US Held Youngsters
At Abu Ghraib
BBC News
3-12-5
Children as young as 11 years old were held at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi
prison at the centre of the US prisoner abuse scandal, official
documents reveal.
Brig Gen Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of the jail, gave details
of young people and women held there.
Her assertion was among documents obtained via legal action by the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The Pentagon has admitted juveniles were among the detainees, but said
no child was subject to any abuse.
Brig Gen Karpinski made her remarks in an interview with a general
investigating the abuses at the prison.
'Innocent civilians'
The transcript of her May 2004 interview was among hundreds of pages
of papers obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act.
In one case, witness statements among the released documents allege
that four drunken Americans took a 17-year-old female prisoner from
her cell and forced her to expose her breasts and kissed her.
In another documented incident, troops are alleged to have smeared mud
on the detained 17-year-old son of an Iraqi general and forced his
father to watch him shiver in the cold.
Brig Gen Karpinski, who was in charge at Abu Ghraib from July to
November 2003, said she often visited the prison's youngest inmates.
She said in her interview that she thought one boy "looked like he was
eight years old".
"He told me he was almost 12," she said. "He told me his brother was
there with him, but he really wanted to see his mother, could he
please call his mother. He was crying."
She said the military began holding children and women at Abu Ghraib
from mid-2003. She did not say what the youngsters had been locked up
for.
In her interview with Maj Gen George Fay, she also said intelligence
officers had worked out an agreement to hold detainees without keeping
records.
The Pentagon has acknowledged holding so-called "ghost detainees" on
the basis that they were enemy combatants and therefore not entitled
to prisoner of war protections.
Brig Gen Karpinski said US commanders were reluctant to release
detainees, an attitude she called "releasophobia".
In her interview, she said Maj Gen Walter Wodjakowski, then the second
most senior army general in Iraq, told her in the summer of 2003 not
to release more prisoners, even if they were innocent.
"I don't care if we're holding 15,000 innocent civilians," she said
Maj Gen Wodjakowski told her. "We're winning the war."
The ACLU has sued US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of
four Iraqis and four Afghans who say they were tortured in US
facilities.
Mr Rumsfeld has stated that neither he nor his aides ever condoned or
authorised abuses.
Seven soldiers have been convicted by US courts martial in connection
with the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Two others are still on trial.
© BBC MMV
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4339511.stm
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