Remember Taxi to the Dark Side? The death of Dilowar?

Last edited Thu Jun 5, 2014, 05:38 PM - Edit history (1)

All this was done in our names, except most of us only heard later on. I was reminded of this by a post I linked to from Daily Kos about Bergdahl

The video at the link below is still available, I believe it was from 2002 by Robert Greenwald.

It's just about 3 minutes, but the rest is available at cost I imagine.

Taxi to the Dark Side and the 2002 death of taxi-driver Dilawar in Bagram.

From Brave New Films:

Jonathan 'DJK' Kim reviews the documentary 'Taxi to the Dark Side'.

Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary 'Taxi to the Dark Side' tells the story of the Bush administration's torture policy through the case of Dilawar, an Afghani taxi driver with no ties to Al Qaeda who was tortured to death while in US custody at Bagram prison.

It's from a post of mine, so I give permission for extra paragraphs from another source.

"Oath Betrayed"..The 2002 death of Dilawar. From our early days of torture in Bagram.

Dilawar was a twenty-two-year-old farmer and taxi driver, whom American soldiers tortured to death over five days at Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan in December 2002. When the soldiers pulled a sandbag over his head, Dilawar complained that he could not breathe. He was then shackled and suspended from his arms for hours, denied water, and beaten so severely that his legs would have been amputated had he survived. When he was beaten with a baton, he would cry "Allah, Allah!," which guards found so amusing that they beat him some more just to hear him cry. During his final interrogation, soldiers told the delirious, injured prisoner that he would get medical attention after the session. Instead, he was returned to a cell and chained to the ceiling. Several hours later, a physician found him dead. By then, the interrogators had concluded that Dilawar was innocent and had simply been picked up after driving his new taxi by the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dilawar's death was predictable and preventable. The counterintelligence team was inexperienced; only two of its thirteen soldiers had ever conducted interrogations before arriving in Afghanistan. The officers knew that President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld had ruled that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Afghanistan. The interrogation policies were unclear. The base commander had ignored Red Cross protests about the treatment of prisoners, including the practice of suspending them. Army and intelligence officers who knew of the ongoing pattern of abuses at the Bagram facility did not intervene to stop them. In fact, another prisoner, Habibullah, had died at the same facility under similar circumstances six days before Dilawar's death.

An autopsy on December 13 found that Dilawar's death was a homicide, caused by extensive and severe "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease" (inexplicably, "coronary artery disease" is typed on the death certificate in a different font). The Pentagon reported that the prisoner died of natural causes. Later, a coroner testified that Dilawar's legs were "pulpified" and that the body looked as if it had been "run over by a truck." Soldiers delivered the body and an English-language death certificate to his wife and two daughters in January 2003. The family could not read English.

Send young men who are sensitive in nature into this culture of cruelty to fellow man...results won't be pretty.