Abuses in Afghanistan dwarf those at Gitmo

McClatchy Newspapers reports the grim -- and under-publicized -- story about the beatings and torture to which suspected (often mistakenly) Al Qaeda members were subject while being held prisoner in Afghanistan.

Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay.

Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them. ...

The most violent of the major U.S. detention centers, the McClatchy investigation found, was Bagram, an old Soviet airstrip about 30 miles outside Kabul. The worst period at Bagram was the seven months from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, when interrogators there used techniques that when repeated later at Abu Ghraib led to wholesale abuses.

The article points out that the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to and including death for the sort of abuses committed at Bagram. But President Bush suspended the rules in 2002, denying detainees POW status and the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

Not only did these abuses violate standards of decency and justice, not only did they likely turn otherwise neutral or even friendly prisoners against the U.S., but they also set a precedent for the treatment of future American POWs held by hostile powers. How will we object to U.S. personnel being given the same treatment the U.S. deals out in its own prison camps?

The abuses of Bagram, Kandahar, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are going to hang over the U.S. military for a long time to come.