Taguba Report: Systemic Torture of Iraqi POWs For Months

Just saw an interview with Hersh on CNN. Am still sickened by what I heard. Months of systemic abuse carried out on Iraqi POWs, he reports evidence of killings and attemots to cover up same. Sexual and physical torture on a wide scale, at the behest of military intelligence and the CIA. The report which has made all these findings was conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Confirms statement of the woman in charge of the prison, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, that the actions caught in the notorious pictures were minor in comparison with the overall pattern, and done under the auspices of intelligence gathering.


This is one of many articles covering the shocking revalations. WIll post more later.





‘CIA agents ordered Iraq abuses’

By PHILIP SHENON
NY Times News Service


WASHINGTON - An Army Reserve general whose soldiers were photographed as they abused Iraqi prisoners said Saturday that she knew nothing about the abuse until weeks after it occurred and that she was “sickened” by the pictures. She said the prison cellblock where the abuse occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged the abuse.


The suggestion by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski that the reservists acted at the behest of military intelligence officers appears largely supported in a still-classified Army report on prison conditions in Iraq that documented many of the worst abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, including the sexual humiliation of prisoners.


The New Yorker magazine said in its new edition that the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and CIA agents to “set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.”


According to the New Yorker article, the Army report offered accounts of rampant and gruesome abuse from October to December of 2003 that included the sexual assault of an Iraqi detainee with a chemical light stick or broomstick.


While reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers have come to light in the last several days, the report cited by The New Yorker indicates a far more wide-ranging and systematic pattern of cruelties than previously reported.


Karpinski was formally admonished in January and “quietly suspended” from commanding the 800th Military Police Brigade, the New Yorker article reports while under investigation.


In a phone interview from her home in South Carolina in which she offered her first public comments about the growing international furor over the abuse of the Iraq detainees, Karpinski said the special high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib had been under the direct control of Army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command.


She said that while the reservists involved in the abuses were “bad people” who deserved punishment, she suspected that they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She said that CIA employees often joined in the interrogations at the prison, although she said she did not know if they had unrestricted access to the cellblock.


According to the New Yorker article, by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, one of the soldiers under investigation, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II, an Army reservist who is a prison guard in civilian life, may have reinforced Karpinski’s contention in e-mails to family and friends while serving at the prison.


In a letter earlier this year, Frederick wrote, “I questioned some of the things that I saw.” He described “such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell.” He added, “The answer I got was, ‘This is how military intelligence wants it done.”’Prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks, witnesses told Army investigators, according to the report obtained by The New Yorker. Much of the abuse was sexual, with prisoners often kept naked and forced to perform simulated and real sex acts, witnesses testified. Hersh notes that such degradations, while deeply offensive in any culture, are particularly humiliating to Arabs because Islamic law and culture so strongly condemn nudity and homosexuality.


Karpinski said she was speaking out because she believed that military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and other reservists and away from intelligence officers still at work in Iraq.


“We’re disposable,” she said of the military’s attitude toward reservists. “Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the MPs and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it’s not going to go away.”


The Army’s public affairs office at the Pentagon referred calls about her comments to military commanders in Iraq.

Karpinski said in the interview that the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen cellblocks in the large prison complex and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations, including virtually all of the military police under her command at Abu Ghraib.


She said repeatedly in the interview that she was not defending the actions of the reservists who took part in the brutality, who were part of her command. She said that when she was first presented with the photographs of the abuse in January, they “sickened me.”


“I put my head down because I really thought I was going to throw up,” she said. “It was awful. My immediate reaction was: These are bad people, because their faces revealed how much pleasure they felt at this.”


But she said the context of the brutality had been lost, noting that the six Army reservists charged in the case represented were only a tiny fraction of the nearly 3,400 reservists under her command in Iraq, and that Abu Ghraib was one of 16 prisons and other incarceration centers around Iraq that she oversaw.


“The suggestion that this was done with my knowledge and continued with my knowledge is so far from the truth,” she said of the abuse. “I wasn’t aware of any of this. I’m horrified by this.”

She said she was also alarmed that little attention has been paid to the Army military intelligence unit that controlled Cellblock 1A, where her soldiers guarded the Iraqi detainees between interrogations.


