American torture must be investigated

The recent deaths of two individuals while being interrogated in American custody in Afghanistan must be independently investigated, says the Medical Foundation.

United States Officials have recently confirmed that the deaths of 22-year-old Dilawar and 30-year-old Mullah Habibullah at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan are being treated as "homicides". A "global response team" from their Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington has already conducted autopsies, and the US insists a full investigation is underway.

While welcoming this response, the Medical Foundation is not satisfied that the US authorities are doing enough to dispel deep disquiet about the interrogation methods allegedly being used by security forces at Bagram and other interrogation centres worldwide, some of them secret.

"The Medical Foundation along with other UK-based human rights organisations, has been pressing the US Government for many months to make a high level statement renouncing torture," says Director of Public Affairs at the Medical Foundation, Sherman Carroll (MBE). "There must be a lead from the top.”

This issue has a short and ignoble history, he says. In October 2001 the Washington Post reported that FBI agents, off the record, were prepared to justify the use of torture against terrorist suspects. There was a ripple of justifications for torture from US commentators and academics, most notably a call for "judicial warrants to torture” by Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.

"The exercise appeared to be intended to prepare the public for a dirty war,” says Mr Carroll. In December 2002 five Washington Post reporters, including Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, compiled a report citing CIA agents who, again off the record, said that actual ill-treatment ("torture-lite") was being used at Bagram.

"We now have the deaths of two young men in detention, both of whom died in December. Mr Dilawar died on December 10, the day commemorating the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, championed by the US since 1948.”

Mr Carroll says the specific allegations about deaths at Bagram should be investigated by independent forensic pathologists.

"All detainees there should have access to delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who are currently denied access to the upper floor of the interrogation centre,” he says.