Aired on CBC Fifth estate
16 November 2005
Gillian Findlay: MAYBE WE COULD START BY TALKING ABOUT THE 519TH INTELLIGENCE BRIGADE [AT BAGRAM BASE IN AFGHANISTAN]?
Tim Golden: Considering that there were a lot of reserve units that had absolutely no experience in doing real interrogations, the 519th was not by any stretch the worst that the army had to offer. It was for the most part a real military intelligence brigade that had a number of interrogators. But only two of those interrogators had ever actually questioned prisoners in the field and many of them were not actually trained interrogators, they were counter intelligence agents.
They came from Fort Bragg [California] and because they were short-handed, they had an added detachment of about a half dozen soldiers from the Utah National Guard…They mostly arrived [in Afghanistan] at the end of July, beginning of August of 2002 and they were there until January of 2003.
Gillian Findlay: AND THEY WERE UNDER THE COMMAND OF CAPTAIN [CAROLYN] WOOD?
Tim Golden: There were series of people, higher-level officers who were supposed to take command of the detention center at Bagram and for various reasons they were rotated out and that responsibility fell to a woman who was then I think a 31 or 32 year old first lieutenant at one point. She was later promoted to captain and that was Carolyn Wood…
Gillian Findlay: SO WHAT HAPPENED THEN AFTER THE 519TH ARRIVED?
Tim Golden: I think over the course of the 519th's tenure, they were not very closely supervised. The chain of command was vague. They didn't have a lot of senior level input. They had a fair amount of pressure from above to get more intelligence because they weren't doing all the great. But, over a period of months, it seemed from the internal army documents that I've gotten a hold of that they got more aggressive about using stress positions, about using coercive interrogation techniques and looser about the way that they conducted sleep deprivation….
Gillian Findlay: NOW EVENTUALLY THINGS DETERIORATE FURTHER BECAUSE AS YOU HAVE DOCUMENTED IN YOUR REPORTING WITH THE DEATHS OF THE TWO DETAINEES. I MEAN THINGS DETERIORATED TO THE POINT WHERE THERE WERE BEATINGS HAPPENING ON, I GATHER, A FAIRLY REGULAR BASIS?
Tim Golden: I don't know if you could say that beatings were happening on a regular basis. I think there were beatings that went unpunished. There was what were called compliance blows which primarily amounted to guards kneeing the detainees forcefully in the legs in a debilitating way, that were not at all part of military doctrine but had been adapted from what some of these reserve military police guards knew as either corrections officers or town policemen in the places that they came from. And they began to be used more and more. Finally, in the case of the two men who died they were used so excessively that the coroner said the two men looked like they'd been hit by buses or run over by buses.
Gillian Findlay: TELL ME IF YOU CAN IN SORT OF A THUMBNAIL SKETCH WHO THOSE TWO MEN WERE AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM?
Tim Golden: The two men who died were both young Afghan men. One was a man who's known as Mullah Habibullah. His identity is not even now very clear and he was said to be the brother of a Taliban commander, although even that has not been definitively confirmed. He was picked up it appears by CIA operators and handed over to the military. The other was a 21 or 22-year-old taxi driver named Diliwar who really happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And he was a young man who had just begun to drive a taxi. He'd been a farmer most of his life in a tiny village in central Afghanistan and he picked up some passengers at the market and was driving them past an American military outpost when they were stopped by Afghan militia men.
Gillian Findlay:AND THEN WHY WERE THOSE TWO CHOSEN FOR THE KIND OF TREATMENT THAT THEY GOT DO YOU KNOW?
Tim Golden: Mullah Habibullah, according to the accounts of the soldiers was said to be a very uncooperative and recalcitrant detainee. A guy who would spit and who didn't want to put his handcuffs on and wouldn't do what he was told. And that may be true although some of those accounts clearly seem to be exaggerated because some of the soldiers who gave them, were later accused of lying to investigators.
The same was said about Diliwar, but Diliwar was a guy who weighed 125 pounds. He was a tiny, frail-looking man whose family described him as an extremely peaceful man. I think he was very frightened to be suddenly held in an American prison surrounded by people who didn't speak his language and often with a hood over his head and chained to the ceiling. He was described by other prisoners as having been very frightened by this treatment of having a hood over his head and being chained to the ceiling. So, it may be that some of his resistance had to do with fear.
Gillian Findlay: NOW I KNOW YOU'VE HAD AN OPPORTUNITY TO INTERVIEW I THINK SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE INVOLVED IN THOSE INCIDENTS AND TO SEE THE ARMY'S INVESTIGATIVE REPORT OF HOW THESE TWO MEN CAME TO DIE THERE. AS YOU PIECE THE STORY TOGETHER, WHY DO YOU THINK THESE MEN WERE TREATED THE WAY THEY WERE?
