Translated by Prof. Dr. Q. Al-Samarrai----- Samarrai11@hotmail.com
Friday, May 07, 2004
Thursday, May 06, 2004
A DESPERATRE SCREAM FROM AN IRAQI LADY FROM HER PRISON
Translated by Prof. Dr. Q. Al-Samarrai-----
Samarrai11@hotmail.com
To my own folk, to my own people in Ramadi, Khalidiyya and Falluja… to all the people of the world who endear their dignity and honour, is my appeal.From the American- Zionist prison of Abu Ghraib, your very sister Nur sends you this letter but the question is: from where shall I start? By God I do not know how to describe to you the misery and the indignation in the prison; the hunger we suffer the humiliation we experience while you enjoy your meals to gluttony? Or the thirst while you drink as you please? Or the sleepless nights we are subjected to by our American prisoners? Or our nakedness that our prisoners like us to parade in front of them? O’ dear brother, when we see your trucks and cars transporting building materials for the Americans, our hearts jump because those trucks and cars belong to my people and to my own town then I reflect with a bleeding heart: O’ God! My people have sold their honour and dignity in exchange for a bundle of American Dollars, but when I reflect upon our desecrated honour and my situation, I burst into tears. O’ dear brothers and sisters, how I, in God’s name, can describe or put in words, the suffering we undergo and experience at the hands of the Americans, let alone the severe beating and daily torture because we do not give in to their lusty and sexual desires!!! O’ the spiritual leaders of our beloved faith, where do you hide your faces from the shame and dishonour that the Americans brought upon you and us?? Have you already forgotten the preaching of our most revered Prophet to safeguard your honour? Have you already sold yourselves and us to the American and Zionists in the slave market in return for a few Dollars? Have you lost your honour and dignity?? Have you forgotten that God has put us in you trust; to keep, to cherish and protect our honour from desecration? The Americans in Abu Ghraib have already desecrated your and our honour. In the name of the almighty God and those who read my letter world wide to raise their voices against the brutal treatment we undergo at the hand of our prisoners. It is worse than the Palestinians in the Zionist’s prisoners but here they rape us, they desecrated and violated our sacred honour like wild beasts. We scream for help to save us from these bests but no one seems to hear our desperate cry. Finally, if there still any atom of honour in your hearts,O’ leaders of the community, do attack this notorious prison with every weapon at your disposal killing them and us altogether because our wombs are already pregnant with their bastards. We love to die than bringing shame upon you or upon our families and our land; kill us, I beseech you to the sake of God to kill us with the Americans and their bastards.
Your Sister
Nur.
Arabic Translationhttp://www.albasrah.net/maqalat_mukhtara/arabic/022004/risala_aboghreb.htm
Source www.albasrah.net
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Nadia's Story Told Through Her Tears: "The Americans Have Raped Me like this!"
Jan 29, 2007
Source: lahaonline.com
This article is dedicated to every Muslim who still has blood running in his veins.
Nadia is one of the victims of the American mercenaries in Abu Ghraib prison. She was detained for unknown reasons. When she was released from the prison, didn't throw herself into the arms of her family as most of the oppressed prisoners released have done dose, especially when he is being fueled by the fire of the oppression and a yearning for his family.
Simply, Nadia escaped immediately after she left prison, not because of the shame that will follow her because of some crime she has committed but because of what she and the other Iraqi captive women have been subject to; rape, and torture by the hands of the American mercenaries in Abu Gharib prison. The walls of the prison tell many tragic stories but what Nadia tells is the living truth and a living hell.
Nadia begins her story:
"I was visiting one of my relatives, and suddenly the American forces attacked the home and started to inspect it. They found some light weapons. So, they arrested all people in the home including me. I tried to explain to the interpreter, who was accompanying the American patrol, that I am just a visitor. However, my trials failed. I cried, begged them, and I lost consciousness from fear when they took me to Abu Gharib prison.
