[pjnews] Stories from Iraq
Info about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list is at the bottom of this message. http://electroniciraq.net/news/printer1899.shtml electronicIraq.net Iraq Diaries Please, Tell Your Military Families... Sheila Provencher, Electronic Iraq 6 March 2005 Being in Iraq is so different from reading about it or watching TV. In Amman the week before I left, I felt scared and uncertain. All of my friends, understandably, warned me about going back to Baghdad: It is too dangerous, people kidnapped on the roads, foreigners could put Iraqi lives in danger. But in Iraq -even hearing occasional distant booms or gunfire a neighborhood away- this place is most basically Home, home to millions of people. In my neighborhood, the same kids run down the street to shake my hand, my shopkeeper friends test out my new Arabic and give me a thumbs-up. My host family, once threatened, wants me to sleep over again. Iraqi human-rights colleagues are glad that CPT is still here, and they want us to stay even if there is risk. Last week, I found out one of the reasons why. Horrible things are happening, and too many people feel that there is no one left to tell the story. In the last week, I have seen the outskirts of Fallujah, talked with refugees, and heard several first-person testimonies of countless civilian deaths. The stories are hard to read and to hear. I also have been reading more about PTSD and returning soldiers who cannot adapt to regular life again after they have killed other human beings in Iraq and/or seen their friends killed. The following reflection is longer than usual. I am sorry, there was no other way to convey what happened. Peace and blessings to you... Sheila Provencher The Fallujah neighborhood looks like the wreckage of sand castles or abandoned ruins. My CPT colleague Allan and I, as well as an Iraqi human-rights activist, an Iraqi pharmacist, and the driver, stare as we pass by on the highway. (It is February 24, 2005. We are on our way to a refugee camp in Amoriyah, a village between Fallujah and Ramadi.) The neighborhood on Fallujah's outskirts is only about 150 meters from the road. At least every third house is destroyed, ceilings caved in, walls disappeared or crumbling. The homes are deserted, the streets empty. A mile-long line of cars snakes from the highway onto the main road leading into the city, through numerous checkpoints so time-consuming that most men stand waiting outside their cars, talking and squinting into the sun. The highway leading toward Ramadi is closed, and we have to take back roads to Amoriyah. Our Iraqi host, a female human-rights activist and one tough lady, said that the U.S. military has surrounded Ramadi in the same way they surrounded Fallujah months ago in an assault that was supposed to break the resistance. I should feel scared, but somehow do not. It is a strange peace, to ride these back roads through Iraqi farmlands just starting to bloom. We pass apricot trees, white apple blossoms, date palms, and fields of barley and alfalfa. Cows grazing. Women, children, and men working the fields. A young man walks along the road with a six-foot sapling for planting, and a car bedecked with wedding garlands passes by in the opposite direction. We arrive in Amoriyah, a community of uniform white six-story apartment buildings created for employees of the nearby industrial complex. Today, Amoriyah houses more than 600 families who fled the U.S. assaults on Fallujah. We go to the primary school, now a refugee camp. Five makeshift tents fill one medium-sized room, one family per tent. The room's ceiling tiles are falling out, windows are papered over, and water puddles on the floor. One barrel-shaped gas oven sits in the center of the room. An elderly woman who cannot remember her age welcomes us and says that her whole extended family-sons, their wives and children--lives there. I meet tiny Riaad ad Deen, a two-month-old baby who was born in the camp. Zaneb, a 13-year-old girl both smiling and serious, watches over the younger children who clamor for the foreigners' attention. Then the fathers and uncles come to talk, and I cannot keep up with the rapid Arabic full of stories of suffering. Our Iraqi friend translates: Most people have lost their homes in the bombing. Some have lost family members and neighbors. All are angry. After awhile we walk to another room, down the hall from the one bathroom that is shared by 40 families. A young man steps forward. We did not know the evacuation deadline, he says. I left the city by chance on the day the bombs began, and then I could not get back in. My brother, who is mentally handicapped, was left behind. When we went back after the attack, he was missing. I looked on the list of people killed, I asked at prisons, but there was no answer. The Americans told me to ask the Iraqi National Guard, and I did, but
[pjnews] Army Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail
