- The abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison continued yesterday
with the publication of fresh pictures and sworn statements that detailed
a teenage boy being raped, prisoners being ridden like animals and other
Iraqis being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol in contravention of their
religion. For the first time video footage of some of the abuse was also
broadcast, a development likely to increase the political impact of the
scandal.
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- The new details caused fresh outrage around the Arab
world and further rocked the Bush administration - already floundering
after a week in which US forces killed dozens of guests at a wedding party
in Iraq after mistaking them for insurgents. The latest pictures and allegations
- chronicling more calculated attempts to humiliate Muslim prisoners -
have only added to the suspicion that they were part of a policy formulated
at a high level of authority.
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- Even though the existence of the images was known - indeed,
lawmakers on Capitol Hill have seen many of the images already - their
publication put further pressure on Washington as it prepares to hand over
sovereignty to an Iraqi administration at the end of June.
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- Partly in preparation for that handover, a bus full of
Iraqi prisoners left Abu Ghraib outside Baghdad yesterday as the US sought
to reduce the numbers being held in the jail. But the new pictures and
statements overshadowed the release.
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- In one statement, a prisoner tells how he witnessed a
US army translator raping an Iraqi boy, aged somewhere between 15 and 18.
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- Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, prisoner number 151108, says a female
soldier took photographs of the rape. Sheets had been hung to block the
prisoners' view, but Mr Hilas says he heard the boy's screams and climbed
a door to see what was going on. "The kid was hurting very bad,"
his statement reads.
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- The statements were published in The Washington Post,
accompanied by images that will haunt America. One shows an Iraqi completely
naked, his arms outstretched, his back to the camera. His body is smeared
with a thick brown substance that looks like excrement. It is caked around
the back of his head.
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- Yet it is not simply these images and details that are
so shocking, but the overwhelming evidence suggesting that, far from being
an isolated episode involving a "few bad apples" from Appalachia,
as the administration claims, this abuse was part of a systematic, gloves-off
approach to dealing with suspected "terrorists" in the post-9/11
world.
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- Compelling evidence is emerging that responsibility for
the abuse goes right to the Pentagon, where an ultra-secret "black
operation" was set up to run the interrogation process. This unit,
under the direction of Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defence for
intelligence, reportedly used theories developed by an academic to guide
the torture of the detainees.
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- The book, The Arab Mind by the late cultural anthropologist
Raphael Patai, includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, stating that
the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation. Patai's book was
described by The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh as providing an intellectual
and practical underpinning of the culture of torture at Abu Ghraib. Another
alleged victim of the orchestrated abuse tells how American soldiers held
him down and sodomised him with a truncheon. This prisoner is not being
named because he was the alleged victim of a sexual assault. Other prisoners
tell how they were fed pork or forced to drink alcohol, which are forbidden
to Muslims.
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- Ameen Saeed al-Sheikh says that he was tortured and ordered
to denounce Islam. Mr Sheikh says that his leg was broken when one of the
soldiers started hitting it and ordering him to curse Islam. "They
ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive," he says.
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- Other photographs show a terrified Iraqi being menaced
by a huge black dog while an American soldier stares aggressively on, and
a man in women's underwear being forced to stand precariously on two boxes,
one leg chained to a doorway and his hands handcuffed between his legs.
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- These are just some of the photographs the Pentagon tried
to suppress. The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed they could
not be released because they might jeopardise the courts martial of seven
soldiers charged with involvement in the abuses. The sworn witness statements
had been kept secret until they were published yesterday.
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- Mr Rumsfeld is fighting for his political life. The New
Yorker report suggests he approved the covert operation, to which he appointed
Dr Cambone as leader in order to obtain fast, "actionable" intelligence
in pursuit of Mr Bush's "war on terror". The pressure to obtain
this information - and the increasingly important role of the army's military
intelligence soldiers and civilian interrogators - grew as the Iraqi insurgency
against US forces developed. At Abu Ghraib, it appears this effort was
combined with ideas that had been developed by Patai's book. The New Yorker
claimed the book was the "bible of the neo-cons on Arab behaviour"
and left them with two ideas - that Arabs only understood force and that
humiliation and shame were their greatest weaknesses.
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- Specialist Charles Graner, one of seven soldiers from
the 372nd Military Police Unit based in Cumberland, Maryland, charged and
clearly identified in some of the prisoners' statements, has already said
through his lawyer that he intends to plead at his court martial that he
was following orders.
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- He and the others charged will say that they were told
by American interrogators to soften the prisoners up for questioning.
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- It is likely that the hearings will further highlight
the role of Major-General Geoffrey Miller, formerly the warden at Guantanamo
Bay, who took control of Abu Ghraib last year with a plan to turn it into
a hub of interrogation. He placed the military police under the tactical
control of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Specialist Jeremy Sivits,
who pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain at a court martial this week,
told the court in his evidence that one of the other accused had told him
they had been told to keep abusing the prisoners by interrogators, and
that they were doing good work.
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- That version of events is backed up one of the former
detainees at Abu Ghraib, Saddam Saleh, who has come forward to say that
he is one of the prisoners in the photographs: the one in which Private
Lynndie England is pointing at the genitals of a row of naked, hooded Iraqi
men, and grinning.
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- Mr Saleh, who has since been released, says he only knows
that he is the third from the right - he was hooded when the picture was
taken and could not see Pte England - because American soldiers brought
the photograph to his cell and pointed him out, apparently in an effort
to humiliate him further. That would back claims that the photographs were
taken so they could be used to humiliate and demoralise the prisoners.
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- Mr Saleh has also said that he was tortured for 18 days
in Abu Ghraib, but that the torture abruptly stopped. While other prisoners
continued to be tortured, he was left alone. At exactly the same time as
the torture stopped, interrogators began questioning him in regular sessions.
He had not been questioned at all before. If the torture was designed to
extract useful information from the prisoners, in Mr Saleh's case it did
not work. He says that after what he had been through, he was ready to
tell the interrogators anything just to escape further mistreatment.
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- "Whatever they asked me I just said, 'Yes'. I was
desperate," he says in his statement.
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- Interrogators asked him if he was a member Ansar al-Islam,
a Kurdish Islamist group that has alleged links with al-Qa'ida. "I
said yes," Mr Saleh says, although he says he knew nothing about the
group, and he has since been released, which indicates that American interrogators
decided he had nothing to do with it. They asked if he was a member of
Jeish Mohammed, a Sunni Iraqi resistance group. "I said my cousin
was the leader of Jeish Mohammed," Mr Saleh says.
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- They asked him if he knew Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a militant
leader in Iraq with links to al-Qa'ida. "I said, 'Yes', but I'd never
heard of him before."
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- Last night the Pentagon said that 37 deaths involving
detainees held by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were being investigated.
There were 33 cases involved, eight more than previously revealed, according
to officials.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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