From New York Newsday, 5/7/04:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-woabuse0508,0,921242.story?coll=ny-top-headlines
U.S. ignored torture allegations
BY JAMES RUPERT
Staff Correspondent
U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington ignored human rights
monitors' repeated pleas for official investigations of American
abuse, torture and killings of Iraqi prisoners over the past year,
international and Iraqi human rights officials said Friday.
And human rights groups rejected Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
assertion that such abuses are "an exception," saying they are
widespread in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the U.S. war on
terror.
Asked by reporters when the U.S. administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer,
first heard of allegations that U.S. soldiers had been mistreating
Iraqi prisoners, his spokesman, Dan Senor, said Bremer "was made aware
of the charges relating to the humiliation" of detainees at Abu Ghraib
prison in January, when U.S. forces began investigating.
The inquiry was prompted by a U.S. soldier's complaint to superiors
about the sexual humiliation of prisoners that he had witnessed at the
prison outside Baghdad.
But the U.S. authorities here had similar information from the
International Committee of the Red Cross for at least seven months
beforehand, said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, its operations director.
The Red Cross, which is the official global monitor of prisoners'
treatment under the Geneva Conventions, gathered testimony from
prisoners of abuses against them and reported the details "on several
occasions, orally and in writing, throughout 2003" to U.S. military
and civilian officials in Iraq, Kraehenbuehl told a news conference in
Geneva.
He declined to discuss details of the complaints, noting the Red Cross
normally reports only secretly to the governments holding prisoners.
But he confirmed as genuine published excerpts of a summary of the
reports that was submitted in February to Bremer.
The excerpts, published Friday by the Wall Street Journal, told of
Iraqi prisoners kept naked in dark cells and of Iraqi men forced to
walk about in women's underwear.
The Red Cross account also said prisoners died from shootings or
beatings by coalition prison guards. In one Abu Ghraib incident,
unarmed prisoners were killed by U.S. guards who fired from towers
around the prison, the report said.
The circumstances were not published.
"Our findings do not allow to conclude that what we were dealing with
here in the case of Abu Ghraib were isolated acts ... What we have
described amounts to a pattern and a broad system," Kraehenbuehl
declared.
He said occupation authorities made improvements on some issues raised
by the Red Cross, but other conditions "remained unacceptable."
The Bush administration and U.S. authority in Iraq effectively
stonewalled Amnesty International, said Alex Arriaga, the group's
government relations director.
"We compiled several stark cases of serious abuse . . ." and raised
them with the occupation authority in June, she said.
The group repeated its appeals in Washington, asking for official
investigations of abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, Arriaga said in a
phone interview.
U.S. officials "listened and never disputed any of the facts," she
said, but "we have never received any written response."
Iraqis, too, say they got no response.
The U.S.-appointed Iraqi minister for human rights, Abel Basset Turki,
said Bremer ignored Turki's face-to-face request in November for an
investigation of human rights violations, "in jails in particular."
Turki quit last month in protest of U.S. military strikes on the
cities of Fallujah and Najaf.
The Baghdad-based Human Rights Organization in Iraq sent memos to U.S.
officials for months last year and sought a meeting to present its
evidence of detainees being mistreated.
The Americans "would give excuses for not meeting," a leader of the
group, Adel al-Allami, told The Associated Press.
U.S. officials finally agreed to meet the group last month, he said.
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Bush administration crooked lying is endless.
Harry
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