see also: http://snipurl.com/6hpa US forces were taught torture techniques: Soldiers' accounts reveal widespread use of sleep deprivation and mock executions
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=23734 Bush torture techniques not confined to interrogation, or to Iraq Evidence Grows of More Widespread Abuse http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-05-13-warnings_x.htm?csp=24 U.S. missed chances to stop abuses -------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25266-2004May13.html 13 May 2004 Democrats Sharply Question Wolfowitz at Hearing By Thomas E. Ricks Washington - Senate Democrats lit into the Bush administration's Iraq policies Thursday, using an uncharacteristically contentious hearing on additional war spending to attack the Pentagon's No. 2 official in unusually personal and bitter terms. After listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testify before the normally stately Senate Armed Services Committee for several hours, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said, "What I've heard from you is dissembling and avoidance of answers, lack of knowledge, pleading process - legal process." Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., then hit Wolfowitz, who is seen as a major architect of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq, with a virtual indictment. "You come before this committee ... having seriously undermined your credibility over a number of years now," she said. "When it comes to making estimates or predictions about what will occur in Iraq, and what will be the costs in lives and money ... you have made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions." She quoted to him from his previous testimony from the runup to the war, in which he asserted that the Iraqi people would see the United States as their liberator, that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction and that then-Army chief Gen. Eric Shinseki's estimate that it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq was "outlandish." Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., usually the committee's fiercest critic of the Bush administration's stance on Iraq, seemed almost tame by comparison, using his questioning time simply to criticize the administration's "arrogance" and remind his colleagues to fulfill their constitutional duties. Wolfowitz, a former Yale political scientist who seems to enjoy political debate more than most senior Bush officials, ignored many of the attacks, including most of Clinton's charges. But he told her that in disagreeing with Shinseki's estimates on the troop requirements for postwar Iraq, he simply was siding with another senior Army general who was closer to the action, Gen. Tommy Franks, who was then chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq and the Middle East. [snip] ------------------ The Guardian-U.K. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1216645,00.html 14 May 2004 Guantanamo Abuse Same as Abu Ghraib, say Britons By Suzanne Goldenberg, Tania Branigan and Vikram Dodd Two British men who were held at Guantanamo Bay claimed that their US guards subjected them to abuse similar to that perpetrated at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In an open letter to President George Bush, Britons Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal accused US military officials of deliberately misleading the public about procedures at Guantanamo. Mr Rasul and Mr Iqbal, who were freed in March after being arrested in Afghanistan and held without charge for more than two years, allege that heavy-handed treatment was systematic. "From the moment of our arrival in Guantanamo Bay (and indeed from long before) we were deliberately humiliated and degraded by methods we now read US officials denying," the men write. The men describe a regime that included assaults on prisoners, prolonged shackling in uncomfortable positions, strobe lights, loud music and being threatened with dogs. At times, detainees would be taken to the interrogation room and chained naked on the floor, the letter says. Women would be brought to the room to "inappropriately provoke and indeed molest them. It was completely clear to all the detainees that this was happening to particularly vulnerable prisoners, especially those who had come from the strictest of Islamic backgrounds," the letter says. Mr Iqbal and Mr Rasul have issued repeated allegations of abuse at the camp since their release last March. Previous allegations were dismissed by the US embassy in London, but after two weeks in which America has been convulsed by images of torture and humiliation, their latest challenge looked set to receive a more serious hearing. The spotlight has shifted from Abu Ghraib to other detention facilities in America's war on terror as reports emerge from Afghanistan, as well as Iraq. Shortly before their release last March, the two men say a new practice was instituted in what became known as the "Romeo" block. Prisoners were stripped completely. "After three days they would be given underwear. After another three days they would be given a top, and then after another three days given trouser bottoms," the letter says. That account stands in direct contradiction to denials this week from a Pentagon spokesman, Colonel David McWilliams, that nudity and embarrassment were never used to break down prisoners. "We have no protocol that allows us to disrobe a detainee whatsoever," Col McWilliams told the Washington Post. Clive Stafford Smith, the lawyer who acted for Mr Rasul and Mr Iqbal in a supreme court case in the US, said: "These guys had been trying to put it all behind them, but they have been reading the stuff this week and getting really angry that the US is lying again." The Guardian has learned that some of the British detainees released from Guantanamo Bay have reported that they were sexually abused. There is no way to independently verify these details. According to a source, who has interviewed them in secret since their release, they were initially too ashamed to talk about it, and are only now starting to give details. The source said: "They are embarrassed about talking about it because they feel humiliated. We have had an account that their religion was used against them, that a copy of the Koran was brought in front of them and pages torn out." see also: http://snipurl.com/6hpe US guards 'filmed beatings' at terror camp
