Just Another Harmless "Fraturnity Prank", No Doubt

There's a story in the NY Times from a leaked 2000 page Army investigative report into deaths at a prison camp in Afghanistan. It makes for some very difficult reading, or at least it did for me. The utter callousness the military showed for the lives of their prisoners just floors me. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
[skip two paragraphs]
At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen.

Deeper in the story it explains that a popular form of physical abuse at the Bagram Collection Point (BCP), where this took place, was the "common peroneal strike", a potentially disabling blow given to the side of the leg just above the knee. When Mr. Dilawar cried out "Allah" upon being given one of these, his captors found it so amusing that they came by and gave him, by one guard's estimate, at least 100 of these over a 24 hour period, just to hear him cry out. The coroner that did the autopsy said the tissues in his leg had been "pulpified", much as if he had been run over by a bus. That was the coroner's simile, by the way, not mine.

The best part of this whole story? Are you ready for this? His captors were pretty well convinced that he was innocent.