Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 2. maj 2004 / Time Line May 2, 2004
Version 3.005/02/2004
There are shocking new details of torture by US troops
by Peter Beaumont, Kamal Ahmed and Chris Stephens
© 2004 The Observer (London)
A new report tells how Iraqi prisoners were threatened with rape.
Six British soldiers may be arrested over abuse claims.
Chilling new evidence of the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi
prisoners by American soldiers emerged last night in a secret
report accusing the US army leadership of failings at the highest
levels.
Detainees were subjected to 'sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal
abuses', according to a military investigation suggesting that last
week's photographs of US soldiers humiliating their naked captives
may only have been the tip of the iceberg.
It comes amid reports that six British soldiers may shortly be
arrested over claims that they too mistreated detainees. Soldiers
from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment are understood to have been
questioned in Cyprus after the publication yesterday of shocking
photographs purporting to show a prisoner being beaten, kicked and
urinated on while in the regiment's custody.
Legal experts warned last night that British soldiers could face
war crimes trials if the allegations are proven, or if they are not
exhaustively investigated.
The revelations can only increase already widespread anger at
coalition forces' handling of the volatile situation in Iraq, where
yesterday a foreign security guard was killed and three others
wounded by a roadside bomb in the northern city of Mosul.
Annals of National Security : Torture at Abu Ghraib : American
Soldiers Brutalized Iraqis. How Far Up Does the Responsibility
Go?
by Seymour M. Hersh
© 2004 The New Yorker
In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of
Baghdad, was one of the world's most notorious prisons, with
torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as
fifty thousand men and women -- no accurate count is possible --
were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot
cells that were little more than human holding pits.
In the looting that followed the regime's collapse, last April, the
huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything
that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The
coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and
repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu
Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners,
however -- by the fall there were several thousand, including women
and teen-agers -- were civilians, many of whom had been picked up
in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell
into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security
detainees suspected of "crimes against the coalition"; and a small
number of suspected "high-value" leaders of the insurgency against
the coalition forces.
Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was
named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and put in
charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only
female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and
intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in
the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she
was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and
thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no
training in handling prisoners.
General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was
five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was
enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview last December with
the St. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi
inmates at Abu Ghraib, "living conditions now are better in prison
than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn't
want to leave."
A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and
quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army's prison
system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the
senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report,
obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M.
Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late
February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the
Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found
that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous
instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu
Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba
reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police
Company, and also by members of the American intelligence
community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion,
which reported to Karpinski's brigade headquarters.)
Den britiske hær har indledt en undersøgelse af otte
soldater efter chokerende billeder af tortor mod en irakisk fange,
skriver Berlingske Tidende.
Litteratur
Leder: Organiseret ondskab. I: Information,
05/03/2004.
Juul Jensen: USAs medier er forsigtige. I:
Information, 05/03/2004.
Nielsen, Jørgen Steen: Fangetortur kan vælte USAs
spil i Irak. I: Information, 05/03/2004.
Rasmussen, Annegrethe: Bileder chokerer briterne. I:
Information, 05/03/2004.
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