New
Evidence Of Recent Torture In Iraq
By Lisa Ashkenaz
Croke
31 August, 2004
The New Standard
While
the latest reports investigating the widely condemned events at Abu
Ghraib prison attempt to close the book on the Pentagons culpability
with a somber critique, new evidence gathered for a class action lawsuit
filed against two US-based private contractors could prove that the
scandal at Abu Ghraib was far from an isolated series of incidents perpetrated
by a few rowdy "bad apples" working the night shift during
Ramadan.
An attorney representing
former detainees says his recent fact-finding mission to Baghdad uncovered
dozens of cases of physical and psychological abuse, sexual humiliation,
religious desecration and rape in ten US-run prisons throughout occupied
Iraq.
The NewStandard
spoke with Michigan-based attorney Shereef Akeel, who interviewed some
50 former detainees about their time and treatment in US custody. Part
of the legal team behind a class action lawsuit against the firms for
their employees involvement in prison abuse at US-run facilities
in Iraq, the former immigration lawyer found himself traveling to meet
face-to-face with the people he is representing in the American court
system.
His team has documented
abuse dating from July 2003 to as recently as last month, when an Iraqi
boy just fifteen years old says his captors at an American facility
raped him. "He was told to go on all fours naked and was sodomized
from behind," Akeel conveyed the fifteen year-olds testimony.
"He said they made him dance and he was crying."
Perhaps the most
disturbing evidence Akeel found suggesting an overarching policy of
abuse comes in the form of first-hand accounts that captors singled
out religiously observant prisoners for particularly harsh abuse.
A number of the incidents Akeel and his colleagues have recorded took
place between January and July of this year. Emerging evidence that
torture in US facilities continues months after the Abu Ghraib and other
torture cases were revealed -- most of those having taken place in late
2003 and dismissed as the results of oversights corrected since -- could
spell major problems for the US government and military.
Akeel and his colleagues
are working in concert with the Center for Constitutional Rights to
sue the US companies CACI International, Inc. and Titan Corp., which
were respectively contracted to provide interrogators and translators
to support the American militarys efforts to obtain information
from "security detainees" -- those thought to be involved
in resisting the US occupation of Iraq. The Center for Constitutional
Rights is a privately funded legal center that litigates on behalf of
social movements and causes.
For its part, CACI
International said in a press statement issued about the case: "CACI
rejects and denies the allegations of the suit as being a malicious
recitation of false statements and intentional distortions." The
company added in its defense, "CACI has never entered into a conspiracy
with the government, or anyone else, to perpetrate abuses of any kind."
CACI also called the allegations of abuse "ill-informed" and
"slanderous."
Titan Corp. spokesperson
Wil Williams told The NewStandard his companys employees at US-run
facilities in Iraq adhere strictly to their role as translators and
are prohibited by company policy from engaging with prisoners in any
other capacity. He said the class action lawsuit naming Titan is "baseless"
and that Titan will "vigorously defend [against] it." He said
it is "against company policy for any [employee] to engage in or
observe" abusive behavior, and expressed confidence that had any
Titan personnel so much as witnessed unlawful behavior, they would have
reported it.
When asked if the
witnesses identified the perpetrators as US military, mercenaries, Iraqis,
private translators or others, Akeel sighed. "Honestly, the line
was so blurred, and they were crossed all the time," he said. According
to the testimony Akeel has collected, interrogators often donned US
military uniforms, assailants entered cells naked or approached victims
from behind, and at least one translator wielded an electrical stun
device.
Williams was unaware
that interpreters, whether representing Titan or not, were being accused
of being in possession of any such devices. "A linguist is not
supposed to be handling weapons," he said, adding that it is "beyond
our imagination" that Titan employees would engage in abusive activities.
Regardless of the
perpetrators national or ethnic origins, Akeel and his clients
hold the US military personnel who were involved in unlawful incidents
and the corporations named in the suit responsible for abuse carried
out in prisons controlled by the US military.
During the course
of his investigation in Iraq, Akeel said, clear patterns emerged. According
to Akeel, testimonials gathered individually from former captives held
in US prisons all over Iraq indicate many of the common methods came
into use across disparate, geographically distant detention centers.
Perhaps the most
disturbing evidence Akeel found suggesting an overarching policy of
abuse comes in the form of first-hand accounts that captors singled
out religiously observant prisoners for particularly harsh abuse.
Akeel said former
detainees told him that upon arrival at a US-run facility, they were
each given a questionnaire asking them about their religious affiliation
as well as their vices. In Akeels words, the questions included:
"Are you Sunni? Are you Shia? Do you drink? Do you not drink? Do
you have a girlfriend?" Akeel said he found a consistent pattern
among the cases: the stricter the religious observance a detainee reported
to his captors, the more severe the treatment he would receive at their
hands.
Akeel provided several
examples of religious desecration, including stories of men who had
purified themselves in an Islamic absolution ritual only to be subsequently
doused with beer and alcohol by captors. At one prison, plaintiffs told
Akeel, captors hung a picture of a pig on the wall toward which prisoners
faced to worship and told them, "Pray to your pig."
In one horrific
case recounted to Akeel, a naked woman wearing a strapped on sexual
device raped an elderly man while he was fasting. The man said the woman
came in silently behind him, "wearing a belt with a penis,"
Akeel relayed. The man told Akeel he could not determine whether his
assailant was an American MP or a private contractor.
Akeel also uncovered
a method, previously unknown to his legal team, by which captors were
malicious in their matching of interpreters with the prisoners they
would help interrogate. He said that in each interrogation case before
him, the victim was assigned an interpreter with a "built-in-prejudice."
"All of the
translators are of Arabic descent," Akeel said. "So theyd
put an Egyptian Coptic [Christian] translator to look over the [Sunni
Muslims]. Its like putting a Serb in charge of a Muslim [in the
former Yugoslavia]. This is a pattern everywhere; [it was] very specific."
Akeel said he interviewed
victims from across the social spectrum, "from lawyers to doctors,
to kids, to the elderly, to housewives." He said US jailers and
their contractors subjected all the plaintiffs to similar mistreatment.
One woman told Akeel
she witnessed an imprisoned man and woman raped on her first night of
incarceration.
Other witnesses
said a group of naked male detainees was forced to serve food to naked
female prisoners who begged the men to cover their eyes.
In another account,
a doctor first taken to a presidential palace and made to stand there
for hours on end, told Akeel that he was then taken to the Abu Ghraib
prison where he watched a naked prisoner forced onto the running engine
of a Humvee, leaving the man with irreparable burns.
Witnesses also told
Akeel the famous Tikrit area stables of Saddam Husseins son, Uday,
now house Iraqi prisoners who are forced to urinate and defecate in
the same stalls where they sleep.
Akeel returned from
his mission to Baghdad last week. He said he is still processing everything
he learned, and has agreed to provide The NewStandard detailed documentation
confirming these accounts once he has organized the material. All of
it, he said, will be introduced as part of the case against CACI and
Titan.
One witness Akeel
had hoped to interview will not be part of the lawsuit. Akeel said he
was expecting to speak with a woman who had been raped at one US-run
prison, and later discovered she was pregnant. Tragically, she killed
herself before they could meet.