Afghanistan detainee homicides 'below the radar'

The Baltimore Sun has published a long piece about the deaths of detainees in custody at Bagram Airbase outside of Kabul, Afghanistan. The author links the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, responsible for the brutal interrogations in Bagram, to the abuses committed in Abu Ghraib. In fact the 519th served at the Iraqi prison in late 2003, when most of the abuses by military police Army reservists occurred.

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. [...]

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.