'Torture camp' alleged at 2nd detention center

By Bonnie Adams
Knight Ridder Newspapers

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — A U.S. resident who was held prisoner by the United States in another detention center in Iraq last year says prisoners there were also beaten and sexually humiliated.

Hossam Shaltout said widespread mistreatment by soldiers in Camp Bucca detention center in southern Iraq was as inhumane as that depicted in recent photos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

He described Camp Bucca as a "torture camp," where soldiers beat and humiliated prisoners. He said he saw soldiers tie groups of naked prisoners together. He said they hogtied his hands and legs and placed scorpions on his body.

"American soldiers love scorpions," Shaltout said in an interview arranged by his U.S. lawyer.

Shaltout, a native Egyptian, said he is a Canadian citizen and permanent U.S. resident but hasn't been allowed to return to the United States. Released last May, he's now living in Saudi Arabia and is seeking $350,000 from the government through the U.S. Army Claims Service for "torture and other personal injuries" while at Camp Bucca.

Shaltout alleged that several soldiers under the direction of 320th Military Police Master Sgt. Lisa Girman, of Hazleton, Pa., placed handcuffs and leg irons on him. He said Girman beat him after he went on a hunger strike.

Girman, 35, a Pennsylvania state police trooper, was among four soldiers with the 320th Military Police Battalion accused of beating prisoners last May. She was found guilty of one count each of abuse of prisoners and failing to safeguard them.

In Antioch, Calif., three U.S. military policemen who served at Abu Ghraib said they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.

"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, of the Army National Guard's 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
 
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression," he said.

Although public attention has focused on the dehumanizing photos, some members of the 870th MP unit say the faces in those images were not the only ones engaged in cruel behavior. Six enlisted personnel are facing military charges.

"It was not just these six people," said Sindar. "Yes, the beatings happen, yes, all the time."

Sindar and fellow military policeman Ramon Leal said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey" or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."

Leal said one female soldier in his unit fired off a slingshot into a crowd of prisoners. Sindar, who was familiar with the incident, said one person was injured.

Another group of soldiers knocked a 14-year-old boy to the ground as he arrived at the prison and then twisted his arm, Sindar and Leal said.

"The soldiers were laughing at him," said Leal. "I saw the other soldiers that would take out their frustrations on the prisoners."

The Californians' remarks were unusual, as U.S. soldiers have been reluctant to speak out in public on the issue.

Some say investigators went out of their way to keep the allegations under wraps. When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.

"That shows you how lax they are about discipline," Leal said.

Yesterday, the military announced charges against one of the soldiers accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Pfc. Lynndie R. England, who was shown in photos holding a leash that was around an Iraqi's neck. She has been charged with assaulting the detainees and conspiring with Cpl. Charles Graner to mistreat them, among other charges. England, 21, must undergo an Article 32 investigation, similar to a grand jury proceeding, before charges are referred to a court-martial.

Meanwhile yesterday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison suffered "systematic degrading" at the hands of U.S. captors, and the human-rights group Amnesty International said abuses at the prison constituted war crimes.

Breaking with the organization's usual vow of silence, Pierre Kraehenbuehl of the international Red Cross said visits to detention centers in Iraq between March and November 2003 had turned up "situations from a human point of view that are degrading in treatment and in some incidents tantamount to torture."

"Our findings do not allow us to conclude that what we were dealing with ... were isolated acts of individual members of coalition forces. What we have described is a pattern and a broad system," he said.

Kraehenbuehl said that the report referred mainly to the actions of U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, but the international Red Cross had also expressed concern in recent months about British-run centers.

Amnesty International sent an open letter to President Bush yesterday calling the abuses at Abu Ghraib a "pattern of brutality and cruelty" that constitutes war crimes and urging him to take "immediate and decisive action."

The organization said its investigators documented "scores of individual cases" of mistreatment at the prison, including beatings, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, the use of hoods and prolonged forced standing or kneeling, which the military refers to as "stress positions."

Alistair Hodgett, a Washington, D.C., spokesman for Amnesty International, said its researchers began documenting cases at Abu Ghraib last May. In July, the group raised its concerns to the U.S. government and the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Material from Knight Ridder Newspapers is included in this report.