We know you are innocent, but we’re pissing on your head
From Isen blog (who rarely, if ever, mentions foreign politics. A sign of the times, indeed. Everyone is talking about the Iraq prison tortures. Polizeros, which has been covering the story heavily, usually gets 1,200 people a day. Since the story broke, we’ve been getting 2,500-8,000 people a day, including thousands of search engine inquiries from people looking for the photos and more information.)
From today’s Washington Post:
Ahmad Naje Dulaimi, a waiter at a restaurant in Baghdad’s Adhamiya neighborhood, was arrested in the middle of the night of July 18. . . . A neighbor had . . . suggested to U.S. troops that he was a member of Hussein’s militia, Saddam’s Fedayeen.
Dualimi’s 11-month imprisonment began in the interrogation rooms of the Adhamiya Palace, a former Hussein villa now being used by U.S. troops. He spent the first night in the T-shirt and shorts he was sleeping in at the time of his arrest, but he was also hooded, with his hands and feet bound by plastic cuffs.
For two days, he consumed only a cracker and several sips of water, he said. On the third night, he was interrogated by two U.S. soldiers, a man and a woman, who were assisted by a Kuwaiti interpreter. The male soldier strode into the interrogation room, Dulaimi said, and immediately urinated on his head.
“They asked me about Baathists in the neighborhood, if there were officers, who sold weapons, and who were Fedayeen. I told them I knew nothing,” said Dulaimi, who also spent time in Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib before he was freed on Thursday, according to his release papers and prison identification bracelet. “They said, ‘We know you are innocent, but we want information from you. You know these people.’ ”
We know you are innocent, but we’re pissing on your head . . .
Top brass ‘picked man who ordered torture’
From Australia
The torture tactics used to “soften up” Iraqi detainees at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail began under orders from the highest level of the US defence administration, it was claimed yesterday.
The creation of torture units was the consequence of orders by the Defence Department – headed by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – to prise information out of prisoners.
Last August, the Department ordered General Geoffrey Miller – then in charge at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay – to go to Iraq to find ways to improve the flow of intelligence from detainees, an investigation by Britain’s Mail on Sunday newspaper has found.
The general recommended creating a single central interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib. It was in this unit where the degradation of Iraqi prisoners – now graphically exposed by more than 1000 photographs – took place.
Interesting. This major Australian newspaper is as much as saying that Rumsfeld ordered the tortures, aided happily by the overlord of the Gitmo hellhole and torture chamber, Geoffrey Miller.
Red Cross: Treatment of Iraqis ‘tantamount to torture’
Iraqi detainees considered likely intelligence sources faced coercion that in some cases was “tantamount to torture,” a Red Cross report concluded in February.
February! Yet Rumsfeld et al claim they had no clue. What a pack of liars. And is it not extraordinary for the Red Cross to make such a statement?
The report also said that up to 90 percent of Iraqis held by U.S. and allied troops have been arrested by mistake.
“In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information,” observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross found.
Intelligence officers told the ICRC that it was standard procedure to subject prisoners to “inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion, against persons deprived of their liberty to secure their cooperation.”
30 more torture scandals probed
From the UK Sunday Mail
Thirty cases of torture and murder by British and American troops against Iraqi POWs are being investigated by defence chiefs.
The probe will examine photos of members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, who appear to be urinating on a terrified Iraq captive.
The dossier of terror includes :
Claims that POWs were thrown to their deaths from a bridge. A videotape of the killings is said to have been destroyed.
The drowning of 16-year-old Ahmad Jabbar Kareem, who was allegedly forced into a canal by British soldiers near Basra.
