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US abuse
worse than Saddam's, say inmates
Day and night lost meaning soon after Muwafaq Sami Abbas, a lawyer, arrived
at Baghdad airport for an unexpected stay.
In March
he was seized from his bed by US troops in the middle of the night, he said,
along with the rest of the men in his house, and taken to a prison on the
airport grounds.
The black sack the troops placed over his head was removed
only briefly during the next nine days of interrogation, conducted by US
officials in civilian and military clothes, he said. He was forced to do
knee bends until he collapsed, he recalled, and black marks still ring his
wrists from the pinch of plastic handcuffs. Rest was made impossible by
loudspeakers blaring, over and over, the Beastie Boys' rap anthem No
Sleep 'Til Brooklyn.
The forced exercise was even harder for his father, 57, a
former army general who held a signed certificate from the US occupation
authority vouching for his "high level of co-operation and assistance" in
the days after the war.
Father and son are now free, but Mr Abbas said his three
brothers were still inside Abu Ghraib prison.
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"The savagery the Americans have practised against the
Iraqis, well, now we have seen it, touched it and felt it," he said. "These
types of actions will grow more hostile forces against the coalition, and
this is the reason for the resistance."
The photographs of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at
Abu Ghraib have reinforced the long-held view that the US occupation is
intent on humiliating the Iraqi people.
Other Iraqis have given similar accounts of what goes on
inside the prison that was a centre of torture and execution under Saddam
Hussein's rule.
Dhia al-Shweiri spent several stints in the prison, twice
under Saddam and once under the Americans. He preferred Saddam's torture to
the humiliation of being stripped naked by his US guards, he said. Now Mr
Shweiri, 30, is a diehard fighter in the Mehdi Army, the anti-US militia of
a Shiite Muslim imam
Mr Shweiri said that while jailed by Saddam's regime he
was electrocuted, beaten and suspended from the ceiling with his hands tied
behind his back.
"But that's better than the humiliation of being stripped
naked," he said. "Shoot me here," he added, pointing between his eyes,
"but
don't do this to us."
The US military said last week
"no more than 20" US
soldiers had been involved in abusing and humiliating inmates. The vast
majority of US guards were not involved, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt
said.
However, on Sunday Abu Salem, who was detained inside Abu
Ghraib for six months until February, said abuse by US guards went on all
the time.
Mr Salem said he had been in the jail shortly before a
visit from the International Red Cross in January. Until then, detainees had
been kept naked. "The night before the Red Cross arrived, the US soldiers
gave them [the prisoners] some new clothes. They told us that if we
complained to the Red Cross about our treatment we would be kept in prison
for ever."
An article by a writer for New Yorker magazine,
Seymour Hersh, at the weekend detailed a report that US Major-General
Antonio Taguba wrote in February that accused soldiers from the 372nd
Military Police Company of "sadistic" treatment of Iraqi prisoners.
source: The Washington Post, Associated Press, The Guardian, The Baltimore
Sun - May 4, 2004 |
