WASHINGTON, May 20, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) - A confidential US Army report unveiled graphic details of widespread abuse in US detention camps in Afghanistan in 2002, including the deaths of two men out of torture ordered by “young and poorly trained” investigators, according to a major US daily Friday, May 20.

The report, carried by The New York Times, came days after 16 people were killed in anti-US demonstrations triggered by another Newsweek report about the desecration of the Noble Qur’an in Guantanamo among other abuses there.

The confidential NY Times report carried the story on a detainee known only as Dilawar who brutally died at the Bagram Collection despite most of the interrogators believing he was innocent.

It also cited sworn statements to Army investigators. “Soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals.”

“They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went,” the report said.

“Another detainee was made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.”

The report said that when Dilawar was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base, for interrogation he was suffering from horrible conditions in detention.

An interpreter who was present said that Dilawar’s legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb, adding that he has been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

When he asked for a drink of water, one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle.

A sketch of former Reserve sergeant showing how Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell. (NYT)

“But first he punched a hole in the bottom so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Dilawar’s face,” said the paper, citing the interpreter who was there.

“Come on, drink!” the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. “Drink!”

The interrogators asked the guard of Dilawar to force the young man to his knees, but his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend.

After the end of the investigations, Dilawar was finally sent back to his cell and the guards were instructed only to chain him back to the ceiling without seeing a doctor.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen, said the report.

The report said that it would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail; most of the interrogators had believed Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

The report also carried the story of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse.

The report said that the harsh treatment of detainees, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.

The punishment was carried out by interrogators or police guards, and sometimes seemed to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty or both.

The NY Times said it obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military’s response to the deaths.

Although incidents of detainee abuse have been reported at Bagram 2002, American officials insisted they isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated.

And many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well treated.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded last October that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case and 15 of them were cited in the Habibullah case, the NY Times said.

In February, a Briton held for years in the US-run jails in Afghanistan and Guantanamo said his US jailers sexually taunted him and broke his skull with a rifle butt.

In June, Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled “The Road To Abu Ghraib” linking the abuse of detainees in Iraq , Afghanistan and Guantanamo to the policies adopted by US President George W. Bush in his so-called war on terror.