Media stampede? Oh, how clueless. >>Iraq abuse allegations multiply
More allegations of mistreatment by US and British prison staff in Iraq have
emerged in the international media.
The alleged abuses include the stripping and beating of a 12-year-old girl and
an imam being forced to wear women's underwear and locked up with female
prisoners.
According to Italy's La Repubblica newspaper, a group of Sunni clerics is
compiling a list of complaints from inmates at Baghdad's infamous Abu Ghraib
jail.
The Council of the Ulema is about to make its findings public, the paper said.
The acts described by the alleged victims seem to have one trait in common - all
involve some form of humiliation or degradation, often of a sexual nature.
Taboo
Several former prisoners reported having been forced to strip and wear female
underwear in front of fellow prisoners, according to Le Repubblica.
I stood naked while they were making fun of my
embarrassment
Former Abu Ghraib inmate
Other alleged abuses include forcing prisoners to simulate homosexual acts - a taboo
in the Arab world.
A 30-year-old imam from Baghdad was arrested after urging people to expel
occupying forces in his sermon, La Repubblica reported.
He was taken to Abu Ghraib prison where he was questioned by female guards.
"They told me to take off my clothes. I stripped down to my underpants but they
shouted I had to take those off, too," the imam is quoted as saying.
"I stood there, naked. I was ashamed, while they were making fun of my
embarrassment.
"At that point, one of the wardens took something red out of a bag. It was very
small panties. 'You can put that on if you are ashamed' she said."
The imam was then put into a cell with 16 women, some of whom knew him as their
spiritual leader, La Repubblica says.
Competition
The inmates at Abu Ghraib reportedly include children.
Suhaib Baz, a journalist for the Arab-language television station al-Jazeera, told
Britain's Independent newspaper that he saw a little girl being stripped and beaten at
the jail.
"She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her," Mr Baz
says.
He added that a teenage boy was made to carry two jerry cans full of water, and an
American soldier would beat him with a stick if he stopped.
The boy eventually collapsed and the guards stripped him and poured cold water
over him, Mr Baz says.
"When he recovered, he saw his father dressed in women's underwear and the
Americans laughing at him."
Mr Baz also claimed that guards at the prison would take gruesome pictures of the
abuses in some sort of bizarre competition.
He said that winning pictures would be used as computer screensavers by the
troops.
'Torture room'
A prisoner released from Abu Ghraib earlier this week told La Repubblica that
inmates were kept naked all the time and that air conditioning would be switched on
in the winter "to freeze us to death".
"Every evening the soldiers would tell me that they were going to pour hot water and
sand into my ears, and sometimes they did. It turned out to be a cement-like
substance, and the pain was unbearable," he said.
"I screamed, I cried, and they pretended not to hear and kept on pouring water and
sand in my ears through a funnel."
In an unrelated interview to al-Jazeera, Hudhayfah al-Shabib, a Jordanian student
who spent some time at the prison, described similar practices to which he was
exposed during his detention.
"They would interrogate us for 15 minutes and then move us to the torturing room.
"There they would pour cold water on us and put us naked in front of an air
conditioner". <<
news.bbc.co.uk
This is not anything I admire, or respect, or consider to be even vaguely tolerable. |