Nadia continues "they put me alone in a dark and dirty prison cell. I expected that I will be released soon, especially when the investigation proved that I hadn't committed a crime"
Nadia elaborated while tears poured down her cheek, a telling sign of just how much she has suffered.
"The first day was so burdensome. The cell was malodorous, humid and dark, and this condition increased the fear inside me more and more. The laughs of the soldier outside the cell made me even more scared. I was afraid of what would happen to me. For the first time I felt that I was in a difficult gridlock and that I had entered an unknown world that I would not get out of.
In the middle of these different feelings, I heard a voice for an American soldier woman who was speaking in an Arabic language. She said to me: "I didn't imagine that the weapons' traders in Iraq are women." When I started to explain to her the circumstances of the situation, she beat me cruelly. I cried and shouted "By Allah! I am oppressed, By Allah! I am oppressed"
The soldier showered me with insults in a way that I have never thought possible or that I would ever be subjected to under any circumstances. Then, she started to deride me saying that she was monitoring me all the day via the satellite, and that they can track their enemies even inside their own bedrooms by American technology.
Then she laughed and said: "I was watching you when you were making love with your husband." I replied in a confused voice "But I am not married".
She beat me for more than one an hour and she forced me to drink a glass of water, and I knew later that they put a drug in it. I regained my consciousness after two days to find myself naked. I knew immediately that I have lost something that all the laws in the earth will not be able to return it to me once again. I had been raped. A hysterical fit attacked me and I started to hit my head violently against the walls till more than five American soldiers head by that soldier women entered the cell and started to beat me, and they raped me alternately while they laughing and listening to a loud music.
Day by day the scenario of raping me was repeated. And every day they invent new ways that are crueler than the prior ways."
She went on describing the horrible acts of the American criminals:
"After about one month, a Negro soldier entered my cell and threw me two pieces of American military clothes. He said in weak Arabic language to wear them. After he put a black bag on my head, he led me to a public toilet where there are pipes for cold and hot water and he asked me to bathe. He then closed the door and left.
I was so exhausted and feeling pain, and despite the tremendous number of the bruises in my body, I poured out some water on my body. Before I finish my bath, the Negro soldier came in. I frightened, and I hit him in the face with the water bowl. His reaction was so tough. He raped me cruelly and spit on my face, then he left and returned with two soldiers who returned me to the cell.
The treatment continued that way, to the extent that sometimes I was raped ten times in a day, the matter which affected my health negatively."
Nadia continued in revealing the American horrible actions made against the Iraqi women, saying:
"After more than 4 months, a woman soldier woman came, and I concluded from her conversation with other soldiers that her name is Mary. She said to me "now you have a golden opportunity, since an officer who has a high position will visit us today, if you deal with him positively, you would be released, especially because we are sure you are innocent."
I replied, "If you are sure of I am innocent, why you don't release me?"
She screamed in nervousness, "The only way that guarantees your releasing is to be positive with them."
She took me to the public toilets, and she supervised my bath while she was holding a thick stick, hitting me by it if I didn't perform her orders. Then, she gave me makeup, and warned me not to cry and ruin my makeup. Then she took me to an empty small room where there was nothing but a cover on the floor, and after one an hour she came accompanied with four soldiers who was holding cameras. She took off her clothes and she harassed me as if she was a man. The soldiers were laughing and listening to a noisy music, and taking photographs to me in all poses, and they were emphasizing on my face. The woman asked me to smile otherwise she is going to kill me, and she took a gun from one of her colleagues and fired four bullets near my head, and swore that the fifth bullet will be fired in my head.
After that, the four soldiers raped me alternately the matter which made me lose my consciousness. When I regained the consciousness I found myself in the cell and the traces of their teeth, nails and cigarettes are in everywhere in my body."
