Emily Bazelon (Mother Jones): From Bagram to Abu Ghraib

[Jack Rabbit]

From Mother Jones (March/April 2005 Issue)
Posted online Friday February 18

From Bagram to Abu Ghraib
For nearly three years, U.S. military authorities have been investigating evidence of torture at American prisons in Afghanistan. But instead of disciplining those involved, the Pentagon sent them to Iraq.
By Emily Bazelon

HUSSAIN YOUSSOUF MUSTAFA stepped off the bus outside a law office on a busy street in Amman, Jordan, on a bright day in November. The 51-year-old wore a white kaffiyeh and a white robe with square-rimmed glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard. Inside, he sat down at a table that faced a map of the Middle East, and over eight hours and two days answered questions about his two years in American captivity.

Mustafa, who is Palestinian, said he earned a master’s degree in Islamic law in Saudi Arabia, but as a young teacher he had trouble making a living in the West Bank. In 1985, he heard that Pakistan was setting up schools for Afghans who were fleeing the Soviet occupation. Mustafa and his wife moved to Peshawar, a city of 1 million near the Pakistani-Afghan border, and for 17 years they lived there and raised eight children, with Mustafa teaching Arabic and the tenets of Islam at a government-run school.

After the American invasion of Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, Mustafa said, Peshawar became tense, with periodic police roundups of suspected militants, although he had no run-ins with the authorities and felt no threat from them. Then, on May 25, 2002, at about 8 p.m., their doorbell rang. Mustafa asked Ibrahim, his youngest son, to answer the door. The boy yelled, “Police!” and ran back into the house, several Pakistani police officers behind him with guns drawn. They took Mustafa in for questioning along with two of his sons, 18-year-old Mohammed and 23-year-old Abdullah. The young men were released later that night. But their father was blindfolded, tightly shackled, and flown to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Built in 1976 for Soviet troops, Bagram is now a heavily guarded U.S. military compound an hour’s drive from Kabul, on a desert plain beneath the snow-peaked Panjshir mountains. When he arrived, Mustafa was publicly stripped naked—a humiliation for a devout Muslim—and put into a crowded pen with more than a dozen others. A barrel in a corner served as a toilet. Mustafa stayed in the cell for about two months. From time to time, American soldiers would take one of the detainees away for interrogations. Mostly, Mustafa said, his questioners wanted to know about Al Qaeda. He told them he didn’t know anything about the group.

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