[Previous entry: "Israel Vows 'Crushing' Response to Attacks"] [Next entry: "Opinions Differ on Rising Price of Gold"]

09/24/2005:

"US Army Whistleblowers Describe Routine, Severe Abuse"

WASHINGTON - As a military jury in Texas considers the fate of Lynndie England, the low-ranking reservist pictured in the notorious photos of the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003, two sergeants and a captain in one of the U.S. Army's most decorated combat units have come forward with accounts of routine, systematic and often severe beatings committed against detainees at a base near Fallujah from 2003 through 2004.

According to their testimony, featured in a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), beatings and other forms of torture were often either ordered or approved by superior officers and took place on virtually a daily basis. The soldiers, all of whom had also been deployed to Afghanistan before coming to Iraq, testified that the same techniques were used in both countries.

The beatings were so severe that they resulted in broken bones "every other week" at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury, where detainees would ordinarily be held for three or four days before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. In one case, an Army cook broke the leg of a detainee with a metal baseball bat, according to one of the sergeants quoted in the report, entitled "Leadership Failure".

Residents of Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold since the 2003 invasion, referred to the unit as "The Murderous Maniacs", because of their treatment of detainees, according to the report.
Full: commondrams.org