More
Horrific Pictures, Stories
From Abu Ghraib
By Andrew Buncombe
in Washington, Justin Huggler in Baghdad
and Leonard Doyle
22 May 2004
The Independent
Click
Here To See The Pictures
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.
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.
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.
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.
In one statement,
a prisoner tells how he witnessed a US army translator raping an Iraqi
boy, aged somewhere between 15 and 18.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He and the others
charged will say that they were told by American interrogators to soften
the prisoners up for questioning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Whatever they
asked me I just said, 'Yes'. I was desperate," he says in his statement.
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.
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."
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.