An Afghan Gives His Own Account of U.S. Abuse

[JackSpratts]

Sayed Nabi Siddiqui,
at his home in the village of Sheikho,
describing mistreatment he suffered
while in United States custody for
40 days last year.

Torture, Murder

Excerpts

KABUL, Afghanistan, Wednesday, May 12 — A former Afghan police colonel gave a graphic account in an interview this week of being subjected to beating, kicking, sleep deprivation, taunts and sexual abuse during about 40 days he spent in American custody in Afghanistan last summer. He also said he had been repeatedly photographed, often while naked.

"I swear to God, those photos shown on television of the prison in Iraq — those things happened to me as well," the former officer, Sayed Nabi Siddiqui, 47, said in the interview on Sunday at his home in the village of Sheikho, on the edge of the eastern town of Gardez.

"And they made insults about our women," he added. He said the American interrogator, through a translator, had taunted him, asking: "Do you know that your wife and daughter are prostitutes now?"

"The Americans were asking this and the translators were translating, and they were all laughing," he said. "And I was in my full police uniform with insignia showing my rank."

More than once, he said, soldiers inserted their fingers into his anus. He said one had touched his penis and asked, "Why is this unhappy?"

Mr. Siddiqui says that he was wrongly detained on July 15 after he reported police corruption and that someone then accused him of being a member of the Taliban.

"Every time, they were laughing and putting their fingers in my anus and throwing different colors of beams of light in my eyes, and they were putting their feet on my neck," he said. He knelt and pressed his head to the floor to show how the soldiers had put their boots on his neck.

Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of United States forces in Afghanistan since last October, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had not heard of the allegations but that "I take those accounts very seriously."

"There is some potentially criminal behavior in there," he said.

Former prisoners have complained of harsh interrogation techniques and rough, sometimes humiliating treatment at the hands of their American guards and interrogators since the United States went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001.

The complaints peaked around December 2002, when two men died in custody within a week of each other at Bagram. More than a year later, results of an investigation of those deaths by the Army's Criminal Investigation Department have not been disclosed.

"There was an old man of 70 or 80," he added. "They stripped him naked. He was so ashamed, he said, `It would be better if I kill myself.' I don't know why they stripped us and beat us. Maybe to influence us before the interrogation."

For the 12 days that he was in Kandahar, Mr. Siddiqui said, the detainees were kept in wire cages, 20 to 30 in a cage, given very little food and water and made to use a bucket for a toilet in front of the other detainees, which he added was also deeply shaming.

American soldiers would throw stones and bottles at the detainees in the cages, he said. "It was like stoning monkeys at the zoo," he said. "They brought buckets of stones and were laughing as they did it."

Two men died in Bagram in December 2002, and American pathologists classified those deaths as homicides "caused by blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." A third man died while being interrogated in June 2003 at a United States Special Forces firebase in the eastern province of Kunar.

Carlotta Gall

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/12/in...12AFGH.html?hp