no one helped me.”
Khandan was hung by his wrists for days and lowered for two or three hours a day for interrogation. Soldiers lowered him so he could relieve himself and then, he said, they would strike him and roll him down a flight of stairs. Khandan soon feared the bathroom and reasoned it would be safer to consume less food and water. After three days he stopped eating and drinking. Eventually a soldier pleaded with him to stop fasting and assured him that he would be able to use the bathroom safely.
Many of his fellow detainees could no longer control their bowels, and the prison began to smell of human waste. Khandan saw flecks of dried blood on the floor whenever guards removed his hood to give him water. It seemed that some prisoners had sustained grave injuries from their detention in Bagram. One of them was Habibullah—sometimes referred to as Mullah Habibullah—the brother of a Taliban commander from Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province.11
During his detention, Khandan heard guards tussling with Habibullah. Other prisoners heard Habibullah exchanging shouts with the guards, and then they heard soft thuds—what seemed like body blows. Next they heard what seemed like sputtering sounds coming from Habibullah. And then silence.
Habibullah died from his injuries on December 4, 2002.
The interrogations did not stop, and the soldiers resumed their routines. Prisoners once again heard the standard battery of questions in the interrogation room: How long have you known Osama bin Laden? How many times did you meet him? Where are the Taliban commanders? Who did you work for? How long have you supported al Qaeda?
Over time, prisoners grew increasingly weary and less articulate.
There were also misunderstandings during interrogations because Bagram’s Afghan translators had difficulty understanding the prisoners from Khost.
“All the translators had problems with us because of our accent,” said Parkhudin.12
Some troops believed detainees were purposely confusing interrogators and evading questions by feigning miscommunication.13
Once again Dilawar pleaded with his captors.
“I’m just a taxi driver,” he said. “The only reason that they arrested me was because of the stabilizer they found in my car. That is why they brought me here.”
“He was crying,” recalled Khandan. “It was all because of the pain, and he was saying ‘Oh, my mother. Oh my God. Oh, I’m about to die.’ ”
But no one heeded his words.
And soon Dilawar, too, succumbed to his injuries.
Word about Dilawar’s death gradually percolated into Afghan governmental channels. Afghan officials puzzled over how to convey the news to his family and how to return his body to Khost. Eventually a government worker who knew about Dilawar contacted his uncles.
“My family, my uncles, they didn’t let me know,” said Shapoor. “They just went to Kabul by themselves and brought the body.”
Dilawar’s body traveled from Bagram, between family houses, until it reached Yakubi. At last, his uncles broke the news to his father, and the family crumpled in sorrow.
Dilawar’s prized Toyota sat in front of the family house, and his mother wept whenever she saw it. Bits of shattered glass still encrusted the edges of the windows. Shapoor eventually sold it for $1,000 and used the money for Dilawar’s funeral ceremony.
Since then, said Shapoor, whenever Dilawar’s parents heard his name “they would get very weak, and I had to take them to see a doctor.”
His mother even developed a respiratory condition from the grief, said Shapoor. Dilawar’s five-year-old daughter, Rashida, understood her father had been captured and killed, but no one could make sense of it. No one understood what anyone would want with Dilawar, the most unassuming member of the family. All they had were documents that established he had been in US custody.
Nearly a year after their arrest, US authorities cleared Parkhudin and Zakim Khan of all charges, allowing them to return home. Shortly after they arrived in Khost, they traveled to visit Dilawar’s parents.
Dilawar’s mother pleaded to hear what happened to her son. The released detainees could tell that Dilawar’s death had already exacted a devastating toll on his family, and they didn’t want to add to their grief. They simply couldn’t bring themselves to convey the truth about Dilawar’s suffering to his parents. Parkhudin insisted “there was no punishment at all … the Americans did not beat him and they did not beat us.” Maybe Dilawar was sick, said Parkhudin to his parents, and perhaps he had a health problem that led to his death.
“I told them that Bagram was a comfortable place, and the Americans were very nice people.”
At the Khost prison, where Wahid and I interviewed Parkhudin, two bearded Afghan guards with narrow faces and chiseled cheeks sat on opposite sides of the room and listened to Parkhudin unpack his experiences. It took him several hours to describe the ways in which American guards and interrogators ratcheted up pressure with pain and humiliation, and what he told Dilawar’s family about how the US military treated them. After he finished his story, the guards grimaced and looked puzzled; their eyes turned sullen. They seemed bewildered by the events that their American counterparts were involved in.
For days, Wahid and I listened to the events that befell the young taxi driver and heard other former detainees catalog their own experiences in US custody.
During the evenings we sat underneath a sheltered veranda at the Governor’s Guesthouse, lounging on long burgundy velvet cushions and sipping tea as the sun set. Wahid worked for hours, translating the events from Bagram and Guantanamo. He was groggy from sleeplessness; his nights were filled with vivid nightmares of lunging dogs and menacing figures.
“I just keep thinking …” he mused. “If they can do this to a taxi driver—a nobody just carrying an electrical stabilizer—and they can capture, and then kill him … then they can do this to anyone.”
Dilawar’s story, like others I encountered in Afghanistan and the Middle East, was an exception, I explained to Wahid. True, there were several documented cases of US torture in recent years, but that didn’t represent how most US forces behaved. I couldn’t gauge whether Wahid genuinely accepted this. And it was hard to explain why US forces turned to abuse, and how it became so aggressive that they would take the lives of Dilawar and Habibullah.
I told Wahid about one common explanation: Bush officials drafted memos that sanctioned coercive interrogation techniques for the military, and those practices spread first to Guantanamo, then to Abu Ghraib, and from there leached into other parts of Iraq. But this account could not be used to explain the torture of Dilawar and Habibullah. Like other prisoners who had been abused by the US military in 2002, their experience preceded the memos.
Due to legal decisions drafted by the Bush administration during early 2002 prisoners were regarded as “enemy combatants,” and many US troops understood that al Qaeda and Taliban detainees weren’t entitled to the minimum standard for humane treatment afforded in the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article Three.14 But the other memos pertaining to coercive interrogation probably had far less influence on troops—especially early on.
In August 2002, Jay Bybee, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel, signed off on a memo to provide the CIA with the legal framework for harsh interrogation. That memo, often called “the Bybee memo”
