fresh evidence of the pervasive US military abuse of prisoners in Iraq: top General directly authorized illegal interrogation techniques.

AxisofLogic/ U.S. Military: "New documents confirm widespread US abuse of Iraqi prisoners, implicate top general | By Joseph Kay | Mar 30, 2005, 04:28

A new series of documents released over the weekend provides fresh evidence of the pervasive US military abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The documents were released by the Pentagon in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights and other organizations.

“These documents provide further evidence that the torture of detainees was much more widespread than the government has acknowledged,” said Jameel Jaffer, attorney for the ACLU. The actions revealed in the documents are all clear and direct violations of international law on the treatment of prisoners of war.

An additional document posted on the ACLU’s web site on Tuesday provides evidence that the former top military official in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, directly authorized illegal interrogation techniques.

The civil rights organization also charged that the Pentagon has abused a court order to turn over the documents in order to bury the scandal. “The documents were supposed to have been turned over to the ACLU on March 21, but were not released to the ACLU until late on Friday [March 25] of what for many is a holiday weekend [Easter],” ...
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Two days earlier, on December 9, another prisoner, Abu Malik Kenami, died of an apparent heart attack. One unsigned document reports, “From the 5th through the early morning of 9th of December there is a history with Kenami of not obeying the BHA rules for detainees; his punishment is ups and downs. Ups and downs is a correctional technique of having a detainee stand up and then sit down rapidly, always keeping them in constant motion.” Kenami had no history of heart problems, and no autopsy was performed.
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According to the officer, “Task Force Gunner continually detains local civilians on nothing more than a whim. At first, detainees were brought in for nothing more than having the equivalent of $100 on their possession.... Many times this task force kept the money and never returned it.... Of the over 650 detainees interrogated, only 20 have proven to be of any real intelligence value.”
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In another case, an artillery convoy opened fire on a vehicle that had allegedly fired on the convoy, “though the report failed to mention any weapons being recovered,” the officer wrote. “The bodies were promptly buried on Taji military complex, and when the family inquired as to their whereabouts, they were detained temporarily, and told to come back on the following day to claim the bodies. The father returned the next day, and had to dig the bodies of his sons up.”
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Documents dated August 16, 2003, describe one officer as telling one of his soldiers to take “take the detainee[s] out back and beat the f*** out of them.”
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“unregistered CIA detainees were brought to Abu Ghraib several times a week in late 2003, and...were hidden in a special row of cells. Military police soldiers came up with a rough system to keep track of such detainees with single-digit identification numbers, while others were dropped off unnamed, unannounced and unaccounted for.”