06/08/11 – Daphne Eviatar – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Santi war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm now joined on the phone by Daphne Eviatar from Human Rights First.
She's been back to Afghanistan and has just issued this report detained and denied in Afghanistan.
How to make us detention comply with the law.
Welcome back to the show.
Daphne, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks, Scott, for having me on again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So give us the bad news.
Tell us, paint us a picture, give us a story.
What's going on over there?
Guantanamo, I mean, Bagram Bay there in Afghanistan.
Right.
Well, you know, it's an interesting slip because most people are aware of the whole situation at Guantanamo, but they don't realize that the United States is holding more than 1700 detainees now at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.
And the situation is similar, but worse actually.
So these are people being held without charge, without trial, without any due process, and a lot of them from based on the research that we did seem to have done nothing wrong.
And we interviewed a lot of, I went with a colleague of mine.
We interviewed a lot of people who had been detained and had been released within the last year by U.S. forces.
A lot of them never knew why they were actually detained.
They didn't know, they never saw charges against them.
They never saw any evidence against them.
They weren't giving lawyers an opportunity in any effort to defend themselves.
And some of them were locked up for years at this prison.
So unfortunately the problem is growing.
You know, when the, when president Obama came into office, they were only about six, I mean, not only it's a lot, but they were about 600 detainees, maybe up to 650 that had been held by the Bush administration.
Now that is almost tripled.
So that's a, it's a growing, as we partly correspond to the surge in U.S. forces, U.S. forces have also increased the number of night raids they do.
So they go into compounds, they gather people up, they arrest them, they bring them to this prison, and then some of them can be left there for years before they get out.
And it's not clear that they had ever done anything wrong.
Well, and you know, I guess one side effect of that, maybe this is a side issue, but you talk about the prison population growing like that.
Sounds like they're just sweeping up fighting age males and that kind of thing, which just means a lot of innocent people get turned into resistance fighters while they're in there.
They're just going to gladiator Academy and pure Islam Academy and whatever while they're there.
Right.
And that's not a side issue at all.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, and that's a lot of what we try to talk about in this report too, is that what you're doing is you're creating a really resentful population.
Tonight, you have thousands of people that have come in and gone in and out of this prison to go back to their communities.
And, you know, it is always men and it's often the breadwinner of the family.
And in Afghanistan, they tend to have large families, especially in the smaller villages, and it tends to be people that they capture in these rural villages, they'll bring them in.
And now the family is left with no one to take care of them for years while this person is held in prison.
The prison, you know, says he hasn't done anything wrong and there's never any evidence presented that he's done anything wrong in a lot of cases, at least, and then when they're finally released and they go back to the village and now you have a really resentful person, a really resentful family and a really resentful village that increasingly feels like the United States is arbitrarily detaining people.
And so you've seen in the last few years that support for us forces in Afghanistan among Afghans has really gone down.
There's a lot more resentment of the United States going in, raiding their compounds, arresting and imprisoning the men of the family for what appears to them to be no reason.
So, and the other thing I think that that's important to note is that the reasons that the U.S. military will give for doing this is they'll say, well, we have information from an informant that this person is working with the Taliban, but the informants that they rely on are often really unreliable people.
And that's something we talk about in the report as well.
And lots of journalists and other human rights organizations have documented this as well, that the people in Afghanistan, there's a lot of tribal conflict, regional conflict, land conflict, and people, there are a lot of enemies between different tribes and different families and different regions.
And so people will give, will inform on someone to the U.S. government and say, oh, he's Taliban, when really they have a land dispute with that guy and it has nothing to do with the Taliban.
Well, this has been going on for a decade in a row now, too.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But it's just getting worse because the volume of these people is growing and the U.S. is trying to be or has been trying to be more aggressive in arresting people.
And so it relies more and more on these unnamed informants and the detainees when they're brought into this prison, they're never told who informed on them.
They have no way to defend themselves because they don't know what the evidence is.
Right.
Well, who in our society ever heard of the right to face one's accuser?
I mean.
Right.
It's unbelievably contrary to all those basic rights we thought that we have.
Well, now, so is there still such a thing as a difference between the prison at Bagram and the wink, wink, nudge, nudge, real prison at Bagram over the hill there?
You know what there is, is there's there's the Bagram prison.
A couple of years ago, the government built a new what they call, you know, new detention facility called Parwan, which is it's on the same airbase.
It just has a different name.
It's a nicer facility.
But for the first few weeks, when people are brought in, they're often brought into a section of the old Bagram prison that the U.S. military calls a screening facility.
And the detainees themselves usually call it the black jail because there are no windows and they don't know what time of day it is.
And they're usually left in there for a few weeks, sometimes depending on who it is and if the military thinks they have important information, they could be held there up to nine weeks.
And this is a place where, you know, the lights on 24 hours a day.
They can be interrogated in the middle of the night.
There seem to be tactics of sleep deprivation going on there.
It's a classified facility, so the government won't talk about it and they won't give anybody they won't give us access to it where we're not allowed to see the facility.
They haven't let anybody through this facility.
