Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Reported After Abu Ghraib Disclosures

Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Reported After Abu Ghraib Disclosures:
“Two Defense Department intelligence officials reported observing brutal treatment of Iraqi insurgents captured in Baghdad in June, several weeks after disclosures of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison created a worldwide uproar, according to a memorandum disclosed Tuesday.

The memorandum, written by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to a senior Pentagon official, said that when the two members of his agency objected to the treatment, they were threatened and told to keep quiet by other military interrogators.

The memorandum said the Defense Intelligence Agency officials had seen prisoners being brought in to a detention center with burn marks on their backs and complaining about sore kidneys.

The document was disclosed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained it as part of a cache of papers from a civil lawsuit seeking to discover the extent of abuse of prisoners by the military.”


Other memorandums disclosed this week, including some released by the A.C.L.U., showed that the interrogation and detention system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had drawn strong objections from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which argued that the coercive techniques used there were unnecessary and produced unreliable information.

The Associated Press reported Monday that one F.B.I. official had written in a memorandum of witnessing a series of coercive procedures at Guantánamo, among them a female interrogator squeezing the genitals of a detainee and bending back his thumbs painfully.

The June 25 memorandum, written by Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was addressed to the under secretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen Cambone. Admiral Jacoby wrote that one of his officers had witnessed an interrogator from the Special Operations unit known as Task Force 6-26 "punch a prisoner in the face to the point the individual needed medical attention." The admiral said that when the D.I.A. official took photos of that detainee, the pictures were confiscated.

The memorandum said the two D.I.A. officials, who were not identified, had found the keys to their vehicles confiscated, and been instructed "not to leave the compound without specific permission, even to get a haircut"; they were also threatened, and told their e-mail messages were being screened. It said they had persevered and provided their accounts to superiors in the agency; the accounts reached Admiral Jacoby on June 24. The memo suggests that the incidents experienced by the officials occurred earlier in June.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/08/politics/08abuse.html

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