Nadia stopped narrating her tragedy to wipe her tears, then she continued: "After one day Mary came and told me that I was cooperative, and I will be released but after I watch the film that they have shot. I was in pain when I saw the film, and she (Mary) said: "you have been created for the sole purpose for us to enjoy". At the moment I became very anger and I attacked her although I was afraid of her reaction, and I would kill her except for the interfering of the soldiers. When the soldiers released me she showered me with hitting, then they left me.
After this incident, nobody harassed me for more then one month; I spent that period in the praying and invocation to Allah, the All-Mighty who has all power, to help me.
Mary came with some soldiers who gave me the clothes that I was wearing when they arrested me and took me to an American car. Then they threw me on the highway road after giving me 10,000 Iraqi Dinars.
I went to a home that was near the place where I have been thrown out and since I know the reaction of my family, I preferred to visit one of my relatives to let them know what happened after my absence. I knew that my brother had held a consolation board for me for more than 4 months, and they considered me as a dead person.
I understand the knife of shame is waiting for me. So, I went to Baghdad where I found a good family who lodged me, and I worked with this family as a maid and governess for their children.
Nadia wonders in pain, regret and bitterness:
"Who will quench my thirst? Who will return my virginity? What is the offense of my family and kin? I have inside me a baby, and I don't know who his father is."
And she ends her story here.
"Did America rape Nadia or did they rape every man and woman in the Ummah? Nadia is me and you, your wife and my wife, your sister and my sister, your mother and my mother. Oh Islam's Sanctity! Oh Our Islam!"
With Kind Regards
Mohammad Usman
K I N D A S A
P O Box: 14221
JEDDAH-21424
SAUDI ARABIA
Tel: +966 2 6270704 extn 105
Fax: +966 2 6270706
Website: www.kindasa.com
Courtesy : This message was posted to me by: Brother Abdul Vahid [ A_Vahid@albannae.ae]; United Arab Emirates
_____________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.itv.com/news/623337.html
'US soldiers abused young girl at Iraqi prison'
She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her" - former Abu Ghraib inmate Suhaib al-Baz
The US military has said it will investigate claims by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison that a girl as young as 12 was stripped and beaten by military personnel
Suhaib al-Baz, a journalist for the al-Jazeera television network, claims to have been tortured at the prison, based west of Baghdad, while held there for 54 days.Mr al-Baz was arrested when reporting clashes between insurgents and coalition forces in November. He said: "They brought a 12-year-old girl into our cellblock late at night. Her brother was a prisoner in the other cells.
"She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her. Her brother was helpless and could only hear her cries. This affected all of us because she was just a child.
The allegations cannot be verified independently but Mr al-Baz maintains psychological and physical violence were commonplace in the jail.
He also claims that a father and his 15-year-old son were tortured in front of his cell.He said: "They made the son carry two jerry cans full of water. An American soldier had a stick and when he stopped, he would beat him.He collapsed so they stripped him and poured cold water over him. They brought a man who was wearing a hood. They pulled it off. The son was shocked to see it was his father and collapsed.When he recovered, he now saw his father dressed in women's underwear and the Americans laughing at himMr al-Baz claims the guards at the prison were keen to take photographs of the abuse and turned it into a competition.They were enjoying taking photographs of the torture. There was a daily competition to see who could take the most gruesome picture.The winner's photo would be stuck on a wall and also put on their laptop computers as a screensaver. had a good opinion of the Americans but since my time in prison, I've changed my mind. In Iraq we still have no freedom or democracy. They are so cruel to us.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has said Iraqis held by US forces have been subjected to systematic degrading treatment, sometimes close to torture, that may have been officially condoned.The ICRC said visits to detention centres in Iraq between March and November 2003 had turned up violations of international treaties on prisoners of war. The ICRC, whose reports on prison visits are confidential, went public with some of its findings after parts of the 24-page document were carried by the Wall Street Journal. The scandal over detainee abuse broke last week with the release of photographs showing the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has taken responsibility for the incidents and apologised to the victims, the Iraqi people and Americans
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Amnesty: UK troops shot civilians
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/10/iraq.british.troops/index.html
Tuesday, May 11, 2004 Posted: 4:58 AM EDT (0858 GMT)
LONDON, England (CNN) -- As furor grows over the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, a report from a human rights group has charged that British troops occupying southern Iraq killed a dozen civilians who posed no threat to them.
