Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Are we ashamed yet?
There are some 107 children imprisoned in Iraq-- this translation of an article in Der Spiegel was posted on -- interestingly enough -- the 4th of July this year. (link via Sadly, No!)

Sadly No! continues the coverage on 7 July with links from Norway:

From his cell in the adult's section he hears a girl of maybe 12 years of age crying. Later he found out that her brother was held in a cell on the second floor of the prison. Once or twice he says, he saw the girl himself. [...] "She called out her brother's name. She was beaten, she cried out "they took off my clothes, they poured water on me." --Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz

Finally, those reports seem to be making their way to the rest of the western press, including the Sunday Herald, posted 8/1 and Rolling Stone. (via Body & Soul and Left Coaster, respectively.)

The Sunday Herald's piece seems to quote almost word for word the story originally from Norway.

It was early last October that Kasim Mehaddi Hilas says he witnessed the rape of a boy prisoner aged about 15 in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets," he said in a statement given to investigators probing prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. "Then, when I heard the screaming I climbed the door ... and I saw [the soldier's name is deleted] who was wearing a military uniform." Hilas, who was himself threatened with being sexually assaulted in Abu Graib, then describes in horrific detail how the soldier raped "the little kid".

In another witness statement, passed to the Sunday Herald, former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod said: "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a US soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young."

In the Rolling Stone article, Osha Davidson takes a look at the "106 annexes" to the Taguba report that Defense classified last spring, and also cites Hillas' account above.

In additin, there's a bit on those in charge:

Nevertheless, the classified annexes indicate that responsibility for the torture extends at least as high as several top-ranking officers in Iraq who have yet to be disciplined or removed from command. Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, who remains director of military intelligence in Iraq, was aware of the conditions at Abu Ghraib and received regular reports from officers at the prison. Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, who directed intelligence at the prison, admitted to Taguba that he did not actually report to the British colonel who was supposedly his supervisor. "On paper, I work directly for him," Jordan told Taguba. "But between you, me and the fence post, I work directly for General Fast." Fast is currently under investigation, but unlike lower-ranking officers and soldiers, she has not been reprimanded or charged in the abuses.

More on Maj. General Barbara Fast here:

Among the handful of Army officers facing scrutiny in the investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast is perhaps the least known, but among the most important.

Fast, 50, the senior intelligence officer in Iraq, was the key conduit for orders and information that related to Abu Ghraib, which she visited frequently, including the infamous cellblocks 1A and 1B, where abuses took place.

A civilian interrogator at the prison wrote that she was involved in CIA access, and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was the overall commander of military police at the facility, said Fast was aware of a Red Cross report revealing wrongdoing at the prison three months before the scandal broke.

Fast approved the order putting Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of a military intelligence brigade at Abu Ghraib in overall command of the prison. She prodded him for fresh information from detainees so insistently that he remarked, "It's worse than a root canal," Karpinski said.

Fast also installed Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an aggressive interrogator who said that he "only reported to her," said Army officers and soldiers who served with Fast in Iraq.

And -- set to be published around Friday(?) of this week is a draft report from Don Rummy's handpicked commission investigating the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. While the article notes that the report may implicitly or explicitly rebuke and reprimand, its original charter was to provide "professional advice" and even "steer clear of 'issues of personal accountability,' which Rumsfeld said 'will be resolved through established military justice and administrative procedures.'"

A lot of good all these reports are going to do...

posted by claudine |Added at 11:20 PM| | politics, torture, iraq, children