'Cooks and drivers were working as interrogators'
Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops, and incarcerated by under-qualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the notorious jail told the Guardian. Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guant?namo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators. . .
There is no evidence of abuses on the scale of Abu Ghraib being committed at Guant?namo Bay, but Mr Nelson said that like the Iraqi jail, it was packed with innocent people, who are only now being released.
"Mistakes were made and people who should never have been sent there ended up there, and it's taken this amount of time to get people to take the decision to get these people out of there," Mr Nelson said.
"All it takes is the signature of a low ranking NCO to send someone right around the world and have them locked up indefinitely but it takes the signature of the secretary of defence to let them go."
UK forces taught torture methods
The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."
He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands.
America as Empire - We Are Our Own Worst Enemies
All the right people have pronounced themselves, sickened, outraged, speechless. But listen more closely. "And it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines. . . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday.
Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us.
But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own internal report calls the abuse "systemic"). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals.
These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral. There's nothing surprising in this. These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo.
Look at these images closely and you realize that they can't just be the random accidents of war, or the strange, inexplicable perversity of a few bad seeds.
Not quite 50 years ago, Aime Cesaire, a poet and writer from Martinique, wrote in his "Discourse on Colonialism": "First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism."
Are we decivilized yet? Are we brutes yet? Of course not, say our leaders.
Cheif Weapons Inspector David Kay repeatedly warned of Iraqi prisoner abuses
"I was there and I kept saying the interrogation process is broken. The prison process is broken. And no one wanted to deal with it. It was too, too distasteful. This is a known problem, and the military refuses to deal with it."
Lynndie England from West Virginia Is Seen As Representing America Now
"A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq," Colleen Kesner said.
"To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised.
"Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting Iraqis."
In Fort Ashby, in the isolated Appalachian mountains 260km west of Washington, the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population talk openly about an active Ku Klux Klan presence.
There is little understanding of the issues in Iraq and less of why photographs showing soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, mostly from around Fort Ashby, abusing prisoners has caused a furore.
Down a dirt track at the edge of town, in the trailer where England grew up, her mother Terrie dismissed the allegations against her daughter as unfair.
"They were just doing stupid kid things, pranks. And what the Iraqis do to our men and women are just? The rules of the Geneva Convention, do they apply to everybody or just us?" she asked.
She said she didn't know where her daughter was being held, but had spoken to her on the phone.
"She told me nothing happened which wasn't ordered by higher up," she said.
"They are trying to pin all of this on the lower ranks. My daughter was just following orders. I think there's a conspiracy. "
A colleague of Lynndie's father said people in Fort Ashby were sick of the whining.
"We just had an 18-year-old from round here killed by the Iraqis," he said.
"We went there to help the jackasses and they started blowing us up. Lynndie didn't kill 'em, she didn't cut 'em up. She should have shot some of the suckers."
Reservist Tells of Orders From Intelligence Officers
There were no rules, by her account, and there was little training. But the mission was clear. Spec. Sabrina D. Harman, a military police officer who has been charged with abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation.
Harman, one of seven military police reservists charged in the abuse of detainees at the prison, is the second of those soldiers to speak publicly about her time at Abu Ghraib, and her comments echo findings of the Army's investigation into prisoner abuse there. That probe documented the maltreatment of detainees and found the prison was chaotically run, that there were no apparent rules governing interrogations and that Harman's military police unit was ill trained for the job it was asked to perform.
Men Who Ordered Waco Branch Davidian Assault are Key Players In Iraq
Both Peter J. Schoomaker and William G. "Jerry" Boykin, key players in the Iraq drama, were the same two men whose advice as Delta Force officers led to the FBI's use of the worst possible tactical approach at Waco. Schoomaker is Donald Rumsfeld's hand-picked Army chief of staff and one of the chief overseers of the Iraq occupation; Boykin -- whose bizarre religious comments last year sparked a brief controversy -- is the deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, the man charged with tracking down terrorist leaders and cracking down on insurgents in Iraq.
Claims US soldiers abused naked young girl at Iraqi prison
The US military has said it will investigate claims by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison that a girl as young as 12 was stripped and beaten by military personnel.
Suhaib al-Baz, a journalist for the al-Jazeera television network, claims to have been tortured at the prison, based west of Baghdad, while held there for 54 days.
Mr al-Baz was arrested when reporting clashes between insurgents and coalition forces in November.
He said: "They brought a 12-year-old girl into our cellblock late at night. Her brother was a prisoner in the other cells.
"She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her. Her brother was helpless and could only hear her cries. This affected all of us because she was just a child.
The allegations cannot be verified independently but Mr al-Baz maintains psychological and physical violence were commonplace in the jail.
Defense Secretary Warns of More Photos and Videos
"Be on notice," he said in a standing-room-only Senate hearing room. "There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist. If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse."
Thus far, no videotapes of abusive treatment have reached the public. But photographs of U.S. military guards physically and sexually humiliating detainees have ignited worldwide revulsion, inflaming anti-American sentiment abroad and sparking a political storm at home.
Pentagon officials have also told lawmakers that thousands of other damning photos, not yet publicized, may exist outside the Defense Department's control. Individual soldiers who took the photos have been "trading" them, and some may be negotiating to sell the videos to foreign television outlets, the officials said, according to the Senate aide.
One issue raised repeatedly with Rumsfeld yesterday, but left unresolved, involved the command structure at the Abu Ghraib prison. Lawmakers pressed him to explain the decision to place military guards under the command of military intelligence officers, who were reported to have encouraged the guards to help "set the conditions" for interrogations. Normally, the duties of military police serving as guards in detention centers are limited to caring for prisoners.
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