Many of those killings have not been investigated by the British military, and the families of the victims have not been compensated, according to a report released on Tuesday in London by Amnesty International.
"In several cases documented by Amnesty International, UK soldiers opened fire and killed Iraqi civilians in circumstances where there was apparently no imminent threat of death or serious injury to themselves or others," the report says.The Ministry of Defence said it was aware of the Amnesty report but had not been able to examine its allegations in detail. A spokeswoman told CNN: "We are aware of the concerns expressed by Amnesty and are considering the points raised. We will respond in detail in due course.
"Some of the allegations if true may give grounds for criminal prosecution. Some cases are indeed already the subject of legal action and for this reason we are unable to comment further."
The ministry spokeswoman added: "We take our obligations under international law seriously and attach great importance to upholding human rights in all circumstances."
The Amnesty report listed examples of 12 civilians who were apparently killed by British forces under questionable circumstances, including the shooting of an eight-year-old girl who was standing with a group of children when a British patrol moved into her town.
A report on the August 21 shooting incident from the First Battalion of the King's Regiment said mobs threw stones at the troops as they drove into Karmat Ali, and one soldier fired a warning shot to disperse the crowds.
However, Hanan Salih Matrood's family said there was no stone-throwing when the British soldiers moved in.
An eyewitness told Amnesty investigators that a few British soldiers got out of an armored vehicle at the entrance to the alley where Hanan lived.
The witness said a group of children, including Hanan, were attracted by the soldiers and stood more than 70 meters (200 feet) away, observing them.
"Suddenly a soldier aimed and fired a shot which hit Hanan in her lower torso," the report says.
The British soldiers took the young girl to a hospital, but she died the next day.
Hanan's family said British military police took pictures of the scene and interviewed witnesses the day after the shooting. But no investigation was launched into the killing by British military authorities, according to information from the UK Minister of State for the Armed Forces, the Amnesty report says.
Britain's Ministry of Defense has said that UK forces have been involved in the killing of 37 civilians since May 1, 2003, according to the report. Amnesty also criticized the British military's investigative procedures, saying officers had too much discretion in deciding whether to launch an inquiry when a civilian was killed. The group also said investigations should be far more open. "The investigations have been shrouded in secrecy -- some victims have not even been aware that they have been opened," the report said. "Families of victims have also not been given adequate information on how to apply for compensation."The report also criticized the process by which Iraqi families could claim compensation for their relatives' deaths, saying it was too difficult and the site where the necessary papers could be obtained was far away and largely inaccessible, especially for poorer families who could not afford to travel.
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Focus shifts to jail abuse of women
Luke Harding in Baghdad
Wednesday May 12, 2004
The Guardian
For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest.
"He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," said Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'" The incident is one of a number in which US soldiers are alleged to have abused, intimidated or sexually humiliated Iraqi women.
According to Prof Shaker, several women held in Abu Ghraib jail were sexually abused, including one who was raped by an American military policeman and became pregnant. She has now disappeared.
Most of the coverage of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on Iraqi men. But there is compelling evidence that several female prisoners, who are in a minority at the jail, were abused as well.
"A female colleague of mine was arrested and taken there. When I asked her after she was released what happened at Abu Ghraib she started crying," Prof Shaker said.
"Ladies here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects. They say everything is OK. Even in a very advanced society in the west it is very difficult to talk about rape. But I think it happened."
