As a follow up on the Bagram abuse: in an incendiary new report on the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at overseas facilities like Bagram air base in Afghanistan, retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba claims their treatment amounts to war crimes. In question is a study by Physicians for Human Rights, a Boston-based advocacy group, in which an examination of eleven prisoners held at various prison facilities show signs of physical and psychological torture, with scars both physical and mental (such as post-traumatic stress disorder).
It is important to note that these eleven men were released with no charges, meaning the U.S. government did not feel they were dangerous or involved in terrorism, yet they averaged three years in abusive detention.
Or so PHR says. The Washington Post (which, interestingly enough, quotes Taguba’s charge of a “systematic regime of torture” but not his charge of “war crimes”) notes an objection by the Pentagon:
A Pentagon spokesman yesterday criticized the report, saying its authors had drawn “sweeping conclusions based upon dubious allegations” of former detainees who had been out of U.S. custody for years.
“The quality of medical care we provide detainees is similar to that which our troops serving in the same locations receive,” said the spokesman, Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon. “We have robust psychological and mental health care available to detainees.”
Fear for the troops. As Spencer Ackerman posts PHR’s response, which is to complain that while their report was over medical examinations for evidence of torture, the Pentagon’s response was about medical care. The two are separate concepts.
So where does this leave Afghanistan? In a war of perceptions as often as guns, torture, no matter how viscerally pleasing to the revenge-minded or even marginally effective, is counterproductive. Getting a few snippets of intel from these low-level victims (call them what they are, when they are unjustly held for years at a time) is not worth the long-term consequences to U.S. foreign policy. Plus, it is quite simply, morally, wrong.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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