Did the Defense Department Stop Reporting Deaths of Detainees in U.S. Custody?

[babylonsister]

Did the Defense Department Stop Reporting Deaths of Detainees in U.S. Custody?
By Daphne Eviatar 9/4/09 4:40 PM


Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, for years tried to track the deaths of “war on terror” detainees being held in U.S. custody. The author of the book “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and America’s War on Terror,” published in 2006 by Random House, has been monitoring the role physicians and psychologists have played in government-sponsored interrogations, observing that they were often there to serve the interrogators rather than the subjects.

In the process, he came across a curious fact. About three years ago, he says, the “entire prisoner death reporting system was turned off in Afghanistan.” And in Iraq, it was “turned off” at the beginning of 2008.

Before that time, says Miles, who’s on the board of the Center for Victims of Torture, the Department of Defense issued press releases about deaths of detainees in its custody. Miles was tracking those deaths and the role of physicians for his book, which was recently updated and republished as Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors by the University of California Press. (The Pentagon never reported the deaths of detainees subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” he says — that is, those sent to other countries for interrogation, and sometimes to be tortured.) But the Pentagon did, at least, report some deaths of the prisoners it acknowledged it had in its custody.

Then “they just stopped reporting it,” says Miles. The press releases stopped.

It couldn’t be that no one died, Miles added, because “you have a certain expected death rate based on the size of the population. I’ve been able to trace all public death reports and can show when they turned them off.”

According to a draft paper he’s written, now being prepared for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics:

In May 2004, shortly after media published photographs of lethal abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, DoD disclosed 22 prisoner deaths; of which 12 (54%) were attributed to natural causes. DOD did not disclose another 67 deaths that occurred during that same period. Only 13 (15%) of the total 89 deaths were due to natural causes. By the end of 2008, 93 of 165 known decedents (56%) are unnamed. Death certificates are available for 37 (22%). Homicides and shelling of prisons are the leading causes of death. DoD has completely suppressed prisoner death reports from Afghanistan since 2004 and adopted a similar policy for Iraq in 2008.

The New York Times also reported back in 2004 that the Defense Department had provided incomplete or inaccurate information about deaths of prisoners in its custody.

more...

http://washingtonindependent.com/57869/did-defense-department-stop-reporting-deaths-of-detainees-in-u-s-custody

[lob1]

1. Not surprising. The American death count has never been accurate.

None of the mercenaries are counted, as if they don't exist. Yet they're a third or more of our fighting force.