Info about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list is at the bottom of this message. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/12/politics/12detain.html? March 12, 2005 Army Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail By DOUGLAS JEHL, New York Times WASHINGTON, March 11 - Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in Afghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative reports that have not yet been made public. One soldier, Pfc. Willie V. Brand, was charged with manslaughter in a closed hearing last month in Texas in connection with one of the deaths, another Army document shows. Private Brand, who acknowledged striking a detainee named Dilawar 37 times, was accused of having maimed and killed him over a five-day period by destroying his leg muscle tissue with repeated unlawful knee strikes. The attacks on Mr. Dilawar were so severe that even if he had survived, both legs would have had to be amputated, the Army report said, citing a medical examiner. The reports, obtained by Human Rights Watch, provide the first official account of events that led to the deaths of the detainees, Mullah Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar, at the Bagram Control Point, about 40 miles north of Kabul. The deaths took place nearly a year before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Among those implicated in the killings at Bagram were members of Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C. The battalion went on to Iraq, where some members established the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib and have been implicated in some abuses there. The reports, from the Army Criminal Investigation Command, also make clear that the abuse at Bagram went far beyond the two killings. Among those recommended for prosecution is an Army military interrogator from the 519th Battalion who is said to have placed his penis along the face of one Afghan detainee and later to have simulated anally sodomizing him (over his clothes). The Army reports cited credible information that four military interrogators assaulted Mr. Dilawar and another Afghan prisoner with kicks to the groin and leg, shoving or slamming him into walls/table, forcing the detainee to maintain painful, contorted body positions during interview and forcing water into his mouth until he could not breathe. American military officials in Afghanistan initially said the deaths of Mr. Habibullah, in an isolation cell on Dec. 4, 2002, and Mr. Dilawar, in another such cell six days later, were from natural causes. Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, the American commander of allied forces in Afghanistan at the time, denied then that prisoners had been chained to the ceiling or that conditions at Bagram endangered the lives of prisoners. But after an investigation by The New York Times, the Army acknowledged that the deaths were homicides. Last fall, Army investigators implicated 28 soldiers and reservists and recommended that they face criminal charges, including negligent homicide. But so far only Private Brand, a military policeman from the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cincinnati, and Sgt. James P. Boland, from the same unit, have been charged. The charges against Sergeant Boland for assault and other crimes were announced last summer, and those against Private Brand are spelled out in Army charge sheets from hearings on Jan. 4 and Feb. 3 in Fort Bliss, Tex. The names of other officers and soldiers liable to criminal charges had not previously been made public. But among those mentioned in the new reports is Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, the chief military intelligence officer at Bagram. The reports conclude that Captain Wood lied to investigators by saying that shackling prisoners in standing positions was intended to protect interrogators from harm. In fact, the report says, the technique was used to inflict pain and sleep deprivation. An Army report dated June 1, 2004, about Mr. Habibullah's death identifies Capt. Christopher Beiring of the 377th Military Police Company as having been culpably inefficient in the performance of his duties, which allowed a number of his soldiers to mistreat detainees, ultimately leading to Habibullah's death, thus constituting negligent homicide. Captain Wood, who commanded Company A in Afghanistan, later helped to establish the interrogation and debriefing center at Abu Ghraib. Two Defense Department reports have said that a list of interrogation procedures she drew up there, which went beyond those approved by Army commanders, may have contributed to abuses at Abu Ghraib. Past efforts to contact Captain Wood, Captain Beiring and Sergeant Boland, who were mentioned in passing in earlier reports, and to learn the identity of their lawyers, have been unsuccessful. All have been named in previous Pentagon reports and news accounts about
