Published: October 10, 2011
Courtesy Of "The New York Times"
KABUL, Afghanistan — Suspects are hung by their hands, beaten with cables and in some cases their genitals are twisted until they lose consciousness in detention facilities run by the Afghan intelligence service and the Afghan national police, according to a study released Monday by the United Nations here.
The report provides a devastating picture of the abuses committed by arms of the Afghanistan government as the American-led foreign forces here are moving to wind down their presence after a decade of war. The abuses were uncovered even as American and other Western trainers and mentors had been working closely with the ministries overseeing the detention facilities and funded their operations.
Acting on an early draft of the report seen last month,NATO stopped handing over detainees to the Afghans in several areas of the country.
The report found evidence of “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment” during interrogation in the accounts of nearly half of the detainees of the intelligence service, known as the National Directorate of Intelligence, who were interviewed by United Nations researchers. The national police treatment of detainees was somewhat less severe and widespread, the report found. Its research covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces. “Use of interrogation methods, including suspension, beatings, electric shock, stress positions and threatened sexual assault is unacceptable by any standard of international human rights law,” the report said.
It was unclear from the report whether any information extracted under torture was used by either the Afghan government or its foreign military allies. One detainee described being brought in for interrogation in Kandahar and having the interrogator ask if he knew the name of the office and then, after the man answered, “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban — even stones confess here.”
The man was beaten over several days for hours at a time with electric wire and then signed a confession, the report said.
The report pointed out that even though the abusive practices are entrenched, the Afghan government does not condone torture and has explicitly said the abuses found by the United Nations are not government policy.
“Reform is both possible and desired,” said Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, noting that the government had cooperated with the report’s researchers and has begun to take remedial action.
“We take this report very seriously,” said Shaida M. Abdali, the Afghan deputy national security adviser.
“Our government, especially the president, has taken a very strong stand on the protection of everyone’s human rights, their humanity, everywhere and especially in prisons and in detention,” he said, adding that he had not yet read the full document.
The government issued a lengthy response to the report in which the intelligence service denied using electric shock, the threat of rape and the twisting of sexual organs, but allowed that there were “deficiencies” in a war-torn country that routinely faced suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism. It also said it had set up an assessment unit to look into the problem, and had dismissed several employees at a unit known as Department 124, where the United Nations said the torture appeared to have been the most endemic. The intelligence service is now admonishing newly assigned interrogators to observe human rights, the government said in its response.
Ultimately the prosecution of the torturers is required, said Georgette Gagnon, the director of the human rights for the United Nations here, in order to “prevent and end such acts in the future.”
In the absence of remedial changes by the Afghans, the information could trigger a provision under American law, known as the Leahy amendment, that would stop some financing for the Afghan security forces, according to human rights experts.
The report overall raises broad ethical questions about the American funding of foreign security forces whose military and law enforcement officials routinely use torture. There have been a number of instances that raise similar questions including in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and El Salvador, according to a RAND report in 2006. Aid to Colombia in fighting its drug cartels and insurgents also has raised some of these issues.
In the case of Afghanistan, there appears to have been little effort made to scrutinize the country’s security practices, especially for detainees, perhaps in part because of political pressure to move as much responsibility as possible to the Afghans and to reduce American involvement here.
Of the 324 conflict-related detainees interviewed, 89 had been handed over to the Afghan intelligence service or the police by international military forces and in 19 cases, the men were tortured once they were in Afghan custody. The United Nations Convention Against Torture prohibits the transfer of a detained person to the custody of another state where there are substantial grounds for believing they are at risk of torture.
With that in mind as well as the military’s institutional view that torture is not a reliable way to obtain usable intelligence, Gen. John R. Allen, the NATO commander here, after seeing a draft of the report in early September, halted transfers of suspected insurgents to 16 of the facilities identified as sites where torture or abuse routinely takes place.
Earlier in the summer, NATO already had halted detainee transfers to intelligence and police authorities in four provinces based on other reports of torture and mistreatment. General Allen has now initiated a plan to investigate the facilities, help in training in modern interrogation techniques and then monitor the Afghan government’s practices. The American Embassy is heavily involved now in working on a long-term monitoring program for detention facilities and is working with NATO to put that in place.
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