She estimated that the floor space of the two-story cellblock was only about 60 feet by 20 feet, and that military intelligence officers were in and out of the cellblock “24 hours a day,” often to escort prisoners to and from an interrogation center away from the prison cells.


“They were in there at 2 in the morning, they were there at 4 in the afternoon,” said Karpinski, who arrived in Iraq last June and was the only woman to hold a command in the war zone. “This was no 9-to-5 job.”


She said that CIA employees often participated in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, one of Iraq’s most notorious prisons during the rule of Saddam Hussein.


Karpinski noted that one of the photographs of abused prisoners also showed the legs of 16 American soldiers -- the photograph was cropped so that their upper bodies could not be seen -- “and that tells you that clearly other people were participating, because I didn’t have 16 people assigned to that cellblock.” The photographs of American soldiers smiling, laughing and signaling “thumbs up” as Iraqi detainees were forced into sexually humiliating positions provoked outrage just as the American military was trying to pacify a rising insurgency and gain the trust of more Iraqis before turning over sovereignty to a new government on June 30.


Karpinski, who has returned home to South Carolina and her civilian life as a business consultant, said she visited Abu Ghraib as often as twice a week last fall and had repeatedly instructed military police officers under her command to treat prisoners humanely and in accord with international human rights agreements.


“I can speak some Arabic,” said Karpinski, a New Jersey native who spent almost a decade as an active duty soldier before joining the Army Reserve in 1987. “I’m not fluent, but when I went to any of my prison facilities, I would make it a point to try to talk to the detainees.”


But she said she did not visit Cellblock 1A, in keeping with the wishes of military intelligence officers who, she said, worried that unnecessary visits might interfere with their interrogations of Iraqis.


She acknowledged that she “probably should have been more aggressive” about visiting the interrogation cellblock, especially after military intelligence officers at the prison went “to great lengths to try to exclude the ICRC from access to that interrogation wing.”


She was referring to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been given access over time to Iraqi detainees at the prison.


Karpinski’s lawyer, Neal Puckett, a former military trial judge, said he believed that she was being made a scapegoat for others in the military, especially for military intelligence officers who knew what was going on in Cellblock 1A.


He said Karpinski had repeatedly insisted that troops under her command in Iraq receive instruction in proper treatment of detainees, but that despite her best efforts, some reservists joined in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “All you can do is give training, give guidance and assume that your soldiers are going to follow orders and are not going to become sick bastards,” he said.


After the first allegations of abuse circulated earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, ordered sweeping inquiries into whether any commanders -- including Karpinski -- should be held responsible. He also ordered a review of policies and procedures at all of the prisons controlled by occupation forces in Iraq.

 

Also, it should be noted that this report ismonths old, and the authorities have known about it for quite some time. There were 3 investigations into all of this which had nothing to do with those pictures, which were minor in comparison to the findings. The events which took place in the pictures were so relatively insignificant that they aren't even coverend in specifics among all the incidents reported.

Additionally, some of the tortures were carried out by civilian 'contractors'.

 

Sorry, Hersh also reports that the report found that officials were seeking to pin the recent scadal on the MP's, so as to avoid the revalations of the widespread torture methids used for months.

Amnesty International has also found that there is a widespread pattern of torture of Iraqi POWs by coaalition troops and intelligence offficers.

Gen. Myers, who recently disavowed any knowledge of systemic torture of POWs admitted he had yet to read the Taguba report.


This is so unbelievable, I can't settle my mind enough to post properly. Sorry for the scattered posts.

 

Read the article, T_J. The report cites that the torture methods were not just carried out on 'suspected terrorists', but Iraqis "picked up at random". Not that your argument would be a valid one if factual, but it's not even that.

And yes, we do know the context: It was systemic torture conducted on restrained POWS for the purpose of hoping to extract information. Suffice it to say that the military itself, which conducted the investigation knows more about the *context* than you do, and still filed this as is.

God, T_J, how far will you sink to auto-defend?

And you can try and damn the messanger, but in this case it's the military itself that conducted the investigations and made the findings.

 

Horror beyond belief


WASHINGTON — Iraqi prisoners faced numerous “sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses” by US soldiers, including sodomy and beatings, according to a US Army report quoted by the New Yorker magazine.

