[News] New Evidence of Recent Torture in Iraq

Tue Aug 31 08:52:48 EDT 2004

American Lawyer Finds New Evidence of Recent Torture in Iraq
Lisa Ashkenaz Croke, <http://newstandardnews.net>The NewStandard
http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=911

August 30 -- While the latest reports investigating the widely condemned 
events at Abu Ghraib prison attempt to close the book on the Pentagon's 
culpability with a somber critique, new evidence gathered for a class 
action lawsuit filed against two US-based private contractors could prove 
that the scandal at Abu Ghraib was far from an isolated series of incidents 
perpetrated by a few rowdy "bad apples" working the night shift during 
Ramadan.

An attorney representing former detainees says his recent fact-finding 
mission to Baghdad uncovered dozens of cases of physical and psychological 
abuse, sexual humiliation, religious desecration and rape in ten US-run 
prisons throughout occupied Iraq.

The NewStandard spoke with Michigan-based attorney Shereef Akeel, who 
interviewed some 50 former detainees about their time and treatment in US 
custody. Part of the legal team behind a class action lawsuit against the 
firms for their employees' involvement in prison abuse at US-run facilities 
in Iraq, the former immigration lawyer found himself traveling to meet 
face-to-face with the people he is representing in the American court system.

His team has documented abuse dating from July 2003 to as recently as last 
month, when an Iraqi boy just fifteen years old says his captors at an 
American facility raped him. "He was told to go on all fours naked and was 
sodomized from behind," Akeel conveyed the fifteen year-old's testimony. 
"He said they made him dance and he was crying."

A number of the incidents Akeel and his colleagues have recorded took place 
between January and July of this year. Emerging evidence that torture in US 
facilities continues months after the Abu Ghraib and other torture cases 
were revealed -- most of those having taken place in late 2003 and 
dismissed as the results of oversights corrected since -- could spell major 
problems for the US government and military.

Akeel and his colleagues are working in concert with the Center for 
Constitutional Rights to sue the US companies CACI International, Inc. and 
Titan Corp., which were respectively contracted to provide interrogators 
and translators to support the American military's efforts to obtain 
information from "security detainees" -- those thought to be involved in 
resisting the US occupation of Iraq. The Center for Constitutional Rights 
is a privately funded legal center that litigates on behalf of social 
movements and causes.

For its part, CACI International said in a press statement issued about the 
case: "CACI rejects and denies the allegations of the suit as being a 
malicious recitation of false statements and intentional distortions." The 
company added in its defense, "CACI has never entered into a conspiracy 
with the government, or anyone else, to perpetrate abuses of any kind." 
CACI also called the allegations of abuse "ill-informed" and "slanderous."

Titan Corp. spokesperson Wil Williams told The NewStandard his company's 
employees at US-run facilities in Iraq adhere strictly to their role as 
translators and are prohibited by company policy from engaging with 
prisoners in any other capacity. He said the class action lawsuit naming 
Titan is "baseless" and that Titan will "vigorously defend [against] it." 
He said it is "against company policy for any [employee] to engage in or 
observe" abusive behavior, and expressed confidence that had any Titan 
personnel so much as witnessed unlawful behavior, they would have reported it.

When asked if the witnesses identified the perpetrators as US military, 
mercenaries, Iraqis, private translators or others, Akeel sighed. 
"Honestly, the line was so blurred, and they were crossed all the time," he 
said. According to the testimony Akeel has collected, interrogators often 
donned US military uniforms, assailants entered cells naked or approached 
victims from behind, and at least one translator wielded an electrical stun 
device.

Williams was unaware that interpreters, whether representing Titan or not, 
were being accused of being in possession of any such devices. "A linguist 
is not supposed to be handling weapons," he said, adding that it is "beyond 
our imagination" that Titan employees would engage in abusive activities.

Regardless of the perpetrators' national or ethnic origins, Akeel and his 
clients hold the US military personnel who were involved in unlawful 
incidents and the corporations named in the suit responsible for abuse 
carried out in prisons controlled by the US military.

During the course of his investigation in Iraq, Akeel said, clear patterns 
emerged. According to Akeel, testimonials gathered individually from former 
captives held in US prisons all over Iraq indicate many of the common 
methods came into use across disparate, geographically distant detention 
centers.

Perhaps the most disturbing evidence Akeel found suggesting an overarching 
policy of abuse comes in the form of first-hand accounts that captors 
singled out religiously observant prisoners for particularly harsh abuse.

Akeel said former detainees told him that upon arrival at a US-run 
facility, they were each given a questionnaire asking them about their 
religious affiliation as well as their vices. In Akeel's words, the 
questions included: "Are you Sunni? Are you Shia? Do you drink? Do you not 
drink? Do you have a girlfriend?" Akeel said he found a consistent pattern 
among the cases: the stricter the religious observance a detainee reported 
to his captors, the more severe the treatment he would receive at their hands.

Akeel provided several examples of religious desecration, including stories 
of men who had purified themselves in an Islamic absolution ritual only to 
be subsequently doused with beer and alcohol by captors. At one prison, 
plaintiffs told Akeel, captors hung a picture of a pig on the wall toward 
which prisoners faced to worship and told them, "Pray to your pig."

In one horrific case recounted to Akeel, a naked woman wearing a strapped 
on sexual device raped an elderly man while he was fasting. The man said 
the woman came in silently behind him, "wearing a belt with a penis," Akeel 
relayed. The man told Akeel he could not determine whether his assailant 
was an American MP or a private contractor.

Akeel also uncovered a method, previously unknown to his legal team, by 
which captors were malicious in their matching of interpreters with the 
prisoners they would help interrogate. He said that in each interrogation 
case before him, the victim was assigned an interpreter with a 
"built-in-prejudice."

"All of the translators are of Arabic descent," Akeel said. "So they'd put 
an Egyptian Coptic [Christian] translator to look over the [Sunni Muslims]. 
It's like putting a Serb in charge of a Muslim [in the former Yugoslavia]. 
This is a pattern everywhere; [it was] very specific."

Akeel said he interviewed victims from across the social spectrum, "from 
lawyers to doctors, to kids, to the elderly, to housewives." He said US 
jailers and their contractors subjected all the plaintiffs to similar 
mistreatment.

One woman told Akeel she witnessed an imprisoned man and woman raped on her 
first night of incarceration.

Other witnesses said a group of naked male detainees was forced to serve 
food to naked female prisoners who begged the men to cover their eyes.

In another account, a doctor first taken to a presidential palace and made 
to stand there for hours on end, told Akeel that he was then taken to the 
Abu Ghraib prison where he watched a naked prisoner forced onto the running 
engine of a Humvee, leaving the man with irreparable burns.

Witnesses also told Akeel the famous Tikrit area stables of Saddam 
Hussein's son, Uday, now house Iraqi prisoners who are forced to urinate 
and defecate in the same stalls where they sleep.

Akeel returned from his mission to Baghdad last week. He said he is still 
processing everything he learned, and has agreed to provide The NewStandard 
detailed documentation confirming these accounts once he has organized the 
material. All of it, he said, will be introduced as part of the case 
against CACI and Titan.

One witness Akeel had hoped to interview will not be part of the lawsuit. 
Akeel said he was expecting to speak with a woman who had been raped at one 
US-run prison, and later discovered she was pregnant. Tragically, she 
killed herself before they could meet.

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Copyright 1994 The NewStandard. TNS Middle East Editor Brian Dominick 
contributed to this article. This is the first in a series of articles 
documenting new allegations of torture not covered by official US military 
reports.

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