlikely that he was the dangerous insurgent the U.S. said he was.

    Gul’s American attorney, Ruben L. Iniguez , went to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2006 to check the details of his story of working as a guard for the Afghan government, and later said in sworn court filings – which included videotaped testimony by witnesses – and in an interview with McClatchy that every fact checked out.

    A LAWLESS PLACE

    The mistreatment of detainees at Bagram, some legal experts said, may have been a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which forbids violence against or humiliating treatment of detainees.

    The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to death for such mistreatment.

    At Bagram, however, the rules didn’t apply. In February 2002 , President Bush issued an order denying suspected Taliban and al Qaida detainees prisoner-of-war status. He also denied them basic Geneva protections known as Common Article Three, which sets a minimum standard for humane treatment.

    Without those parameters, it’s difficult to say what acts were or were not war crimes, said Charles Garraway , a former colonel and legal adviser for the British army and a leading international expert on military law.

    Bush’s order made it hard to prosecute soldiers for breaking such rules under the military’s basic law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in large part because defense attorneys could claim that troops on the ground didn’t know what was allowed.

    In sweeping aside Common Article Three, the Bush administration created an environment in which abuse such as that at Bagram was more likely, said Garraway, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College .

    “I think it’s completely predictable, because you no longer have standards,” he said.

    In 2006, Bush pushed Congress to narrow the definition of a war crime under the War Crimes Act, making prosecution even more difficult.

    UNTRAINED, UNDISCIPLINED

    The military police at Bagram had guidelines, Army Regulation 190-47, telling them they couldn’t chain prisoners to doors or to the ceiling. They also had Army Regulation 190-8, which said that humiliating detainees wasn’t allowed.

    Neither was applicable at Bagram, however, said Bovarnick, the former senior legal officer for the installation.

    The military police rulebook saying that enemy prisoners of war should be treated humanely didn’t apply, he said, because the detainees weren’t prisoners of war, according to the Bush administration’s decision to withhold Geneva Convention protections from suspected Taliban and al Qaida detainees.

    The military police guide for the Army correctional system, which prohibits “securing a prisoner to a fixed object, except in emergencies,” wasn’t applicable, either, because Bagram wasn’t a correctional facility, Bovarnick told investigators in 2004.

    “I do not believe there is a document anywhere which states that … either regulation applies, and there is clear guidance by the secretary of defense that detainees were not EPWs,” enemy prisoners of war, Bovarnick said.

    Compounding the problem, military police guards and interrogators lacked proper training and received little instruction from commanders about how to do their jobs, according to sworn testimony taken during military investigations and interviews by McClatchy .

    The guards who worked there from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003 were all reservists from the 377th Military Police Company , based in Cincinnati , and many of the military intelligence interrogators serving at the same time were from the Utah Army National Guard .

    Good order and discipline had evaporated.

    1st Sgt. Betty Jones said during a 2004 interview with investigators that a fellow military police sergeant and his men on several occasions were “drunk to the point that they could not go to duty.”

    Salcedo, the military intelligence soldier, said in her statement at Corsetti’s court-martial that she and others drank alcohol during their time at Bagram, and at one point smoked hashish on the roof of a building.

    Cammack told McClatchy that one of his sergeants drove a John Deere Gator, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle, to a nearby town and traded with locals for bottles of vodka.

    “Really, nobody was in charge … the leadership did nothing to help us. If we had any questions, it was pretty much ‘figure it out on your own,’ ” Cammack said. “When you asked about protocol they said it’s a work in progress.”

    PENTAGON RESPONSE

    Senior Pentagon officials refused to be interviewed for this article. In response to a series of questions and interview requests, Col. Gary Keck , a Defense Department spokesman, released this statement:

    ” The Department of Defense policy is clear – we treat all detainees humanely. The United States operates safe, humane and professional detention operations for unlawful enemy combatants at war with this country.”

    No U.S. military officer above the rank of captain has been called to account for what happened at Bagram.

    The head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan when prisoners were being abused at Bagram, then-Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill , declined an interview request. McNeill was later made the commander of all NATO forces in Afghanistan , a post he held until recently.

    His predecessor, then-Maj. Gen. Franklin L. “Buster” Hagenbeck , said in an e-mail exchange that from late 2001 to 2002, his attention wasn’t on detainee facilities.

    “Unfortunately, I have nothing to add to your reporting … I was focused on battling the Taliban and al Qaida, as well as reconstruction and coordinating with the nascent Afghan government,” Hagenbeck wrote. “I do not personally know of any abuses while I was there, and we focused on treating all with dignity and respect – even, and perhaps especially, those persons in our custody.”

    Hagenbeck is now the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point .

    Capt. Carolyn Wood , who led the interrogators at Bagram, was sent to Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2003 and assumed control of interrogation operations there that August.

    A military investigation that followed the Abu Ghraib scandal – known as the “Fay-Jones Report” for the two generals who authored it – found that from July 2003 to February of 2004, 27 military intelligence personnel there allegedly encouraged or condoned the abuse of detainees, violated established interrogation procedures or participated in abuse themselves.

    The abuse resembled what former Bagram detainees described.

    A key factor in serious cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the report found, was the construction of isolation areas, a move requested by Wood, who said that “based on her experience” such facilities made it easier to extract information from detainees.

    Wood remains an active-duty military intelligence officer.

    ( Matthew Schofield contributed to this report from Paris and Lyon, France .)