The New Yorker said it had obtained a 53-page, internal US military report into alleged abuses at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. In an article posted on its website yesterday, the magazine said the report had been authorised by Lt-General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US officer in Iraq, and was completed in February.

The May 10 issue of the magazine goes on sale tomorrow. The army report listed abuses such as “breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees ... beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomising a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.”

The report, written by Major-General Antonio Taguba, said evidence to support the allegations included “detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence”.

A senior Pentagon official said he had seen no allegations of rape or the use of chemicals against prisoners in Iraq, but said abuse of prisoners was “despicable and inexcusable”.

News of the military report comes days after photographs showing abuse by US troops of Iraqi prisoners were published and broadcast around the globe. The photos showed US troops smiling, posing, laughing or giving the thumbs-up sign as naked, male Iraqi prisoners were stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts with one another.

US President George W. Bush said on Friday he was deeply disgusted by the abuse but said only a “few people” were to blame. He defended the conduct of the US occupation forces as the White House scrambled to head off a backlash in Iraq and across the Arab world.

A claim that British troops brutally beat and urinated on an Iraqi prisoner ignited a new furore yesterday over the apparent abuse of Iraqis held by US-led occupation forces.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday abuse of Iraqi prisoners was “completely and totally unacceptable” after pictures were published showing British soldiers apparently urinating on a shackled prisoner of war.

Britain launched an inquiry after yesterday’s Daily Mirror newspaper published five black and white photographs of British troops it said were kicking, stamping and urinating on a hooded Iraqi in Basra, southern Iraq, where Britain has around 7,500 soldiers.

The Daily Mirror said it obtained the photographs from two unnamed soldiers in the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. The soldiers said the Iraqi man in the pictures had been detained on suspicion of stealing.

“Let me make it quite clear that if these things have actually been done, they are completely and totally unacceptable. We went to Iraq to get rid of that sort of thing, not to do it,” Blair told BBC television.

“I think in fairness however, we should say that there are thousands of British troops in Iraq doing a very brave, extraordinary job on behalf of the Iraqi people and on behalf of our country to make the country better.”

The British Army’s highest-ranking officer, General Sir Michael Jackson, condemned the latest case of alleged mistreatment as shameful, while the Defence Ministry launched an urgent investigation.

“If proven, not only is such appalling conduct clearly unlawful, but it also contravenes the British Army’s high standards,” said Jackson, the army’s chief of general staff.

“All allegations are already under investigation. If proven, the perpetrators are not fit to wear the queen’s uniform. They have besmirched the good name of the army and its honour,” Jackson told a hastily arranged press conference late on Friday.

“Vile, but this time it’s a British soldier degrading an Iraqi,” said the Daily Mirror’s headline on a front page dominated by a photograph of a man in army uniform appearing to urinate on a bound captive who had a bag over his head.

Further pictures inside appeared to show a soldier jabbing the man — who was picked up for suspected theft — in the groin with a rifle, and the prisoner lying on the floor with a soldier’s boot on his head.

The Daily Mirror — the strongest voice of opposition to the Iraq war among the British press — said that the prisoner, aged 18-20, was savagely beaten before being thrown from a moving truck. His fate is not known.

The tabloid said it was given the pictures by serving soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, one of whom was among the attackers.

One of the soldiers quoted anonymously by the newspaper said:

“We’re not helping ourselves out there. We’re never going to get the Iraqis on our side. We’re fighting a losing war.”

Britain’s armed forces minister Adam Ingram told BBC radio yesterday:

“If these allegations are true, they are appalling, they are despicable and there is no justification for them at all.”

In the US, Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter for The New Yorker, said that Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, one of six US military policemen accused of humiliating Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Gharib prison outside Baghdad, wrote home in January that he had “questioned some of the things” he saw inside the prison, but that “the answer I got was, ‘This is how military intelligence wants it done’.”

According to his letter quoted by Hersh, military intelligence officers had congratulated Frederick and other soldiers on the “great job” done with prisoners because “they were now getting positive results and information”.

The Guardian newspaper said it had reviewed a journal Frederick began keeping in January after an investigation was launched into the alleged abuse of prisoners.

