Early accounts of Iraqi prisoner abuse ignored

By charles J. Hanley
The Associated Press

GREG BAKER / AP Former Iraqi detainees and brothers, Rahad Naif, left, Saad and Hassan describe treatment after being imprisioned by the Americans in Iraq, in this Oct. 19, 2003 photo.

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At the time, one ex-prisoner sensed that words might count for little. Instead, Rahad Naif told a reporter, "I wish somebody could go take a picture of Camp Bucca."

These early accounts by freed prisoners, reported by The Associated Press last fall, told of detainees punished by hours lying bound in the sun; being attacked by dogs; being deprived of sufficient water; spending days with hoods over their heads.

One told The AP of seeing an elderly Iraqi woman tied up and lying in the dust; others told of ill men dying in crowded tents.

They spoke repeatedly of being humiliated by American guards. None mentioned the sexual humiliation seen in recently released photos, but Arab culture might keep an Iraqi from describing such mistreatment.

In contrast to suggestions that the photos indicate isolated abuse by a few, these Iraqis told of widespread practices in several camps that would violate the Geneva Conventions and other human-rights standards.

On Friday, in an unusual public statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross agreed, disclosing that its inspectors last year found a "broad pattern" of abuse.

On Oct. 18, The Associated Press posed specific questions about the reported abuses to the U.S. military command in Baghdad and the 800th Military Police Brigade, which was in charge of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities.

The unit drafted responses, The AP later learned, but the Baghdad command did not release them. No explanation was given. The AP report, published Nov. 1, cited a statement to Arab television by the brigade commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, that prisoners were treated humanely.

A later Army report on its investigation on prisoner abuse said the photos from Abu Ghraib dated from before and after the AP article appeared.

The Army's report, which found that soldiers also committed "egregious acts and grave breaches" at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, did not come to light until they were disclosed in the May 10 issue of The New Yorker magazine. It had been classified "secret." That investigation was prompted by a soldier's complaint to superiors in January about fellow guards' actions.
 
While the military had maintained public silence on the alleged abuses, three months earlier it had charged four Army Reservists from Pennsylvania with physically abusing prisoners at Camp Bucca in May. Three were found guilty, fined and discharged. The fourth decided not to face a military hearing and was given a dishonorable discharge.

The half-dozen ex-prisoners interviewed by The Associated Press in October were freed without charges after spending months in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and the Baghdad airport's Camp Cropper.

Some Americans were humane, they said, but many were not.

"They don't have morals. They don't respect old or young. They humiliate everybody," said Naif, 31. Women guards especially were verbally abusive, with obscene invective, "insulting our sisters and parents. It was very hard to accept," he said.

"Some are like children, showing off their muscle," his brother Hassan, 32, who also was confined, said of the MPs.

Last summer, when temperatures topped 120, guards struck one man at Camp Cropper with an "electric stick" because he was slow carrying water, and then "tied his hands and put him in the sun for three hours," said Ziad Tarik, 24.

This punishment in "The Garden" also was recounted by others: being made to lie bound in the sun for hours on a patch of sand enclosed by razor-wire, even for such lesser infractions as shouting to the next tent or stealing food.

They also told of beatings by guards — for example, of an Abu Ghraib prisoner who refused to eat.

"He was stubborn, so they hit him, and he spent three days in the hospital," Tarik said.

"They used to hit people and turn dogs loose on them," said Saad, 36, the third Naif brother, who spent 2-½ months in Abu Ghraib.

"They used to humble people by putting nylon bags over their heads, for three days, with their hands tied up. I know one who died because he couldn't breathe."

The U.S. military and CIA now say at least 14 detainee deaths have been or are being investigated.

The camps held not only men captured in the anti-U.S. insurgency, but many others picked up by U.S. troops in broad neighborhood sweeps, on slight suspicions or unverified tips, or as curfew-breakers, checkpoint-dodgers or common criminals. Up to 8,000 are believed still held.

The ex-detainees complained they were never given enough water for drinking and washing and at times were denied food as punishment.

"Once we were saying prayers for the death of a prisoner, and we were chanting, so they kept food from us for a day and a half," Saad Naif said.

In hours of AP interviews, the Iraqis said the Americans' treatment of women detainees and the sick most appalled them.

Hassan Ali Muslim, 28, detained for alleged carjacking but never charged, remembered one man being brought into their stifling, overcrowded tent at Camp Cropper in a sickbed. He said another died beside him.

"He was an old man. We had to line up for food, and it was very hot and it took a very long time, and wasn't good for sick people," Muslim said. "After the meal he began breathing heavily, and he just died."

The men told of detainees in wheelchairs and poorly treated diabetics, of epileptic seizures and nervous breakdowns.

"I saw four die in our camp," Tarik said of Abu Ghraib. Even when fellow prisoners warned of one man's worsening condition, he said, "they said they wouldn't take him (to a hospital) until it's serious and he's about to die."

Saad Naif said the "worst thing" was the treatment of women.

"Innocent women were kept for months in the same clothes. I saw a woman about 80 years old — her hands were tied up and she was lying in the dust," he said.

Hassan Naif recalled a day at Camp Cropper when a man saw his sister being punished by being stretched out bound in the sun. He angrily tried to cross the razor wire ringing his tent, "and they shot him in the shoulder," he said.

Muslim, whose father was jailed under the ousted Baathists, said the U.S. system hardly compared with the old regime's bloody political prisons, and he said living conditions improved at times under the Americans.

Camp Cropper, whose overcrowded conditions had grown notorious, was closed Oct. 1. The secret Army investigation, nevertheless, found that the worst abuses continued at least into December at Abu Ghraib.

Much of what the ex-detainees told The AP meshed with what delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outsiders allowed into the camps, were said to have found on visits last year.

Saad Naif said one prominent detainee, a former Iraqi provincial governor, urged U.S. military officers to halt the abuses.

"He told them, 'What you are doing to the Iraqi people will turn against you,' and that they must win the support of the people, not the opposite," Naif said. "They told him to mind his own business."