- WASHINGTON -- The US military
prison torture scandal widened further yesterday as new evidence emerged
of beatings and sexual abuse of detainees in army jails in Afghanistan.
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- An Afghan police colonel told reporters from the New
York Times and Associated Press that he had been repeatedly beaten, stripped
naked and threatened with dogs for nearly 40 days last year at several
US-run bases in Afghanistan. He also accused American prison guards of
sticking their fingers in his anus and taunting him sexually.
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- A spokesman for US forces said an investigation into
the allegations was opened yesterday, but Human Rights Watch pointed out
it had presented senior US officials in Afghanistan with a report in March
alleging systematic physical abuse and sexual humiliation in military prisons.
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- The Afghan allegations come at a time when the Bush administration
has been accused of creating conditions for the physical and sexual assaults
on prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison by allowing the use of "stress and
duress" techniques.
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- Private Lynndie England, one of the military police guards
facing court martial after she appeared in photographs with naked Abu Ghraib
inmates, yesterday insisted she was acting on orders from "persons
in my chain of command".
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- "I was instructed by persons in higher rank to 'stand
there, hold this leash, look at the camera', and they took pictures for
PsyOps [psychological operations]," Private England told a Denver
television station, KCNC-TV. "I didn't really ... want to be in any
pictures."
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- In evidence to a Senate committee, the defence secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday defines prisoners in Iraq as "unlawful
combatants" rather than prisoners of war but insists they were treated
in a manner "consistent with" the Geneva conventions.
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- A Pentagon lawyer yesterday said that detainees in Afghanistan,
like those in Guantanamo Bay, were not protected by the Geneva conventions,
as they were not part of a uniformed regular army.
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- Sayed Nabi Siddiqui, an Afghan police colonel, told the
New York Times he had been wrongly detained in July last year after reporting
police corruption. He told the Associated Press that he was beaten every
day for 22 days by about six to seven people, some American and some Afghan.
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- "They stood around me and put their fingers in my
anus," he said. "They were asking very rude questions, like which
animal did I like having sex with," he told the New York Times.
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- He also said he was made to kneel and dogs were brought
into the cell and used to threaten him.
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- The US embassy in Kabul told the New York Times that
a military investigation had been launched and quoted the US ambassador,
Zalmay Khalilzad, as saying: "To the best of our knowledge this is
the first time anyone in the military chain of command or the United States
embassy has heard of this alleged mistreatment."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1215538,00.html
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