A NEW chapter of horror has opened in the brutal treatment of prisoners by American guards and interrogators, this time in Afghanistan.

A leaked 2,000-page report into the deaths of two detainees details systematic and routine mistreatment at the Bagram military base, 40 miles (64km) north of Kabul.

Each man had spent most of his five days’ captivity shackled to the ceiling or wall of his cell, a technique that has since been labelled by the US military as a criminal assault. They were also subjected to relentless beatings, particularly to their legs, which coroners blamed for their deaths.

In one case, the guards and interrogators believed that their prisoner was not guilty of the assault on an American base for which he was blamed.

But the mistreatment appeared to be habitual, the work of young, ill-trained and bored recruits prone to violence. Many of the individuals involved in the two cases in December 2002 and January 2003 were redeployed to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. They included one interrogator known variously as “Monster” and “the King of Torture”. At Abu Ghraib he was fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning.

The US military’s response has been slow and, in contrast to the Abu Ghraib prison guards charged and sentenced in public view, guarded.

For months after the deaths military spokesmen insisted that they had been because of natural causes even though the coroner in each case had ruled them homicides. In October 2004 the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command found probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted men and women with criminal offences surrounding one of the cases, that of a 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar.

Fifteen of the same group were also found liable in the other, that of Habibullah, the brother of a former Taleban commander. None has so far been convicted. Only seven have been charged, four of them last week, even though the two men died more than two years ago.

The men and women involved said they believed that they were operating according to guidelines set in Washington, where President Bush had ruled that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda or terrorist detainees. Horrific details of the two men’s deaths are spelt out in an army criminal investigation report leaked to The New York Times by a military official unhappy with the Pentagon’s response.

Habibullah was taken to Bagram on December 30, 2002, where he was reported by an American doctor to be in good health. He was swiftly marked down as unco-operative, and shackled by his wrists to the wire-mesh ceiling over the cell.

During the next few days he was severely beaten on the head, chest and legs. The guards used a technique they had been taught, the disabling “common peroneal strike”, or sharp blow to the side of the leg just above the knee. Ali Baryalai, one interrogator, said that Habibullah often did not answer the interrogators’ questions because he did not understand them.

After two days of beatings and being shackled to the ceiling by the wrists, Habibullah was unable to bend his right leg and his foot was swollen. He could not bend his knees to sit in a chair for questioning and was allowed to sit on the floor.

The next day he was found in his cell slumped to one side with his tongue sticking out.

Habibullah, who was a combative detainee, often spitting at the guards, was found dead in his cell on his fifth day at Bagram. A coroner said that the likely cause of death was a blood clot caused by the severe beating to his legs, which travelled to his heart.

Most of the soldiers involved were from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which was bolstered by six Arabic speakers from the Utah National Guard. Only two of the group had ever questioned a real prisoner. “There was nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation,” Staff Sergeant Steven Loring told investigators.

Dilawar was taken to Bagram the day that Habibullah died. He died after five days of similar treatment. The medical examiner who checked his body said that the tissue in the young man’s legs had “basically been pulpified”.

It emerged later that the guards did not believe that Dilawar was guilty of what he had been accused. They were right. He and three other men in his taxi had been turned in by a warlord seeking to curry favour with the Americans. The other three spent 15 months in Guantanamo Bay before being released.

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