Afghan Prison Abuses: What Did Americans Know? And When Did They Know It?

Afghan soldiers stand guard at a prison in Kandahar. Arghan/Xinhua/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In early October, the UN released a report detailing a pattern of abuse taking place in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, including the vaunted Department 124. The interrogation methods of choice: hanging detainees by their hands for hours, beating them with metal pipes, shocking them with electricity, and twisting their genitals until they passed out. You know, just to soften them up.

Over the past decade, American officials trained (and funded) Afghan intelligence operatives, and transferred prisoners to many of the prisons in question. So the Washington Post‘s Joshua Partlow and Julie Tate ask: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Department 124 was long sealed off from the outside world; the [International Committee of the Red Cross], the United Nations and other organizations concerned with human rights were barred by Afghan officials from monitoring conditions there.

But American officials frequently went inside, according to Afghan officials and others familiar with the site. U.S. Special Operations troops brought detainees there, and CIA officials met with Department 124’s leadership on a weekly basis, reviewed their interrogation reports and used the intelligence gleaned from interrogations to inform their operations, the officials said.

The detainees’ physical characteristics were entered into an American biometric database. They wore orange jumpsuits—as detainees do at the U.S.-run prison at Bagram air base, but not at other Afghan prisons—and were sometimes hooded, according to an Afghan intelligence official. Seventeen detainees said they had been transferred to the prison by international military forces; the United Nations found “compelling evidence” that those detainees were tortured once they arrived. The detainees told U.N. officials that their interrogators were Afghans.

That such harsh tactics are used to get information and extract confessions is no secret among current and former Afghan intelligence officials. One of them said their CIA partners were “totally aware” of such treatment.

“They work with us every other day, if not every day,” another Afghan intelligence official said of the CIA. Because of their close collaboration and the prevalence of beatings, “the CIA guys should have known about it,” he said.

American officials deny that they knew the abuse at Department 124 was systematic, and insist that prisoner transfers to the facilities in question were halted whenever allegations of abuse surfaced. In late August, they also promised to begin monitoring the detention centers for potential human rights abuses. But the State Department has yet to implement the program.

Meanwhile, the Post reports that the ICRC had been investigating detainee abuse long before the UN began its investigation in October 2010, issuing warnings to officials from the US embassy and CIA. Human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were reporting on the problem of detainee abuse by Afghan intelligence as far back as 2007.

Aside from the obvious ethical issues this presents for the US, there’s also a legal one: According to the Leahy Amendment, the US can’t provide military funding to alleged human rights abusers; the State Department is investigating whether or not the law applies in this instance. But even if it does, the US has a history of circumventing the law. And over the past two years, the Obama administration has repeatedly set aside restrictions on military aid to countries that use child soldiers.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate