Torture in Iraqi prisons: Standard U.S. procedure!

by Dave Bernt and Michael Schreiber

For well over a year the Bush administration and other supporters of the colonial occupation of Iraq have insisted that the invasion was a mission to bring democracy and human rights to the Middle East.

But the administration’s image of a benevolent and humane "liberation" of Iraq came crashing down last month when CBS’s "60 Minutes" showed pictures of U.S. soldiers committing torture and sexual humiliation on Iraqi prisoners. These atrocities took place at Abu Ghraib prison, known as the "Auschwitz" of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and now converted by the U.S. authorities for their own use.

On May 5, a new series of torture photographs appeared in the Washington Post. Hundreds more photos and videos on the subject, according to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s May 7 testimony before Congress, are in the Pentagon’s files.

Meanwhile, published interviews with former prisoners, their families, and GIs, and even the military’s own reports have made it clear that the torture of prisoners has been an integral part of U.S. policy—ordered by top officials and aimed at crushing the Iraqi resistance by any means necessary.

As outrage spread across the Middle East and much of the rest of the world, the Bush administration scrambled to try to limit the political damage. Speaking on Arab-language TV on May 4, the president promised a further investigation of conditions in the Iraq prisons—while stopping short of having his administration shoulder the blame.

Rumsfeld at first tried to deny the fact that torture had taken place, stating that the photos merely recorded a lesser form of "abuse" of Iraqi prisoners. Only after much domestic criticism and calls in Congress for Rumsfeld to resign, did Bush and the defense secretary finally offer a public apology for the atrocities.

But even the "shock" professed by Bush and other top officials rings hollow.

The White House has been forced to admit that Bush was informed as long ago as January about U.S. military reports of torture and deaths occurring in its prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Later, the military brass pressured CBS-TV to repress the photos or at least delay their broadcast.

It is obvious that the administration’s shock and sorrow do not arise so much from the atrocities themselves but from the mere fact that the torture photos were made public.

The "60 Minutes" and Washington Post photos show U.S. soldiers forcing Iraqi prisoners with sandbags over their heads into sexual acts—or mimicked versions of those acts. One snapshot shows Pvt. Lynndie England laughing and pointing at a naked Iraqi as he masturbates. Another shows England forcing a naked man to crawl on the floor as she pulls him with a dog leash.

Others show at least seven naked Iraqis face down and stacked on one another like a pyramid—eerily reminiscent of photos of piles of corpses taken at Nazi death camps. Two dead Iraqis appear in the "60 Minutes" pictures, including one who is bloodied—apparently from being beaten—and wrapped in cellophane and ice.

The released pictures opened up a flood of reports on brutal prison conditions in Abu Ghraib and the entire prison system in Iraq.

Seymour M. Hersch reported in an article in the May 5 New Yorker magazine that the Army, in an internal investigation completed by Major Gen. Antonio M. Taguba in February, documented numerous reports at Abu Ghraib of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses."

The Army’s internal investigation found that instances of abuse of Iraqi prisoners included "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; sodomizing 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."

The initial reaction of military officials was to lay blame on the seven soldiers identified in the "60 Minutes" photos. Hersch’s investigation, however, tells a different story.

Far from being aberrant acts by a few individuals, Hersch found through the Army’s own report and interviews with other soldiers that this behavior has been systematically encouraged by military intelligence officials, as well as by private contractors, as a method to obtain information from captured Iraqis.

Brig. General Janis Karpiniski, who was in charge of the Army Reserve division that administered Abu Ghraib, told The New York Times that CIA officials and others often joined in interrogations and had at times exclusive control over the cell block where the "60 Minutes" photos were taken.

Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, a guard at Abu Ghraib, said in e-mails released by his family that CIA officers and private interrogation specialists from civilian contractors were in charge of interrogations. When Sgt. Frederick questioned the brutal treatment of prisoners, including "leaving inmates in their cells with no clothes or female underpants…" he said, "the answer I got was, 'This is how Military Intelligence wants it’" (London Guardian, May 6, 2004).

The May 8 Guardian cites UK military sources as stating that the acts of ill treatment and humiliation used by U.S. authorities at Abu Ghraib and other prisons (placing hoods over inmates, sleep and food deprivation, sexual degradation, etc.) are part of a standard system of interrogation called R2I.

One former British special forces officer who had returned recently from Iraq told the Guardian: "It was clear from discussions with U.S. private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

He said that British and U.S. military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques at an interrogation center in Britain. "There is a reservoir of knowledge," he stated, "about these interrogation techniques, which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq."

Two CIA manuals obtained by the Baltimore Sun in 1997 also contain instructions on coercive interrogation techniques similar to those in use at Abu Ghraib. The U.S. military and its surrogate armies used these methods in their counter-revolutionary wars in Central America in the 1980s (see the Guardian, May 6, 2004).

Another internal Army report prepared by one of the Army's chief law-enforcement officers, Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, suggested widespread human-rights abuses in Iraqi prisons. Hersch wrote of the report in the New Yorker: "There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan War that Military Police had worked with intelligence operatives to 'set favorable conditions’ for subsequent ‘interviews’—a euphemism for breaking the will of prisoners."

The Taguba report likewise found that the CIA, Army officers, and private contractors had "actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."

The New York Times reported on May 4 that throughout Iraq "prisoners and human rights officials said scores of complaints documented a pattern of excessively rough treatment." Many of the detained and tortured, including women and teenagers, are innocent civilians who were picked up in the U.S. military's regular sweeps at highway checkpoints.

One man, according to The Times, "said he was arrested in November on charges of carrying out attacks on Americans. He said he and other prisoners had been beaten regularly at Abu Ghraib and had been forced to strip naked and bend over a wall, leading him to believe he would be raped."

Iraqi citizens report numerous cases of extreme brutality being used in arrests by U.S. troops, including beatings; confiscating money, cars, and valuables; demolishing houses and farm buildings; killing livestock; and even summary executions (see Pacifica Radio’s democracynow.org for its May 7 broadcast).

Human rights groups, The New York Times reported, have documented some of these cases: "American soldiers burst into houses with excessive force, breaking furniture and windows, using foul language, placing hoods over their heads and beating them."

Abbas Mehdi, a 51-year-old Iraqi, said that on Dec. 2, U.S. soldiers barged into his house at gunpoint and handcuffed his wife and children, beat him, placed a hood on his head, and then urinated on him.

Another Iraqi, Mowafak Sami, reported that he and his father and brothers were arrested in March. While in prison, Mowafak was beaten over the head with the barrel of a gun. Mowafak, his family, and other prisoners were forced to do knee bends, and stand on one leg with arms extended for as long as an hour at a time. His father was released after five days and Mowafak in nine days; however, he said his brothers are still in prison.

The U.S. acts of torture are the work of a brutal conquest for oil and power, not of a force for democracy. That force will be the Iraqi people, whose self-determination cannot be won until all foreign troops and their torture cells leave the country.

This article first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.