Not in your name?
The Washington Post reports that Gen. Ricardo Sanchez
was present during abuses committed at Abu Ghraib:
The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that
Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior
military officers were aware of what was taking place
on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend
Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd
Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing
that was open to the public, Shuck said the company
commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to
testify in exchange for immunity. The military
prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say
under oath.
"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify
that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?"
asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.
"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer
of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two
children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."
Associated Press and TIME report that 2,000 pages were
"missing" from the copy of Gen. Taguba's expose
delivered to the US Senate:
Something may be missing from the Senate's copy of the
Army report on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.
Two-thousand pages or more.
Time magazine says Senate aides discovered about a
third of the pages were missing as they were putting
the report into binders.
It was supposed to be six-thousand pages.
The report by Major General Antonio Taguba
(tuh-GOO'-buh) was the basis for this month's hearings
by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had the report with him when
he testified before the committee. Copies were
delivered to the committee afterward.
BUT the "US Mainstream News Media" still hasn't dealt
with the worst of the incredible shrinking _resident's
foolish military adventure in Iraq...
Guardian: The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe...
Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US military in January, headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor" was entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees - who form
a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in
US custody since last year's invasion - have also been
abused. Nobody appears to know how many. But among the
1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside
Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report,
images of a US military policeman "having sex" with an
Iraqi woman.
Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and
photographed naked female detainees. The Bush
administration has refused to release other
photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare
their breasts (although it has shown them to Congress)
- ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in
Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent further
domestic embarrassment.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,3604,1220673,00.html
The other prisoners
Most of the coverage of abuse at Abu Ghraib has
focused on male detainees. But what of the five women
held in the jail, and the scores elsewhere in Iraq?
Luke Harding reports
Thursday May 20, 2004
The Guardian
The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not
by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December
2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad
managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so
shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the
other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain
access to the US jail found them hard to believe.
The note claimed that US guards had been raping women
detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at
Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it
added. The women had been forced to strip naked in
front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi
resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further
shame.
Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now
representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to
piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture
perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in
detention without charge. This was not only true of
Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it,
"happening all across Iraq".
In November last year, Swadi visited a woman detainee
at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police
compound in Baghdad. "She was the only woman who would
talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she
had been raped," Swadi says. "Several American
soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them
off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the
stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and
husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about
this.'"
Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US
military in January, headed by Major General Antonio
Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of
Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor" was
entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the
focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been
on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in
front of US women soldiers, there is now
incontrovertible proof that women detainees - who form
a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in
US custody since last year's invasion - have also been
abused. Nobody appears to know how many. But among the
1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside
Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report,
images of a US military policeman "having sex" with an
Iraqi woman.
Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and
photographed naked female detainees. The Bush
administration has refused to release other
photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare
their breasts (although it has shown them to Congress)
- ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in
Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent further
domestic embarrassment.
Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in
her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at
Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre
after being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann Clwyd,
who investigated the case and found it to be true,
said, "She was held for about six weeks without
charge. During that time she was insulted and told she
was a donkey."
In Iraq, the existence of photographs of women
detainees being abused has provoked revulsion and
outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women
involved may since have disappeared, according to
human rights activists. Professor Huda Shaker
al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University
who is researching the subject for Amnesty
International, says she thinks "Noor" is now dead. "We
believe she was raped and that she was pregnant by a
US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to
her house. The neighbours said her family had moved
away. I believe she has been killed."
Honour killings are not unusual in Islamic society,
where rape is often equated with shame and where the
stigma of being raped by an American soldier would,
according to one Islamic cleric, be "unbearable". The
prospects for rape victims in Iraq are grave; it is
hardly surprising that no women have so far come
forward to talk about their experiences in US-run
jails where abuse was rife until early January.
One of the most depressing aspects of the saga is
that, unaccountably, the US military continues to hold
five women in solitary confinement at Abu Ghraib, in
cells 2.5m (8ft) long by 1.5m (5ft) wide. Last week,
the military escorted a small group of journalists
around the camp, where hundreds of relatives gather
every day in a dusty car park in the hope of news.
The prison is protected by guard towers, an outer
fence topped with razor wire, and blast walls. Inside,
more than 3,000 Iraqi men are kept in vast open
courtyards, in communal brown tents exposed to dust
and sun. (Last month, nearly 30 detainees were killed
in two separate mortar attacks on the prison; about a
dozen survivors are still in the hospital wing,
shackled to their beds with leather belts.) As our bus
pulled up, the men ran towards the razor wire. They
unfurled banners and T-shirts that read: "Why are we
here?" "When are you going to do something about this
scandal?" "We cannot talk freely."
