Capt. Roger Hill and NATO’s 96-Hour Rule

Last week, CNN ran this story about US Army Capt. Roger Hill, who, along with other members of his unit were charged with detainee abuse, including a mock execution, war crimes, dereliction of duty and other serious charges.

I initially broke the story in The Washington Post back in Dec. 2008.

The circumstances surrounding Capt. Hill’s case are extraordinary, but too complex to explain here in great detail. The short version is that Capt. Hill and his men illegally interrogated a group of Afghans working on his base in Wardak province. The Afghans–Capt. Hill’s personal translator among them–were spies for the Taliban, according to classified documents.  Because the evidence against the detainees was classified, Capt. Hill could not turn it over to the Afghan police and the spies would therefore  have to be released.  His only choice was to extract confessions from the Afghans, which he did through illegal means.

The CNN piece focuses on the 96-hour rule, a NATO regulation which stipulates that detainees must be either charged or released after 96 hours of detention. Had the 96-hour rule not been in effect, none of this would have happened to Capt. Hill and his men.

While my story in The Post was sympathetic to Capt. Hill–or at least empathized with the impossible situation he and his men faced–I still believe that  the 96-hour rule is a good thing.

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No government should be allowed to detain people indefinitely without charge. That is a form of oppression and I find it abhorrent in any context.

In this case, the problem isn’t the 96-hour rule, but rather a failure of Capt. Hill’s superiors to intervene and have the detainees brought to Bagram for questioning. This happens all the time in Afghanistan and it has never been made clear to me why these particular Afghans had to be turned over to the police.

Capt. Hill and his executive officer repeatedly asked their colonel for permission to transfer these prisoners into a higher level of US/NATO custody and these requests were denied. The men in Capt. Hill’s unit insisted that there was a personal conflict between the colonel and Capt. Hill and that’s why the colonel left them all high-and-dry. When I interviewed the colonel he denied this.

I’m not calling anybody a liar, but I can’t believe that something couldn’t have been done to prevent this chain of events from unfolding.

Either way, the 96-hour rule, or one like it, should be in place for all coalition forces in Afghanistan.

On a personal note, Capt. Hill and those of his men that I had a chance to interview are some of the most sincere people I have ever interviewed. They did what they did out of love for each other as well as rage for their dead comrades, men who died gruesome deaths because of information gleaned by spies in their midst.

I have never been an apologist for Capt. Hill and his men. What they did was wrong and I said so in The Post. But they are not and were not monsters. Rather, they were pushed into a corner by forces beyond their control in a war that has far more shades of grey than black or white.

Read The Post piece and tell me what you would have done in the same circumstance.