|
Accusations of Mistreatment of POWs Have Been Ignored for Months
Detailed allegations of psychological abuse, deprivation, beatings and deaths at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq were met by public silence from the U.S. Army last October â six months before shocking photographs stirred world outrage and demands for action. .... These early accounts by freed prisoners, reported by The Associated Press last fall, told of detainees punished by hours lying bound in the sun; being attacked by dogs; being deprived of sufficient water; spending days with hoods over their heads. One told AP of seeing an elderly Iraqi woman tied up and lying in the dust; others told of ill men dying in crowded tents. They spoke repeatedly of being humiliated by American guards. None mentioned the sexual humiliation seen in recently released photos, but Arab culture might keep an Iraqi from describing such mistreatment. In contrast to suggestions that the photos indicate isolated abuse by a few, these Iraqis told of widespread practices in several camps that would violate the Geneva Conventions and other human rights standards. On Friday, in an unusual public statement, the international Red Cross agreed, disclosing that its inspectors last year found a "broad pattern" of abuse. On Oct. 18, AP posed specific questions about the reported abuses to the U.S. military command in Baghdad and the 800th Military Police Brigade, which was in charge of detainees at Baghdadâs Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities. The MP unit drafted responses, AP later learned, but the Baghdad command did not release them. No explanation was given. The AP report, published Nov. 1, cited a statement to Arab television by the MP commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, that prisoners were treated humanely. A long series of detailed accusations about mistreatment of prisoners. Much of what the ex-detainees told AP meshed with what delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outsiders allowed into the camps, were said to have found on visits last year. Those findings were confidential, but the human rights group Amnesty International said last summer it learned that the ICRC inspectors were finding serious abuses, and it charged that "torture and gross abuse of human rights" were occurring. On Friday, the Red Cross disclosed it had repeatedly demanded last year that U.S. authorities correct problems in the detention centers. The Americans took action on some issues but not others, it said. "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," Pierre Kraehenbuel, the Red Cross operations director, said in Geneva. Inside the camps, too, appeals were made. Saad Naif said one prominent detainee, a former Iraqi provincial governor, urged U.S. military officers to halt the abuses. "He told them, `What you are doing to the Iraqi people will turn against you,â and that they must win the support of the people, not the opposite," Naif said. "They told him to mind his own business." Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=32542 |