Early Iraq Abuse Accounts Met With Silence
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By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
Detailed allegations of psychological abuse, deprivation, beatings and
deaths at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq were met by public
silence from the U.S. Army last October - six months before shocking
photographs stirred world outrage and demands for action.
At the time, one ex-prisoner sensed that
words might count for little. Instead, Rahad
Naif told a reporter, "I wish somebody could
go take a picture of Camp Bucca."
These early accounts by freed prisoners,
reported by The Associated Press last fall,
told of detainees punished by hours lying
bound in the sun; being attacked by dogs; being deprived of sufficient
water; spending days with hoods over their heads.
One told AP of seeing an elderly Iraqi woman tied up and lying in the
dust; others told of ill men dying in crowded tents.
They spoke repeatedly of being humiliated by American guards. None
mentioned the sexual humiliation seen in recently released photos, but
Arab culture might keep an Iraqi from describing such mistreatment.
In contrast to suggestions that the photos indicate isolated abuse by a
few, these Iraqis told of widespread practices in several camps that
would violate the Geneva Conventions and other human rights standards.
On Friday, in an unusual public statement, the international Red Cross
agreed, disclosing that its inspectors last year found a "broad pattern" of
abuse.
On Oct. 18, AP posed specific questions about the reported abuses to
the U.S. military command in Baghdad and the 800th Military Police
Brigade, which was in charge of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib
prison and other facilities.
The MP unit drafted responses, AP later learned, but the Baghdad
command did not release them. No explanation was given. The AP
report, published Nov. 1, cited a statement to Arab television by the MP
commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, that prisoners were treated
humanely.
Meantime, "between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib
Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant,
and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees,"
according to the report of a later Army investigation.
That Army report said the photos from Abu Ghraib dated from this period
- both before and after the AP article appeared.
The Army's report, which found that soldiers also committed "egregious
acts and grave breaches" at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, did not come
to light until they were disclosed in the May 10 issue of The New Yorker
magazine. It had been classified "secret."
That investigation was prompted by a soldier's complaint to superiors in
January about fellow guards' actions.
The half-dozen ex-prisoners interviewed by AP in October were freed
without charges after spending months in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and
the Baghdad airport's Camp Cropper.
Some Americans were humane, they said, but many were not.
"They don't have morals. They don't respect old or young. They humiliate
everybody," said Naif, 31, a Baghdad resident like the others and one of
three brothers confined.
Women guards especially were verbally abusive, with obscene invective,
"insulting our sisters and parents. It was very hard to accept," he said.
"Some are like children, showing off their muscle," his brother Hassan,
32, said of the MPs.
Last summer, when temperatures topped 120, guards
struck one man at Camp Cropper with an "electric
stick" because he was slow carrying water, and then
"tied his hands and put him in the sun for three
hours," said Ziad Tarik, 24.
This punishment in "The Garden" also was recounted
by others: being made to lie bound in the sun for hours
on a patch of sand enclosed by razor-wire, even for
such lesser infractions as shouting to the next tent or
stealing food.
They also told of beatings by guards - for example, of
an Abu Ghraib prisoner who refused to eat.
"He was stubborn, so they hit him, and he spent three
days in the hospital," Tarik said.
"They used to hit people and turn dogs loose on them,"
said Saad, 36, the third Naif brother, who spent 2 1/2
months in Abu Ghraib.
"They used to humble people by putting nylon bags over
their heads, for three days, with their hands tied up. I
know one who died because he couldn't breathe."
The U.S. military and CIA now say at
least 14 detainee deaths have been or are being
investigated.
The camps held not only men captured in the anti-U.S.
insurgency, but many others picked up by U.S. troops in
broad neighborhood sweeps, on slight suspicions or
unverified tips, or as curfew-breakers,
checkpoint-dodgers or common criminals. Up to 8,000
are believed still held.
The Naif brothers said they and neighbor Tarik were
seized by American soldiers after a nasty quarrel with
another neighbor, who had links with the U.S.
occupation and apparently denounced them as
resistance supporters. The brothers were thrown into
three separate camps.
Prisoners regularly rose up in protest or riots to
demand they be charged or freed, and sometimes to
seek better treatment for ill comrades, the men said.
"They'd turn dogs on us to put down the
demonstrations," said Ra'id Mohammed Hassan, 42.
He said he was taken to Camp Bucca after Americans
searching his car found a weapon, a common item for
Iraqis.
The ex-detainees complained they were never given
enough water for drinking and washing and at times
were denied food as punishment.
"Once we were saying prayers for the death of a
prisoner, and we were chanting, so they kept food from
us for a day and a half," Saad Naif said.
In hours of AP interviews, the Iraqis said the
Americans' treatment of women detainees and the sick
most appalled them.
Hassan Ali Muslim, 28, detained for alleged carjacking
but never charged, remembered one man being brought
into their stifling, overcrowded tent at Camp Cropper in
a sickbed. He said another died beside him.
"He was an old man. We had to line up for food, and it
was very hot and it took a very long time, and wasn't
good for sick people," Muslim said. "After the meal he
began breathing heavily, and he just died."
The men told of detainees in wheelchairs and poorly
treated diabetics, of epileptic seizures and nervous
breakdowns.
"I saw four die in our camp," Tarik said of Abu Ghraib.
Even when fellow prisoners warned of one man's
worsening condition, he said, "they said they wouldn't
take him (to a hospital) until it's serious and he's about
to die."
Saad Naif said the "worst thing" was the treatment of
women.
"Innocent women were kept for months in the same
clothes. I saw a woman about 80 years old - her hands
were tied up and she was lying in the dust," he said.
Hassan Naif recalled a day at Camp Cropper when a
man saw his sister being punished by being stretched
out bound in the sun. He angrily tried to cross the
razor wire ringing his tent, "and they shot him in the
shoulder," he said.
Saad Naif said he saw another prisoner shot dead
when he approached the wire at Abu Ghraib.
Muslim, whose father was jailed under the ousted
Baathists, said the U.S. system hardly compared with
the old regime's bloody political prisons, and he said
living conditions improved at times under the
Americans.
Camp Cropper, whose overcrowded conditions had
grown notorious, was closed Oct. 1. The secret Army
investigation, nevertheless, found that the worst
abuses continued at least into December at Abu
Ghraib.
Much of what the ex-detainees told AP meshed with
what delegates of the International Committee of the
Red Cross, the only outsiders allowed into the camps,
were said to have found on visits last year.
Those findings were confidential, but the human rights
group Amnesty International said last summer it
learned that the ICRC inspectors were finding serious
abuses, and it charged that "torture and gross abuse of
human rights" were occurring.
On Friday, the Red Cross disclosed it had repeatedly
demanded last year that U.S. authorities correct
problems in the detention centers. The Americans took
action on some issues but not others, it said.
"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not
individual acts. There was a pattern and a system,"
Pierre Kraehenbuel, the Red Cross operations director,
said in Geneva.
Inside the camps, too, appeals were made.
Saad Naif said one prominent detainee, a former Iraqi
provincial governor, urged U.S. military officers to halt
the abuses.
"He told them, `What you are doing to the Iraqi people
will turn against you,' and that they must win the
support of the people, not the opposite," Naif said. "They
told him to mind his own business."
___
Associated Press Special Correspondent Charles J.
Hanley has covered the Iraq crisis since mid-2002 and
most recently reported from Iraq in the fall of 2003.
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