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Cases draw less focus than Abu Ghraib scandal

One detainee had already died when the directive came from a legal adviser at a U.S.-run detention facility in Afghanistan to the commander of the military police unit responsible for guarding prisoners: Tell your soldiers to stop "hanging and hitting" the detainees. That advice went unheeded, according to a previously undisclosed report by Army investigators. And within a 10-day period in early December 2002, two Afghan prisoners were dead after being suspended by their arms from a ceiling and allegedly beaten by U.S. soldiers so severely that in each case, investigators wrote, if the prisoner had survived, "both legs would have had to be amputated." Medical examiners classified the deaths as homicides, among the first of about a dozen suspicious detainee deaths investigated in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past two years. In one case, an Iraqi man was allegedly forced by his U.S. captors to jump into the Tigris River, where he drowned. In another, an autopsy found a broken bone in the neck of a detainee dragged by his throat from a holding cell in southern Iraq and found dead hours later. The little-noticed detainee deaths drew increased scrutiny this year after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal ignited international outrage. But the death investigations have drawn less attention, and lesser punishments, than the photographed humiliation and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib - even though at least one case involved some of the same figures. [more]