Salon.com > James Meek

New claims of detainee torture

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 17:45:00 +0000

New evidence has emerged that U.S. forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse, taking "trophy photographs" of detainees and carrying out rape and sexual humiliation. Documents obtained by the Guardian contain evidence that such abuses took place in the main detention center at Bagram, near the capital Kabul, as well as at a smaller U.S. installation near the southern city of Kandahar. The documents also indicate that U.S. soldiers covered up abuse in Afghanistan and in Iraq -- even after the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light last year.

A thousand pages of evidence from U.S. Army investigations released to the American Civil Liberties Union after a long legal battle, and made available to the Guardian, show that an Iraqi detained at Tikrit, Iraq, in September 2003 was forced to withdraw his report of abuse after soldiers told him he would be held indefinitely.

Meanwhile, photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing U.S. soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid "another public outrage," the documents show.

In America’s secret prison network

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:55:00 +0000

A man is walking alone along a mountain path in the darkness. He is carrying a suitcase. He seems frightened, tired and confused. He has long hair and a long beard, but they are untidy, as if he did not grow them voluntarily. He turns a bend and meets three men carrying Kalashnikovs.

The man shows them his passport. It indicates that he is a German citizen, born in Lebanon, called Khaled el-Masri. Using poor English, he tells them that he does not know where he is. They tell him that he is on the Albanian border, close to Serbia and Macedonia and that he is there illegally, since he doesn't have an Albanian stamp in his passport.

The story that el-Masri tells them by way of explanation, on this evening in late May 2004, is extraordinary: a story of how an unemployed German car salesman from the town of Ulm went on a New Year's holiday to Macedonia, was seized by Macedonian police at the border, held incommunicado for weeks without charge, then beaten, stripped, shackled and blindfolded and flown to a jail in Afghanistan, run by Afghans but controlled by Americans. Five months after first being seized, he says, still with no explanation or charge, he was flown back to Europe and dumped in an unknown country that turned out to be Albania.

“I wish I could fly 24 hours a day”

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 15:52:00 +0000

Just after 4 p.m. Monday, with the shadows already lengthening, the ash-gray form of a U.S. Navy Seahawk helicopter was thudding at speed between the peaks of the forested mountain range that divides the eastern and western sides of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

On board were four aircrew; Arista Idris, an Indonesian worker from the International Organization for Migration; two journalists; and 1,000 pounds of boxed biscuits and fresh water. The helicopter was one of a dozen from the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln being used to shuttle supplies from Banda Aceh airport to the dozens of devastated, cut-off remnants of towns struck by the Boxing Day tsunami.

Crossing the ridge, the aircraft began sledding downward sharply toward the narrow strip of coast worst affected by the disaster. There were signs of life below, even motorbikes moving along the fragments of coast road that escaped destruction.

Some sights were deceptive. An expanse of tall green-fringed palms turned out to conceal the sinister blanket of salty gray mud that has devoured the coastland like mold. The surf washing mildly over the boundaries of old rice fields looked as if it was there to stay: The area's very maps will need to be redrawn.

Reporting on a savage war

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 14:34:00 +0000

Anna Politkovskaya was born into Soviet high society -- the kind of privileged, metropolitan elite that knew abroad better than it knew the factories of the Urals, and whose children were guaranteed comfortable jobs in the rambling bureaucracies of Moscow.

Half a life later, in her 40s and a mother of two children, Politkovskaya found herself alone at night in the Chechen hills, fleeing through the darkness. She was running from the Russian security service, the FSB, which wanted to arrest her, but out there in the highlands of a lawless region steeped in bloodshed, she could have fallen victim to anyone or anything: Chechen bandits, Russian or Chechen government death squads, a broken neck. It was Europe, in 2002.

"I walked the whole night," she says. "I wanted to stay alive! It was terrifying. I reached the [Chechen] village of Stary Atagi at dawn. I stayed there for a day and a night, keeping my head down ..." She talks about it for a while, then seems to check herself, feeling perhaps that telling a stranger about one of the numerous occasions in her career as a journalist that she faced a threat of imprisonment or serious harm is irrelevant to the serious business of reporting. "These are just details," she says, finally.

Get a life

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 13:54:00 +0000

It is getting dark in Aden, and Theguardian, trailing a long sword through the dirt on the edge of a mean village of barns and lean-tos, is fed up and a little bored. The rough tracks through the trees are littered with the corpses of goblins which Theguardian has slain for want of anything else to do. In truth, they are easy kills, and slaying anyone does not correspond to good journalistic practice. But Theguardian, my avatar, has spent a real hour in a nonexistent world with more than four million paying residents, and nobody has been willing to talk to him so far.

Broad-shouldered men with jackboots and flowing capes dash across the mud. Barbie-doll elven women in pink miniskirts and bra tops loiter by the woodsheds. Each of these electronic incarnations on the screen represents an actual person somewhere in the world. The real individual could be anywhere on the globe. Here, they are all Adenites.