But so there's still a real question about what's going on there and what this screening facility is.
And is it do you know if it's a CIA thing more than a military thing or vice versa?
It seems to be a special forces thing.
It's JSOC.
So it's not the regular military.
It's not the the there's a task force in charge of detainee operations in Afghanistan called Joint Task Force 435.
They're the ones who allowed us to go into the new facility and to see the hearings that they give to detainees.
But they say they have nothing to do with the secret facility.
That's all special operations.
It's classified.
So kind of no one takes responsibility for it.
And the U.S. government, it's all considered secret.
And they don't say why it's secret.
It's not clear why you have to have secret detention on the U.S. airbase when everybody already knows it's there.
It's not clear why this facility is classified, but that's how they've characterized it so far.
Well, I guess it sounds like the same terminology, but with a different meaning.
The black sites have often that's kind of the term for secret CIA or military prisons around the world.
And there have been reports from time to time, although I guess it's been a year or so since I've heard about this in detail.
But, you know, there are said to be black sites all over Afghanistan run by the so-called Afghan government, as well as by the military and or CIA as well.
And is there any real word about what's going on there?
You know, accountability.
Well, I can tell you what I mean.
There's no accountability as far as I know.
But I can tell you what I learned when I was there was from interviewing people who had been held at some of these sites, none of them claim that they were tortured.
So I do think the conditions or the treatment isn't as bad as it was under the Bush administration.
I think that there were claims of torture under the Bush administration at these black sites.
But what we were hearing were things like sleep deprivation, you know, really cold rooms being thrown into a cell alone in isolation, no mattress, no blanket, kind of really, really uncomfortable conditions and disorienting conditions, you know, no windows, no idea what time of day it is, no way to know how they're supposed to pray a certain number of times a day at certain times of the day.
It's part of Muslim rituals.
And they couldn't do that because they didn't know what time of day it was.
They weren't given water, which is sort of a basic thing that you need.
That's a violation of Geneva, too, isn't it?
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're going to have to hold it right there.
But I want to get back to the degree of abuse or whatever people want to call it nowadays in the prison system in Afghanistan.
It's Daphne Eviatar from humanrightsfirst.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Daphne Eviatar from Human Rights First.
She's a lawyer and a journalist and has this new, extremely important report, Detained and Denied in Afghanistan.
It's at humanrightsfirst.org.
You can read all about it.
And we were talking about, Daphne, before the break there, you were saying, as far as you know, the prisoners in some of these jails across Afghanistan are undergoing what now?
They're sort of forms of deprivation, for example, that they're not really allowed to practice their religious rituals because they're not told what time of day it is or given water, which is a necessary thing for a lot of the ritual for these Muslim rituals.
And again, as I said, the government doesn't release any information about these.
But this is information that we've gotten from former detainees who were held in some of these facilities for at least a few weeks, some of them for a few months.
And the conditions are not as bad, again, as they were under the Bush administration, but they still raise serious concerns about kind of basic minimum rights.
OK, now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but John McCain pushed this Detainee Treatment Act back in 2005.
Dick Cheney successfully got the CIA taken out of it.
And but it said that the military is completely bound by the Army Field Manual description of how to carry out an interrogation.
And as soon as that was passed, they rewrote the Army Field Manual.
And I don't know if they added Appendix M or changed Appendix M, how to treat prisoners under your care.
But they loosened the rules basically and allowed what exactly?
Do you know?
Yeah, I mean, that's a that's a really important point that from what we can understand, they're applying Appendix M in these facilities, which allows them to do things like isolate people for long periods of time.
You sleep deprivation as a tactic to disorient people, possibly possibly use some sort of stress positions and do these things in combination.
Now, when they're done in combination, they can rise to the level of torture.
It depends how long you're kept in isolation or how much sleep you're deprived of.
If you're being, you know, people described being woken up at midnight and taken out for interrogation.
So there's no reason to interrogate them at midnight other than to deprive them of sleep or to disorient them.
So that whole tactic of disorienting people to get information out of them raises real concerns.
Well, now, Appendix M itself goes further than that.
If the actions don't, and I don't know how much evidence we really have about what's going on in there, but the the field manual now allows for cold water.
And and I forget what all, doesn't it?
I mean, they have cold water, but it doesn't I mean, I think it allows some sort of it doesn't allow extreme temperature manipulation, but it allows some temperature manipulation, is my understanding.
At least they're not chaining them to the wall of underground dungeons, right?
That that's as far as we know.
And again, as you said, you know, we don't really know what's going on in the CIA facilities.
So these are people who the people that we interviewed are people who are in U.S. military facilities.
And even if it is complying with Appendix M, Appendix M allows a combination of techniques that can be that can rise to the level of torture, depending on how they're used.
All right.
Now, abuse in custody aside, just the process as far as how these people are being dealt with, how close or how far outside of the rules under the Geneva Conventions and so forth is this process?
Well, you know, part of the problem is, and I think we've talked about this before, is that the government doesn't consider these prisoners of war because it's a non-international armed conflict and meaning we're at war with these insurgency groups rather than with a government.
