Ghani seeks details about CIA-tortured Afghans

KABUL (Pajhwok): President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday slammed a report from the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as “shocking” and demanded to know how many Afghans were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

The United States released the long-awaited report detailing how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employed extreme interrogation methods on suspected terrorists following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a lengthy summary Tuesday of the CIA’s interrogation techniques, including confinement in small places, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

The report said the agency also used “ice baths”; “rectal rehydration,” a form of feeding through the rectum; and threats that suspects’ relatives would be harmed. One suspected extremist froze to death while in captivity.

It said the interrogations were “far more brutal” than the CIA had described them and that the agency had “misled” Congress and the White House about its activities.

President Ghani told a press conference in Kabul he had studied the 499-page report word by word and it belonged to the era between 2002 and 2008.

He said the report was shocking and the CIA torture “violated all accepted norms of human rights in the world“. The Afghan government condemned the methods, he added, remarking that such brutal techniques had not been employed in any country.

“When a person is inhumanly treated, he reacts inhumanly and such reactions foment trouble for all,” the president reasoned, saying the reported showed some Afghans had also been subjected to the shameful acts, but their exact figures were not known.

Names of some special people have been mentioned in a list in the report, but their nationalities have not been revealed.

“We want to know the names and number of the Afghans subjected to the techniques in order to work for their rights,” the president said.

He noted the most outrageous aspect of the document was that some of those subjected to the brutal actions had been found innocent. Subjecting innocent people to such actions is against Islamic beliefs and human rights.

Ghani said he had phoned and discussed the revelations with former president Hamid Karzai, who is currently in China on a private trip. He said the revelations were initial and once further revelations were made, they would investigate them and announce a national stance in response.

Under the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the United States, the president continued, the Americans could not detain Afghans or run a jail in Afghanistan after 2014.

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