The searing report by the International Committee of the Red Cross on the abuse of Iraqi detainees at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere has fueled the developing furor in the United States and abroad.
Officials from President Bush down to field officers in Iraq have responded to its findings with the same terms they used to describe the recently released photos and videos of Iraqi prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib: “shocking,” “disgusting,” “appalling.”
According to a copy of the report, the ICRC found incidents of brutality during the capture and initial confinement of prisoners, “sometimes causing death or serious injury.”
The group also cited physical and psychological coercion during interrogations that included nudity and humiliation, excessive use of force during imprisonment and deliberately holding prisoners in areas where they were exposed to insurgent shelling.
The Pentagon has publicly treated the matter as one largely confined to the Abu Ghraib facility and a relative handful of wrongdoers.
“We find that we have . . . a few who have betrayed our values by their conduct,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told an audience of military personnel last week. “We know what our standards are. You know what you’re taught. And the terrible actions of a few don’t change that.”
But the Red Cross said some of the problems were pervasive throughout occupied Iraq.
“The ICRC collected allegations of ill-treatment following capture which took place in Baghdad, Basrah, Ramedi and Tikrit, indicating a consistent pattern with respect to times and places of brutal behavior during arrest,” the report said.
The Red Cross said it repeatedly attempted to inform the U.S.-led coalition of the mistreatment from the time of the U.S. advance into Iraq in March 2003 until last November, both in person and in writing.
It prepared its confidential report early this year in a renewed effort to bring top-level attention to the prisoner abuse, sending copies to civilian administrator Paul Bremer and other coalition officials in February. The Wall Street Journal first revealed the report’s contents.
The Pentagon says it launched several investigations after being informed of the human-rights violations at the prison near Baghdad by an enlisted man, but the matter did not become an international scandal until some of the photos and videos were made public.
The ICRC said it did not find ill treatment during interrogations systematic with all prisoners–just when it came to “persons arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an `intelligence’ value.”
Those people, the report said, “were at high risk of being subject to a variety of harsh treatments, ranging from insults, threats and humiliations to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture.”
The U.S. and coalition practice of keeping “high-value detainees” in solitary confinement at Baghdad International Airport for months–depriving them of sunlight for nearly 23 hours at a time–constituted “a serious violation” of the Geneva Conventions, the report said.
During periods of prison unrest or escape attempts, jail guards shot prisoners with live ammunition, killing some, when non-lethal means of subduing them were available.
The Red Cross also charged that arrests typically followed an abusive pattern, one reminiscent of British “Black and Tan” raids on the Irish during uprisings there.
“Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property,” the report said.
Rifles were pointed at people, who were sometimes kicked and punched.
The arresting parties almost never identified themselves and refused to explain why the detainees were being arrested or where they were being taken, the ICRC charged.
In the manner of the thousands of “disappeared” in Argentina during military rule there, Iraqi arrestees were sometimes detained for months before families learned their whereabouts.
In one of the most striking findings, Red Cross investigators said they were told by unnamed coalition military intelligence officers that an estimated 70 percent to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees proved to have been arrested by mistake.
In one incident cited by the ICRC, nine Iraqi men were arrested in a Basra hotel last September and allegedly had their money confiscated without any receipts. They were then taken to a detention facility and beaten severely, the ICRC said.
One of them, a 28-year-old father of two, died after having been heard by fellow prisoners screaming for help. The international death certificate for him listed “cardio-respiratory arrest” as the cause of death.
A 61-year-old prisoner at Camp Bucca complained that he had been hooded, tied and forced to sit on top of a vehicle engine, which caused him to suffer severe burns.
Interrogation methods used on Iraqi prisoners included extensive use of hooding, sometimes in conjunction with beatings, as it increased the prisoner’s apprehension of when the next blow would come, according to the report.
Prisoners were beaten with pistols and rifles, among other hard objects, and slapped, punched and kicked as well, it said.
Stripping prisoners was a common practice, the report alleged. They were held naked in solitary confinement and paraded naked with hoods or women’s underwear on their heads.
Some were also subjected to loud noise or music, or exposed to harsh sunlight at times when the temperature reached 122 degrees, the ICRC said.
“Stress positions,” in which detainees were made to stand, squat or be painfully handcuffed to their cells, were another tool of interrogation, the report said, as were sleep deprivation and constant exposure to bright light.
After observing the treatment of naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison last October, Red Cross investigators said they were told by coalition authorities there that this was “part of the process.”
The Red Cross cited many instances of guards shooting prisoners during periods of unrest or escape attempts. In one such incident at Abu Ghraib in June 2003, guards from three towers opened fire on demonstrating prisoners, killing one and wounding seven.
At the same prison last November, U.S. military police panicked upon seeing prisoners gather by a gate and opened fire, killing four detainees, the report said.
In response, coalition authorities said the use of firearms was legitimate.
Iraqi security personnel also took part in the abuse of prisoners, subjecting them to mock executions and beating the soles of their feet with sticks, the ICRC said.
U.S. authorities have said that the abuses are limited to a small number of military personnel and that the vast majority of American service people in Iraq are working hard to improve the lives of Iraqis and would never act inhumanely.
They also say they are aggressively investigating any potential mistreatment of detainees in Iraq or Afghanistan, including at least 20 investigations currently under way.
The Red Cross did note instances in which its complaints resulted in some improvement.
Guards at Camp Cropper in Baghdad, for example, stopped shooting detainees last November after getting complaints from the ICRC for five months, the group said.
A memorandum from the ICRC listing more than 200 allegations of mistreatment was sent to coalition authorities in May 2003 and forwarded to the U.S. military’s Central Command headquarters at Doha, Qatar.
“Subsequently, one improvement consisted of the removal of wristbands with the remark `terrorist’ [on them],” the report said.
But the ICRC concluded that many of the practices were ongoing.
At a Senate committee hearing last week, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that, thus far, the U.S.-led coalition had imprisoned some 43,600 Iraqi detainees, of whom 31,800 had been released–leaving some 11,800 behind barbed wire.