“The journals ... detail the conditions of the prisoners, apparent torture and the death of one inmate after interrogation,” the newspaper said.

According to Frederick’s journal quoted in the Guardian, “prisoners were forced to live in damp cool cells” and those placed in isolation cells were left there with “little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window for as much as three days.”

Frederick writes in his journal that he tried to raise the issue with his superior who told him: “Don’t worry about it”. He adds that when he also questioned the fact that some prisoners were placed in rooms as small as three feet by three feet the acting batallion commander stated “I don’t care if he has to sleep standing up.”

Fredericks also writes that dogs were used to intimidate prisoners and that “a prisoner with a clearly visible mental condition was shot with non-lethal rounds for standing near a fence singing when a lesser means of force could have been used.”

He said that soldiers were told to stress out prisoners as much as possible to get information and one occasion in November soldiers “stressed out (an inmate) so bad that the man passed away”.

Fredericks writes that the man’s body was packed in ice for 24 hours before medics “came in and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away”.

The prison scandal broke out on Wednesday, after CBS’s 60 Minutes II programme broadcast a picture showing a prisoner standing on a box with a hood over his head and wires attached to his hands.

He had been told he would be electrocuted if he fell off, the report said.

Other pictures showed nude prisoners lying on each other and simulating sex acts as smiling US troops pointed and laughed.

Six US military police were charged in March with conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty, maltreatment, assault and indecent acts against up to 20 prisoners at the jail last November and December. They may face a court martial.

But Gary Myers, a civilian defence attorney who represents Frederick, said his client and the other soldiers were only carrying out orders that came from their superiors.

“Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?” Myers is quoted as asking.

Hersh points out that abuses at the Abu Gharib prison were detailed in a confidential army report as far back as February and were more cruel that just humiliating the detainees.

Male detainees at Abu Gharib have been also threatened with rape, according to The New Yorker.

Military police have been allowed to stitch the wound of a detainee, who was injured after being slammed against the wall, and sodomized a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, Hersh quotes the report written by Army Major-General Antonio Taguba.

The general recommended administrative punishment for at least two military intelligence officers assigned to Abu Gharib, Hersh points out.

— AFP, Reuters

 

US spies 'urged abuse' of prisoners

BY Roy Eccleston, Washington correspondent, and John Kerin
May 03, 2004
THE scandal over the US military's abuse of Iraqi prisoners at a notorious Baghdad prison is deepening, with new claims the possible war crimes were encouraged by American intelligence officers wanting inmates "softened up" for interrogation.

A London newspaper has also broadened the abuse allegations to British troops. The Daily Mirror published photographs at the weekend of what it said was a tortured Iraqi man, after receiving details of the alleged eight-hour beating from two British soldiers.

The claim that the "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" by at least six US military police were actively encouraged by intelligence officers came in a confidential military report leaked to The New Yorker magazine.

The magazine also reported that when one Iraqi prisoner was so stressed by questioning – possibly by CIA officers – that he died, his body was packed in ice for a day and then taken from the jail with a mock intravenous drip in his arm to disguise his death.

Army Reserve general Janis Karpinski, who has been stood down over the allegations, told The New York Times on Sunday that she also believed the brutal behaviour had been encouraged by intelligence officers, who were now being protected. "We're disposable," said General Karpinski, who had been in charge of military prisons in Iraq, referring to the reservist military police (MPs) allegedly involved.









"Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the MPs and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."

The Arab world is outraged at photographs broadcast first on the US current affairs program Sixty Minutes II last week, showing the humiliation of naked Iraqi prisoners at one of the prisons most notorious for torture during the reign of Saddam Hussein.

While General Karpinski said the pictures sickened her when she saw them, and that those responsible were "bad people", she also added that the Abu Ghraib prison cell block involved – 1A – was under the control of military intelligence officers 24 hours a day.

"They were in there at 2 in the morning, they were (there) at 4 in the afternoon," she told the paper, adding that she had never been in the area, despite having overall control of the prison.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer conceded yesterday that the mistreatment provided a "propaganda victory for al-Qa'ida", but stopped short of describing the behaviour as a breach of the Geneva Convention on torture.