So they consider it these to not be prisoners of war.
So they don't have the benefits of most of the Geneva Conventions.
They only have the benefit of Common Article 3, which says basically they have to be treated humanely.
So the government will, you know, they can define that however they want to.
And then they can make up all the rest.
Basically.
And actually, it's a really good point.
The argument we make in our report is that the way that they're being treated and the way that the fact that the hearings they get are basically a sham, like there's no evidence presented, they're not given lawyers to defend them, they're not allowed to see the evidence against them because it's classified.
It's kind of a joke.
And that violates basic international human rights law.
But the U.S. government's position is international human rights law does not apply to U.S. operations overseas.
So they are saying the U.S. government's position is there is no law that governs their treatment of these detainees other than Common Article 3, which is that they have to be treated humanely, however you define that.
Well, what about the Military Commissions Act that doesn't apply to this?
It doesn't, because to be to get to a military commission, you have to be charged with a crime, with a crime under the military commission.
In fact, none of these people have been charged with anything.
They're just being held under the laws of war.
So they're being held as like a potential threat.
So they're not charged with a crime.
They're not soldiers and they're not criminals.
They're just basically, well, can you differentiate this between the David Addington, John Yoo view of George Bush's power to do this same stuff?
Is there any difference?
You know, the only difference I would say is that Addington and Yoo took a more extreme view of the way you could treat these people, the sort of physical, the use of torture and waterboarding and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I guess I mean more the president's power to do it.
They're, they're legal theories about all that.
Yeah, no, that, no, I mean, that's basically that there's no, yeah, there's no real difference in terms of the government might kind of invoke a different article of the constitution now for that, for his argument, he says he's doing this under the law of war, not under, you know, his plenary power under the constitution, but it's the same idea is that they're saying they can detain anyone that they believe is working with, you know, insurgent forces against them, they're not enemy soldiers.
And there might not really even be any evidence that they're actually working with, with forces against them, but it can take a really, they don't necessarily get a real chance to defend themselves and to explain like, I didn't do any of the stuff that you're claiming, but some neighbor informed on me and said that I did that because, you know, they want my land.
I mean, they don't get an opportunity to, to really say that because they don't know who informed on them.
They don't know what the evidence is against them.
Right.
Well, you know, it's funny because just before the break, we were talking about how the state of California is going to have to release 10,000 something prisoners in order to obey a federal court order that says that they're in violation of the eighth amendment, that you can only have so many people in a cage at a time before you're basically torturing them.
Cruel and unusual punishment.
That's the ban.
I know they're not talking about the unreasonable fines.
Uh, it's, uh, uh, this is as the law applies here in America, still, at least a little bit in California, at least in this instance, uh, that's considered beyond the pale, the overcrowding in California.
So you take the flip side of that and say some guy, you know, uh, hundreds, thousands of people, uh, in solitary confinement, uh, put on the frequent flyer program and maybe sprayed down with a hose and threatened and, and whatever else, it, it may not be as bad as the Bush years, but it certainly sounds like it's beyond what the line, uh, has been drawn at here in the United States.
Oh yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, in the United States, you have a right to be charged and have a trial and have a lawyer to defend yourself.
And, you know, you have certain basic rights that, that absolutely don't apply in Afghanistan.
And the government is saying none of the rights apply.
I mean, you know, even at Guantanamo Bay, they have a right to take their case to court.
Eventually it can take years to get there, but they have the right of habeas corpus and then they can be represented by a lawyer.
They don't have any of that in Guantanamo.
And the Obama administration has very strongly insisted they have no right.
Well, at Bagram, you meant to say, I think, but, uh, well, and that's why they started shipping people to Bagram from all over the world instead of Guantanamo Bays.
They said, oh, well, if the court decided that the constitution could reach across that 90 miles to Cuba, well, then we'll just take them further.
We'll just, you know, take, you know, somebody, some Egyptian we arrest in Europe or kidnap in Europe and take him to Bagram outside the law.
Right.
I mean, they say they're not doing that anymore.
Uh, but we don't really know.
The other thing, actually, that's interesting that you mentioned that people haven't really paid attention to is when they built this new facility, this new par one, just par one detention facility, as they call it, they said they had the capacity to hold 1,100 detainees, and now they've admitted they have more than 1,700.
So, you know, we've already gone over.
Well, it's interesting.
No one's acknowledged that.
Right.
It's funny too, Daphne, because you know that if we didn't have this world empire, you and I would be on the radio talking about the terrible prison system in America and how these people need a fair hearing every once in a while.
And we got to do something about all the overcrowding and the rape and the crime and the, and the corruption and the, the contracts for slave labor.
And, and we can't even take care of our immediate business because we're stuck dealing with the prison system in Afghanistan.
And not to mention the trillions of dollars we're spending on maintaining the war and the prison system in Afghanistan.
Yeah, indeed.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time, but I thank you very much for your time as always.
It's been great.
Everybody has Daphne Aviatar, humanrightsfirst.org.
Thanks so much, Scott, for your interest.