Tim Golden: Well in the case of Mullah Habibullah, who's the detainee who died first, it seems that he, for whatever reason, got on the wrong side of some of the guards. And as time went on, they seemed to just single him out for more punishment. He was thought to be a fairly important detainee. Some guys referred to him as a VIP because he had this supposed Taliban connection because he was brought in by the CIA. So, he seems like somebody that the MPs worked over fairly hard. Whether they were doing that at the behest of military intelligence or not hasn't really become clear.
In the case of Diliwar he seems to be somebody who was spending a long time screaming. Whether he was terrified or upset for whatever reason, he was yelling so much that it bothered the military police guards. And as a result, they began striking him in the knees. And there's testimony from some of the guards that at one point they figured out that if they hit him, if they kneed him in the legs, he would scream out “Allah”. And they took kind of a sick pleasure in this and according to one of the guards, MPs began kind of coming in and gathering around and hitting the guy in the legs to get him to scream to God and it just deteriorated from there.
Gillian Findlay: WAS THERE A BELIEF ON THE PART OF THESE PEOPLE THAT THIS MAN WAS GUILTY OF SOMETHING?
Tim Golden: The guards, the MPs, treated all the detainees essentially as terrorists until proven otherwise. And generally if somebody was proven otherwise, they wouldn't know about it. The M[ilitary] I[ntelligence] soldiers did essentially the same although it was becoming clear to them that somewhere between 80, 90% of the guys that they were getting were either farmers or other innocent people caught up in the sweeps of militia men and American soldiers, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or they were just low-level Afghan fighters, Taliban fighters. So, very few of these people turned out to be important sources of intelligence.
It's not entirely clear what Mullah Habibullah knew or didn't know because I don't think the interrogators, whatever tactics they used, got it out of him. But the interrogators who had questioned Diliwar, I think, had figured out by his third interrogation that he was really what he said he was, a taxi driver who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What's especially tragic about his story I think is that the two interrogations he had at the end of his life were especially cruel and seemed to really not be about getting any information out of this guy at all. They were just about making him do what the interrogators wanted him to do. And at that point his legs were so battered he couldn't kneel, he couldn't stand, he could barely follow the commands that the interrogators were giving him.
Gillian Findlay: HOW DID HE DIE? WHAT DID THE CORONER'S REPORT SAY?
Tim Golden: In both cases the coroner's reports attributed the deaths to injuries caused by blunt force trauma. The two men's legs were essentially pulpified. One of the coroners described them as looking like they had been run over by a bus….
Gillian Findlay: DID YOU COME TO ANY CONCLUSION AS TO HOW MUCH THIS WAS CONDONED THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOR? I MEAN THIS IS IN THE CONTEXT OF PRESIDENT BUSH SAYING GENEVA WILL NOT APPLY. WE WILL TREAT THEM HUMANELY AND NEVERTHELESS…
Tim Golden: There are sort of two answers to that question. The suspension of the Geneva Conventions and the rules that came with it about how American soldiers treated their prisoners clearly created a vacuum. And people at Bagram thought that there was stuff you could do it wasn't entirely clear what that hadn't been allowed previously and that the war on terror was in sort of a new world in which the rules were not what they had been before.
It's not entirely clear how much senior officers really knew or condoned what went on. There's some indications that they tried to brush that some of them at least tried to brush abuses that happened even culpability in the two deaths under the rug.
In the first times that army investigators sent in their reports based on what the lawyers at Bagram and the commanders at Bagram had advised them and the testimony that they had taken in a very cursory way from soldiers there. They recommended that no one be charged with any crimes because they couldn't really tell who had done what to whom.
Gillian Findlay: AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?
Tim Golden: I think senior army officials back in the United States to their credit said no that's not going to fly. Two guys died, go back and redo the investigation. It ended up taking almost two years for that investigation to be conducted to an adequate level for people to be charged.
Gillian Findlay: BUT THIS WAS ONLY AFTER THIS BECAME PUBLIC THAT THAT DECISION WAS TAKEN?
Tim Golden: The senior commander of all coalition forces in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeil, told one of my colleagues in February of 2002, almost 2 months after the autopsies had showed both these deaths to have been homicides, that there was no indication that abuses had contributed to the deaths of either men. The army at that point was still sticking to the story that they had died by natural causes.
It was only several months after that that the army investigators really got to the point where they were launched on a serious investigation and that was after reporting showed that these men had died of homicides. And one of my colleagues went to the Afghan village where Diliwar was from and got this piece of paper that his family had been given along with his body which of course they couldn't read. It was in English. But it was an army death certificate that showed that he had died at someone else's hands.
Gillian Findlay: IT SAID HOMICIDE?
Tim Golden: It said homicide.
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