6 US Troops charged for maltreating Iraqi jail inmates

[Berzerker]

I see this as being better then what most countries do. The Coalition exposed the abuse and has arrested those responsible while in a great many countries these would have been buried or over looked. At least we punish criminal behavior when we find it even if the people responsible are US soldiers.

You're kinda missing the point, we're trying to show the Arabs and the rest of the world that we have a just cause and this behavior puts Americans in jeopardy by pissing off people who might be on the fence regarding our effort in Iraq and giving our opponents a loophole to mistreat captured Americans. We lose some of our moral high ground to complain about the mistreatment of Americans when things like this happen and the average Arab probably doesn't believe these people will be punished.

[Berzerker]

Btw, I don't know who exposed it but I doubt it was the Pentagon or coalition forces, they know the fallout that can result from making this public.

[Chemical Ollie]

I had a good laugh last summer when I heard that police instructors where coming from US and other Western countries to teach the new Iraqi police their job. They needed to tell the Iraqi policemen things like:

Don't transport suspects in the trunk of the car

Perhaps these instructors need to do some work with the American prison guards too?

[Kuciwalker]

[Agathon]

Instructors coming from the US to train Iraqi police? They must be from New York as today's news is that a prisoner was sodomized with a foreign object.

[gopher]

Actually, in todays (SUN) New York Times, both the general in charge and an internal military memo suggest that the cellblock in question was under direct MI supervision and that the acts were performed to help with interrigations and encouraged them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/international/middleeast/02ABUS.html?hp

[gopher]

For you lazy types.....



WASHINGTON, May 1 — 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 M. Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and C.I.A. 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.

General 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, General 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 C.I.A. 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 M. Hersh, one of the soldiers under investigation, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, an Army reservist who is a prison guard in civilian life, may have reinforced General Karpinski's contention in e-mails to family and friends while serving at the prison.

In a letter earlier this year, Sergeant 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. Mr. 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.

General 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 M.P.'s 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.

General 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 General 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 C.I.A. employees often participated in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, one of Iraq's most notorious prisons during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

General 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.

General 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 General 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 I.C.R.C. 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.

General Karpinski's lawyer, Neal A. 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 General 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 S. Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, ordered sweeping inquiries into whether any commanders — including General 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.

[Agathon]

If that's true then the occupation is doomed.

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Oerdin
It's sorry that 17 people out of 200,000 in the theater do something like this and so many posters here want to condemn everyone in Iraq.

I see this as being better then what most countries do. The Coalition exposed the abuse and has arrested those responsible while in a great many countries these would have been buried or over looked. At least we punish criminal behavior when we find it even if the people responsible are US soldiers.

Oerdin, how many of those 200,000 have been involved in the detention of the prisoners (and I'm not talking about those who would keep them a few days before sending them to whatever POW camp)? If we exclusively consider those who actually had to guard and handle the detainees, the figure could be much more ugly.

[Chemical Ollie]

A swedish reporter writes today that he spent two weeks with an American unit some months ago. He says that the whole family of a suspected insurgent could be taken hostage to blackmail him to turn himself in. Prisoners were forced to sit outside in pouring rain for 24 hours, some were humiliated sexually, photographed and laughed at. A "Sergeant Mikael" is quoted: - All Iraqis are liers. The only Iraqis I want to meet are the dead ones.

http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/story/0,2789,471697,00.html

[Kropotkin]

To be fair Ollie, Aftonbladet can hardly be seen as the most unbiased and serious paper around. Still, if half of it is true, it's still a gloomy picture of the situation.


(Kom att tänka på nåt nån reporter skrev i aftonbladet för ett tag sedan, något i stil med;"I england är begreppet tabloid nedvärderande medan det i sverige är en kvalitetstämpel" Snacka om att vara lojal till sin egen arbetsplats.)

[Sikander]

The most contemptable people I ever met in the Army were Military Police. I knew a lot of Interrogators, and the worst of them was better than the best MP I met. Fry the lot.

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by Kropotkin
To be fair Ollie, Aftonbladet can hardly be seen as the most unbiased and serious paper around. Still, if half of it is true, it's still a gloomy picture of the situation.

On the other hand, Aftonbladet is the only newspaper in Sweden that actually has a reporter in Iraq (to my knowledge). The other media rely on services like Reuters and AP. Urban Hamid also does some reports in Swedish Radio and TV. But his bias seems to have gone from neutral to quite anti-american recently. Well, as his father came from Iraq, he is expected to have some pro-iraqian bias.

[Dis]

shocking

perhaps the U.S. military should be disbanded.

[Kuciwalker]