<font color=brown>Well, as it turns out.......the tortures were definitely widespread. Why the hell didn't the Red Cross do something? They knew.
Why is the WA Post suddenly coming out with all this $h*t. They just found out this week???? I doubt it.......they knew and sat on it. Cowards......all fukking cowards!
There are only two words to describe how I feel:
IMPEACH RUMSFELD! <font color=black>
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Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Close-up
Life on the inside: Former detainees recount abuses by U.S. forces
By Scott Wilson
The Washington Post
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Day and night lost meaning shortly after Muwafaq Sami Abbas, a lawyer by training, arrived at Baghdad International Airport for an unexpected stay. In March, he was seized from his bed by U.S. troops in the middle of the night, he said, along with the rest of the men in his house, and taken to a prison on the airport grounds.
The black sack the troops placed over his head was removed only briefly during the next nine days of interrogation, conducted by U.S. officials in civilian and military clothes, he said. He was forced to do knee bends until he collapsed, he recalled, and black marks still ring his wrists from the pinch of plastic handcuffs. Rest was made impossible by loudspeakers blaring, over and over, the Beastie Boys' rap anthem "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn."
The forced exercise was even harder for his 57-year-old father, a former army general who held a signed certificate from the U.S. occupation authority vouching for his "high level of cooperation and assistance" in the days after the war.
A family torn apart
Father and son are now free — and angry about what they endured in a suddenly notorious U.S.-run prison system in Iraq. But months later, Abbas' three brothers are still inside Abu Ghraib prison, he said. He is their only legal advocate, trying to refute written charges that they are members of the Iraqi insurgency.
Bringing the story to light
Seymour Hersh, the reporter whose article in the May 10 edition of New Yorker Magazine detailed alleged abuses of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for revealing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. In 1969, Hersh, then a freelance journalist, got a tip about an upcoming court-martial, which led him to a military prison in Georgia where he met Lt. William Calley, who spoke candidly to him. The resulting story of the massacre of more than 500 civilians at a small Vietnamese village on March 16, 1968, was published more than a year later in several U.S. newspapers. The revelations raised questions about the conduct of American soldiers.
"The savagery the Americans have practiced against the Iraqis, well, now we have seen it, touched it and felt it," Abbas said. "These types of actions will grow more hostile forces against the coalition, and this is the reason for the resistance."
The photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib — images that reached Iraqi newspapers on Sunday, following a three-day holiday — have reinforced the long-held view here that the U.S. occupation is intent on humiliating the Iraqi people. The system has been rife with complaints for months, but now the testimony of former Iraqi prisoners claiming abuse at the hands of U.S. jailers has gained new credibility.
Interviews with former Iraqi prisoners and human-rights advocates present a picture of the U.S. prison system here as a vast wartime effort to extract information from the enemy rather than to punish criminals. Former prisoners say lengthy interrogation sessions, employing sleep deprivation, severe isolation, fear and humiliation and physical duress, were regular features of their daily regimen and remain so for the estimated 2,500 to 7,000 people inside the jails.
The system comprises 16 prisons, four of which hold prisoners accused of being part of the anti-occupation insurgency. But there are countless other holding cells on U.S. bases, many once used by former president Saddam Hussein's government, where young Iraqis spend their first fearful hours in captivity.
Six-month ordeal
Abdullah Mohammed Abdulrazzaq, an unemployed 19-year-old, was held for six months in several prisons around Iraq. "How can we not hate the Americans after the treatment we have received?" he said. "It is not human."
Four Humvees arrived for Abdulrazzaq at 2:30 a.m. one night in September, he said. He was awake when troops crashed through his apartment door. The electricity had cut out hours before in Aadamiya, a comfortable northwest Baghdad neighborhood where he lives with his widowed mother, and the heat was stifling.
The troops held a picture of the wiry teenager holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, he recalled. In hood and handcuffs, Abdulrazzaq was taken to Aadamiya Palace, a compound once used by the former president's eldest son, Uday Hussein. It is now a U.S. army base, and one of the sitting rooms became the venue for long, intense interrogation sessions.
His interrogators — first U.S. soldiers, then a man who he said wore the uniform of a Kuwaiti army captain — sought information on the location of weapons of mass destruction, Saddam, and the insurgents in his neighborhood. For the next three days, he said, the Kuwaiti man tortured him using electricity.
U.S. soldiers came in and out of the room where he was tied naked to a chair, he said, adding that he saw their boots from beneath his blindfold and heard them speaking English. He collapsed because of the physical stress and lack of food and water. He was eventually taken to Baghdad International Airport on a stretcher.
"I told the American soldier when I arrived to do something for me, and punish this Kuwait soldier," he said. "He told me, 'I can't do anything against him. And you are going to find the same treatment here.' "
After a few days of interrogation, Abdulrazzaq said, he was taken to Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. There he lived in a tent with 40 other prisoners. Showers were available once a week when army water tankers pulled up in front of portable bathrooms. A liter of water was expected to last each prisoner a week, he said, and a weekly army MRE augmented their one meal a day.
Unruly prisoners were placed in shipping containers used to house the prison dogs, he said. The smell inside was horrible, and detention there would last days.
He was interrogated every two weeks. He was taken to a room with his hands and feet tied together, he said, then thrown on the floor. In that position, he would endure hours of questioning, much of it designed to elicit a confession that he was part of the insurgency or inform on his neighbors — many of whom, he said, were already tentmates.
Then one day he was informed at 5 a.m. that he was being released. He never saw a lawyer or any evidence against him, beyond the photograph he claims is a fake.
Saif Mahmoud Shakir, a 26-year-old taxi driver, always carries the papers he received on his March release from Abu Ghraib. He said he was taken from his house in July, accused of participating in the insurgency and of threatening to kill a translator working for the Americans. The man owed him $60, he said, and was trying to avoid repaying the loan by lying about him to U.S. troops eager to hunt down the insurgents.
He said he served most of his time in Umm Qasr, Iraq's southern port, where the occupation authority assembled a vast prison camp out of tents. His twin brother, Ali, was taken with him, and the two moved from prison to prison together for months.
His first stop was another U.S. base in Aadamiya. There, he said, he was beaten by his interrogators before being taken to a special section of the airport prison where he said he was held along with senior members of Saddam's government.
"I arrived there and I was urinating blood because my kidney had been injured by the beatings," he said. "The doctor was very sympathetic and gave me medicine, and fruit."
Faked executions
Shakir, whose gaunt cheeks are covered by a thin beard, said U.S. interrogators used his relationship with his brother to try to extract a confession. On three occasions following extended sessions, he said, they were taken in Humvees into the desert north of the port. There, he said, they were buried up to their necks in the sand.
"I couldn't see my brother," he said. "Then I heard shots fired. They came back and told me my brother was dead."
But his brother had not been killed, and the interrogators sometimes fired near his head to frighten him. The only time he was shot, Shakir said, was by rubber bullets used by guards if prisoners were outside the tent after 9 p.m., even to use the bathroom. He has two dark, dime-size scars on his right bicep.
The brothers were separated in March when Shakir was released from Abu Ghraib, where he spent his final months in captivity, and his brother remained inside. At 5 the morning after his release, U.S. soldiers came looking for him.
"My father showed them my release papers, and they threw them back at him," Shakir said. "They just kept asking, 'Where is Saif?' So I don't sleep there anymore."
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