None of Us Were Like This Before. Joshua Phillips

Чтение книги онлайн.

      The degree to which officers issued explicit orders remains uncertain. It’s possible that mid-level officers ordered some of the abuse. However, at present, there isn’t proof that high-ranking officers sanctioned abuse at Bagram. The soldiers’ lawyers did not introduce such orders as exculpatory evidence during courts-martial. Dilawar’s experience shows that directives, written or otherwise, weren’t needed to enable abuse. Officers merely had to look the other way to facilitate the abuse—and they did, according to military reports.⁵⁵ In that regard, the stories of Dilawar and Habibullah reinforce the impression that overlooking abuse can (and did) help facilitate torture just as much as issuing orders.⁵⁶ Indeed, failing to stem abuse would contribute to more abuse elsewhere during the war on terror.⁵⁷

      In the end, some military personnel felt that the intelligence collected from Bagram’s detainees during that period was dubious. According to a report on US detainee abuse in Afghanistan produced by the McClatchy Newspapers, Major Jeff Bovarnick, a legal adviser at Bagram from November 2002 to June 2003, “said in a sworn statement that of some 500 detainees he knew of who’d passed through Bagram, only about 10 were high-value targets, the military’s term for senior terrorist operatives.”⁵⁸

      There was another dimension to this story that I hadn’t fully understood until my journey to Khost: the Afghan perspective.