Salon.com > Britta Sandberg

Detainee abuse continues at Bagram

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:22:00 +0000

The day that Raymond Azar was taken by force to Bagram was a quiet day in Kabul. There were no attacks and the sun was shining.

Azar, who is originally from Lebanon, is the manager of a construction company. He was on his way to Camp Eggers, the American military base near the presidential palace, when 10 armed FBI agents suddenly surrounded him.

The men, all wearing bulletproof vests, put him in handcuffs, tied him up and pushed him into an SUV. Two hours later, they unloaded Azar at the Bagram military prison 31 miles northeast of Kabul.

As Azar later testified, he was forced to sit for seven hours, his hands and feet tied to a chair. He spent the night in a cold metal container, and he received no food for 30 hours. He claimed that U.S. military officers showed him photos of his wife and four children, telling him that unless he cooperated he would never see his family again. He also said that he was photographed while naked and then given a jumpsuit to wear.

A need for this sort of place

New evidence of a secret torture prison

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:40:00 +0000

Only a smattering of clouds dotted the sky over Szymany on March 7, 2003, and visibility was good. A light breeze blew from the southeast as a plane approached the small military airfield in northeastern Poland, and the temperature outside was 2 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit). At around 4 p.m., the Gulfstream N379P -- known among investigators as the "torture taxi" -- touched down on the landing strip.

On board was the most important prisoner the U.S. had been able to produce in the war on terror: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, also known as "the brains" behind al-Qaida. This was the man who had presented Osama bin Laden with plans to attack the U.S. with commercial jets. He personally selected the pilots and supervised preparations for the attacks. Eighteen months later, on March 1, 2003, Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces and brought to Afghanistan two days later. Now the CIA was flying him to a remote area in Poland's Masuria region. The prisoner slept during the flight from Kabul to Szymany, for the first time in days, as he later recounted:

The leader of the Pakistani Taliban vows to strike America

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:44:00 +0000

Last Thursday, at 7 a.m., Baitullah Mehsud dialed the telephone number of Alamgir Bhittani, a radio correspondent in the Tank region of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. The voice of "Bait," as the Pashtuns call the feared leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was soft and flattering.

He had called the journalist to boast about his exploits, telling him that his fighters were the ones who had created a blood bath the previous day at a police academy near the northeastern Pakistani city of Lahore. He told Bhittani that he had ordered his men to "eliminate" as many supporters of what he called the traitorous Pakistani regime as possible.

Wearing stolen uniforms, the group of 10 terrorists had gained access to the training camp to kill recruits. The attackers took hostages and hid in one of the buildings. Helicopters and elite army and police units appeared on the scene. In the end, three of the terrorists blew themselves up, and the rest were arrested. When the blood bath was over, eight police recruits were lying dead in the barrack's yard.

Turning their backs on jihad

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:45:00 +0000

Noman Benotman walks into a restaurant on Park Lane, the exclusive, minimalist sort of place that is currently all the rage in London. People in business suits converse in hushed tones at nearby tables. Benotman, wearing an orange polo shirt and a gray checked blazer, fits in perfectly.

Benotman, a 41-year-old man from Libya, was once a jihadist. He fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and it was in those days, which some would later romanticize as heroic, that he met Osama bin Laden. Benotman says that he was once adept at using an AK-47, and that he remembers making out the faces of Soviet helicopter pilots before shooting them down.

After the Soviet army withdrew in disgrace from Kabul and Kandahar, Benotman returned to his native Libya, where he became one of the leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The group, several hundred strong, sought to overthrow the regime of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, which they believed was corrupt and un-Islamic. Before Sept. 11, 2001, Benotman was an important figure in the expanding global network of terrorism.

Today he sits in a London restaurant and orders an espresso with a glass of water from a waiter dressed in a white uniform. He speaks with a flawless British accent.