"Wussification"

The Atlantic Correspondents blog has a chilling post by Alex Gibney, who made the film "Taxi to the Dark Side" about an Afghan taxi driver who died in American custody at Bagram. He is responding to the way in which some pundits have attempted to equate treatment of detainees with harmless fraternity hijinks.

Well, Ms. Coulter, work on this: is murder a frat prank?

There has been a lot of arcane talk about the memos produced by the Office of Legal Counsel about specific "no-touch" torture techniques which, out-of-context, can sound harmless, if a bit weird. (In one of Office of Legal Counsel memos written by Stephen Bradley, he notes that, while it's OK to strip a detainee naked and make him wear a diaper, one must be careful not to chafe the skin with the Velcro straps when taking them on and off.)

What has been mostly missing from the recent debate about detainee abuse is that over 100 detainees died in custody during the war on terror. Nearly half of those deaths have been classified as homicides. For all sorts of reasons, it's worth looking at one case in particular. It's the story of Dilawar, a 22-year old taxi driver whose murder was at the center of my film, "Taxi to the Dark Side."

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What could have caused such trauma? A criminal investigation revealed that the Military Police at Bagram had pummeled Dilawar's legs with peroneal strikes, an "approved" control measure that the MPs had learned one day in their guard training. It involved slamming their knees into the nerve endings on Dilawar's thighs. "It drops 'em pretty good," said one MP.

At first, soldiers told me, they used strikes to control the 122-pound Dilawar because he would often try to take off his hood, perhaps because he suffered from severe asthma. Later, as Dilawar continued to moan and cry out for his mother and father - which MPs, who couldn't understand him, may have mistaken for the signs of a troublemaker - the guards would pummel him with knee strikes over and over again, just to shut him up, or sometimes, for their amusement, just to hear him scream "allah."

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Now, let's move on to the results of Dilawar's interrogation. After all, the "torture-is-tough-but-necessary" crowd maintains that torture always delivers the goods. Let's see what actionable intelligence was obtained: After the third day of trying to find out about the rocket attack, Dilawar's interrogators concluded that he was utterly innocent. Yet the beatings continued for another two days until Dilawar was dead.

To cover-up the fact that the Army had murdered an innocent man, the Army sent his passengers (who had also been incarcerated at Bagram) to Guantanamo. There they sat until March 2004, when military officials concluded that the unlucky passengers "posed no threat" to American forces and sent them, without explanation, back home to the peanut fields of Yakubi. Upon further investigation, it turned out that Afgans who had originally detained Dilawar and his passengers were the very ones who were actually responsible for the rocket attacks on Camp Salerno. They had a record of arresting innocents, proclaiming them guilty and turning them over to US troops in order to curry favor with the Americans.

The level of the public debate is sickening. I'm glad Alex Gibney is pointing that out and moving the focus in a more constructive and meaningful direction. The entire film can be view online. It is heartbreaking but necessary.