However, Human Rights Watch in New York said that under the Geneva Conventions, mistreatment of prisoners that amounted to "torture or inhuman treatment" would be a war crime.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, a respected private monitor of human rights abuses, claimed the bold behaviour of the soldiers in posing for photographs with the prisoners "suggests they had nothing to hide from their superiors".

The scandal is a devastating blow to the US image in Iraq, where the Iraqi Governing Council is demanding an investigation. Council member Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer told Associated Press the perpetrators must be punished "as war criminals" because "the dignity of an Iraqi citizen is no less than the dignity of an American".

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine said a leaked Pentagon report by Major-General Antonio Taguba, completed in February, found that between October and December last year there were numerous cases of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of Iraqi prisoners at the prison.

Among the alleged abuses were: breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomising a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

Six reservist military police, including several women, have been charged and face court-martial. But Hersh also reported some of the accused soldiers claimed they had been urged to act by military intelligence interrogators.

The Taguba report said army intelligence officers, CIA agents and private contractors "actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favourable interrogation of witnesses".

The most senior of those charged, Sergeant Ivan Frederick, in letters to his family blamed military intelligence, according to Hersh.

He claimed he questioned some things that were done, such as leaving prisoners with no clothes or in women's underpants, but was told "this is how the military intelligence wants it done". The intelligence officers "encouraged and told us 'great job', they were now getting positive results and information".

He also claimed a man brought in by the CIA and its employees had died. "They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away," he wrote, the magazine said.

"They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately 24 hours in the shower. The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV (intravenous drip) in his arm and took him away."

No record was made that the man had been there.

President George W. Bush, who cites the end of Saddam's torture chambers as a justification for war, has tried to reel in the public relations disaster the claims represent.

"(The prisoners') treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people," Mr Bush said. "That's not the way we do things in America. And so I – I didn't like it one bit."

The British allegations, complete with photographs showing a hooded man being urinated on and assaulted with a rifle butt, were made by two anonymous soldiers to the Daily Mirror newspaper.

"The prisoner, aged 18-20, begged for mercy as he was battered with rifle butts and batons in the head and groin, was kicked, stamped and urinated on, and had a gun barrel forced into his mouth," the paper said.

Barely conscious after eight hours of assaults, he was thrown from a truck. It was not known if he survived.

"If it happened, it's completely unacceptable," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"If this is proven, the perpetrators are not fit to wear the Queen's uniform," said Chief of the General Staff General Sir Michael Jackson.

The Sunday Telegraph newspaper said military police were expected to arrest six soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment in connection with the apparent abuse by tomorrow.

The Sunday Times reported that the treatment may have been part of a series of revenge beatings for the murder of a British soldier last August, although the Sunday Express also suggested the pictures could have been "a cruel joke".

HRW's Mr Roth said the US had been slack at cracking down on troops who had already been shown to have abused prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It is clear that the US has not taken the issue of prisoner abuse seriously enough," he charged.

 

Although irony is the least impactive element to this, it should be noted that the Abu Ghraib prison which was the base for these tortures was the one made famous near the beginning of the war because of the findings that it had been used for torture in the past By Saddam's troops.

 

Hersh told of many specific incidents, including one of a POW that was killed, his body kept in ice, given false ID, and dumped on the streets of Baghdad. Unfortunately for the operatives and contractors ( he said this specific incident was carried out, not by regular soldiers, but CIA/MI operatives and those "non-mercenary" contractors we've heard so much about.) in question, the pictures of this, including the body being kept under ice, have been recovered in the investigation.

 

Yeah. This is about me. I love it. Usually the source would be attacked, but as it's a general in the U.S. military specifically charged with investigating this, he's off the hook,, so it's the poster. Right.

T_J...again, and for the last time. This isn't the findings of the liberal media. This isn't the findings of the Democratic Party. These aren't my findings. These are the findings of the U.S. military.


You can yammer on all you want about loving the troops, etc., as though that was relevant, but I'm afraid it's not. No, I'm not the expert. General Taguba is.


He knows the context, he knows the incidents, and he reported on them. Do you know more? Are you, in fact, the expert, T_J? Cause if you're not, why are you arguing with the man who is?


Pathetic and transparent.

 

Rm..


The Taguba report goes way beyond the incidents in those pictures. It's not even really about them, they are minor in comparison. This is widespread, systemic torture for months.