The women, however, are kept in another part of the
prison, cellblock 1A, together with 19 "high-value"
male detainees. It is inside this olive-painted block,
which leads into a courtyard of shimmering green
saysaban trees and pink flowering shrubs, that the
notorious photographs of US troops humiliating Iraqi
prisoners were taken, many of them on the same day,
November 8 2003. A wooden interrogation shed is a
short stroll away. As we arrived at the cellblock, the
women shouted to us through the bars. An Iraqi
journalist tried to talk to them; a female US soldier
interrupted and pushed him away. The windows of the
women's cells have been boarded up; birds nest in the
outside drainpipe. Captain Dave Quantock, now in
charge of prisoner detention at Abu Ghraib, confirmed
that the women prisoners are in solitary confinement
for 23 hours a day. They have no entertainment; they
do have a Koran.
Since the scandal first emerged there is general
agreement that conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved.
A new, superior catering company now provides the
inmates' food, and all the guards involved in the
original allegations of abuse have left.
Nevertheless, there remain extremely troubling
questions as to why these women came to be here. Like
other Iraqi prisoners, all five are classified as
"security detainees" - a term invented by the Bush
administration to justify the indefinite detention of
prisoners without charge or legal access, as part of
the war on terror. US military officials will only say
that they are suspected of "anti-coalition
activities".
Two of the women are the wives of high-ranking and
absconding Ba'ath party members; two are accused of
financing the resistance; and one allegedly had a
relationship with the former head of Iraq's secret
police, the Mukhabarat. The women, in their 40s and
50s, come from Kirkuk and Baghdad; none has seen their
families or children since their arrest earlier this
year.
According to Swadi, who managed to visit Abu Ghraib in
late March, the allegations against the women are
"absurd". "One of them is supposed to be the mistress
of the former director of the Mukhabarat. In fact,
she's a widow who used to own a small shop. She also
worked as a taxi driver, ferrying children to and from
kindergarten. If she really had a relationship with
the director of the Mukhabarat, she would scarcely be
running a kiosk. These are baseless charges," she adds
angrily. "She is the only person who can provide for
her children."
The women appear to have been arrested in violation of
international law - not because of anything they have
done, but merely because of who they are married to,
and their potential intelligence value. US officials
have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in
the hope of convincing male relatives to provide
information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to
find a male suspect, they will frequently take away
his wife or daughter instead.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, whose
devastating report on human rights abuses of Iraqi
prisoners was delivered to the government in February
but failed to ring alarm bells, says the problem lies
with the system. "It is an absence of judicial
guarantees," says Nada Doumani, spokesperson for the
ICRC. "The system is not fair, precise or properly
defined."
During her visit to Abu Ghraib in March, one of the
prisoners told Swadi that she had been forced to
undress in front of US soldiers. "The Iraqi translator
turned his head in embarrassment," she said. The
release of detainees, meanwhile, appears to be
entirely arbitrary: three weeks ago one woman prisoner
who spoke fluent English and who had been telling her
guards that she would sue them was suddenly released.
"They got fed up with her," another lawyer, Amal
Alrawi, says.
Last Friday, about 300 male prisoners were freed from
Abu Ghraib, the first detainees to be released since
the abuse scandal first broke. A further 475 are due
to be released tomorrow, although it is not clear if
any of the women will be among them. General Geoffery
Miller, who is responsible for overhauling US military
jails in Iraq, has promised to release 1,800 prisoners
across Iraq "within 45 days". Some 2,000 are likely to
remain behind bars, he says. Iraqi lawyers and
officials aredemanding that the US military hands the
prisons over to Iraqi management on June 30, when the
coalition transfers limited powers to a UN-appointed
caretaker Iraqi government. Last week, Miller said
"negotiations" with Iraqi officials were ongoing.
Relatives who gathered outside Abu Ghraib last Friday
said it was common knowledge that women had been
abused inside the jail. Hamid Abdul Hussein, 40, who
was there hoping to see his brother Jabar freed, said
former detainees who had returned to their home town
of Mamudiya reported that several women had been
raped. "We've know this for months," he said. "We also
heard that some women committed suicide."
While the abuse may have stopped, the US military
appears to have learned nothing from the experience.
Swadi says that when she last tried to visit the women
at Abu Ghraib, "The US guards refused to let us in.
When we complained, they threatened to arrest us."