Abuses and even torture of Iraqi detainees by U.S. Marines have been widespread, according to U.S. Navy documents released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Among the worst was a June 2003 case in which four Iraqi juveniles were forced to kneel while a pistol was “discharged to conduct a mock execution,” according to the documents. There was also another case in which a detainee’s hands were set alight after they were doused in alcohol, and yet another where a detainee was forced to “dance” as he was shocked by an electric transformer.
The reports, which were obtained by the ACLU as a result of a court order requiring the Pentagon to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request earlier this summer, are the latest in a series of recent reports of widespread abuses against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by U.S. troops and interrogators.
“Day after day, news stories of torture are coming to light, and we need to know how these abuses were allowed to happen,” said ACLU executive director Anthony Romero. “This kind of widespread abuse could not have taken place without a leadership failure of the highest order.”
While the Pentagon still insists, as it has since photographs of the humuliation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in October 2003 came to light in April, that the abuses have been the work of a tiny minority of aberrant U.S. soldiers and do not reflect approved policy, the most recent disclosures suggest a somewhat different explanation.
Ten days ago, for example, the military announced that it had launched a criminal investigation into photographs that appeared to show Navy SEALs in Iraq sitting on hooded and handcuffed detainees and, in one case, pointing a gun to the head of a bloodied prisoner. The photos were apparently taken in May 2003 – five months before the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred.
Last week, the ACLU and several other human rights groups – including the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, and Veterans for Common Sense – that had joined in the FOIA lawsuit released records detailing complaints by Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) personnel about the beatings and abuse of Iraqi detainees by members of a task force of Special Operations Forces (SOF) who also threatened the DIA officials with retaliation if they reported their observations to higher authorities.
The same batch of documents also reported heated objections by both DIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials to the way SOF interrogations were carried out against so-called “high-value” suspects at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a result of which FBI officials were told to avoid all such interrogations.
At the same time, the Associated Press reported on a July 14, 2004 letter from a senior FBI counter-terrorism official to a military counterpart that described a case at Guantanamo where an FBI agent observed a female interrogator squeezing a male detainee’s genitals and bending back his thumbs, as well as other “highly aggressive” interrogation techniques, including the use of a guard dog to intimidate another detainee.
The New York Times reported this week that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had issued its own secret directive in August 2003 ordering all of its personnel in Iraq to avoid interrogations carried out by military personnel that involved techniques “beyond questions and answers.” It also barred its officers from even entering a secret SOF interrogation facility in Iraq.
Meanwhile, in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) asked for information regarding the progress of investigations into the deaths in custody of six detainees in Afghanistan, including at least two who were tortured before their deaths.
It charged that the failure to investigate and prosecute abuses had created a “culture of impunity” among some interrogators and thus allowed abuse to spread to other theaters, including Iraq. And it stressed that the detention system under the command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan continues to operate “outside the rule of law.”
“Abuse of detainees was not aberrational,” said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. “The Defense Department adopted extreme interrogation techniques as a matter of policy.”
The Navy documents released Tuesday, according to the ACLU, suggest the existence of an internal culture of secrecy throughout the armed forces in the “war on terrorism.” For example, when describing the Marines’ “rough handling” of detainees, one Navy corpsman noted in the documents that “there was a lot of peer pressure to keep one’s mouth shut.”
While the mock executions and other serious abuses appear to have been exceptional, abusive treatment has been routine, according to the records released Tuesday. They included investigation reports from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and witness interviews, as well as a log of the material compiled by the ACLU. The names of all U.S. personnel were blacked out.
One document related how Iraqis classified as Enemy Prisoners of War (EPWs) would be taken to an empty swimming pool and shackled with burlap bags over their heads and forced to remain in a kneeling position for up to 24 hours awaiting interrogation. Detainees who moved were yelled at or jerked into the desired position by Marines.
“Roughing up” EPWs appeared to be routine, according to the testimony recorded in numerous documents that also suggest that forcing their faces in the dirt was also a common practice with the understanding that doing so was particularly humiliating to Arabs.
The records depict efforts by the NCIS to investigate particularly serious incidents, such as reports of the execution of three EPWs captured by Marines at a pharmaceutical plant outside Baghdad in mid-April, but the results often appear inconclusive from the records released by the ACLU.
One investigator sent an e-mail in June 2004 describing his Iraq caseload as “exploding [with] high-visibility cases.”
The Pentagon has been ordered by a federal court to release all documents relevant to the treatment and interrogation of detainees by U.S. forces in connection to the war on terrorism, all deaths in custody, and the “rendition” of detainees to third countries known to use torture by the end of next month.
“There is growing evidence that the abuse of detainees was not aberrational but systemic, and that senior officials either approved of the abuse or were deliberately indifferent to it,” the ACLU said, adding “the public has a right to know what the government’s policies were, why these abuses were allowed to take place, and who was ultimately responsible.”
(Inter Press Service)
