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Iraq
Detainees Fared Worse in Iraqi Hands, Logs Say
2010-10-24
Gee, no kidding. In a part of the world where prisoners have never been treated well, it turns out that American treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib really was an aberration on the part of our soldiers. Whereas, that sort of abusive treatment was a daily occurrence at Iraqi facilities. The NYT reporters wring their hands a lot in this long piece (just the first few paragraphs presented here), point to some Wikileaks documents, and note that President Bambi is depending on these same Iraqi police units to run the place after we pull out. No doubt the IP will have changed their tactics by then: they'll quit filing written reports.
The public image of detainees in Iraq was defined by the photographs, now infamous, of American abuse at Abu Ghraib, like the hooded prisoner and the snarling attack dog. While the documents disclosed by WikiLeaks offer few glimpses of what was happening inside American detention facilities, they do contain indelible details of abuse carried out by Iraq's army and police.

The six years of reports include references to the deaths of at least six prisoners in Iraqi custody, most of them in recent years. Beatings, burnings and lashings surfaced in hundreds of reports, giving the impression that such treatment was not an exception. In one case, Americans suspected Iraqi Army officers of cutting off a detainee's fingers and burning him with acid. Two other cases produced accounts of the executions of bound detainees.

And while some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans, most noted in the archive seemed to have been ignored, with the equivalent of an institutional shrug: soldiers told their officers and asked the Iraqis to investigate.

A Pentagon spokesman said American policy on detainee abuse "is and has always been consistent with law and customary international practice." Current rules, he said, require forces to immediately report abuse; if it was perpetrated by Iraqis, then Iraqi authorities are responsible for investigating.
Posted by:Steve White

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