Few women released from US detention have come forward to talk about their experiences in a Muslim society where rape is sometimes equated with shame and victims can be killed to salvage family honour.( DUE TO IGNORANCE, It is not allowed in ISLAM any way)
According to the New Yorker magazine the photos and videos so far unreleased by the Pentagon show American soldiers "having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner", and a secret report by General Antonio Taguba into the scandal confirms that US guards videotaped and photographed naked female prisoners and that "a male MP [military police] guard" is shown "having sex with a female detainee". Yesterday Prof Shaker, who began researching the subject this year for Amnesty International, said she believed the woman involved had been killed.
"The girl was called Noor. When I went to her house in Baghdad earlier this year she had disappeared. The neighbours said that she and her family had moved away."
Since the US military began its inquiry into prisoner abuse in January, many female detainees have been released from Abu Ghraib and the other US detention facilities across Iraq.
But five women are still in solitary confinement in Abu Ghraib's notorious 1A cellblock where as many as 1,500 pictures were taken in November and December.
According to Rajaa Habib Khuzaai, an obstetrician who is one of three women on the US-appointed Iraqi governing council, none of the five has been raped or sexually abused. US officials allowed Dr Khuzaai to visit them yesterday and interview them privately.
Two of the women told her that US soldiers had beaten them after their arrest in December and January while they were in custody at Baghdad international airport, before their transfer to Abu Ghraib.
"They were a little embarrassed. They merely said they had been beaten and that was it," Dr Khuzaai told the Guardian.
She added: "They are now paid special attention. Conditions are OK and they have given them some privacy."
But there are unanswered questions as to why the women have been locked up without charge.
According to Dr Khuzaai, two of the women are married to high-ranking and absconding Ba'ath party officials, two are accused of financing the Iraqi resistance, and one had a relationship with the director of Iraq's former secret police, the mukhabarat.
Human rights campaigners say the US military frequently arrests wives and daughters during raids if the male suspect is not at home. US officials have acknowledged detaining women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information: a strategy that is in violation of international law.
"The issue is the system," Nada Doumani of the International Committee of the Red Cross said yesterday.
"It is an absence of judicial guarantees. People are being kept in custody without knowing what for. The system is not fair, precise or properly defined."
Senior US military officers who escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib on Monday admitted that rape had taken place in the cellblock where 19 "high-value" male detainees are also being held.
Asked how it could have happened, Colonel Dave Quantock, who is now in charge of the prison's detention facilities, said: "I don't know. It's all about leadership. Apparently it wasn't there."
Journalists were forbidden from talking to the women, who are kept upstairs in windowless 2.5 metre by 1.5 metre cells. The women wailed and shouted.
They were kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, Col Quantock said, with only a Koran.
Other allegations being investigated are that a 12- or 13-year-old girl had been stripped naked in the block and paraded in front of male inmates.
Yesterday Prof Shaker said after her ordeal in February her friends dragged her back into the car and drove off. "I vowed never to talk to another American soldier," she said.
She said the US and Britain should learn from the affair. "You can't treat human beings in this way. I hope they have learned from this."
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CRUSADERS RAPE MUSLIM CHILDREN ALSO
UNICEF: Did US Troops Abuse Iraqi Children, Too?http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=44410006&p=444yx3x8
UNICEF 'disturbed' over child abuse claims11/05/2004 - 13:00:23
The United Nations children’s agency said today it was “profoundly disturbed” by reports that children may have been abused in prisons in Iraq.
“Any mistreatment, sexual abuse, exploitation or torture of children in detention is a violation of international law,” UNICEF spokesman Damien Personnaz said.
“UNICEF is profoundly disturbed by news reports alleging that children may have been among those abused.”
The US network NBC News reported last week that unreleased videotapes, apparently shot by US personnel, showed Iraqi guards at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison raping young boys. British newspapers have reported that children were tortured under interrogation.
Personnaz said UNICEF so far had no independent confirmation of the reports.
UNICEF stressed that mistreating children breached the UN treaties on children’s rights, torture and civil rights, as well as the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war.
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An Afghan Gives His Own Account of U.S. AbuseBy CARLOTTA GALL
Published: May 12, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/12/international/asia/12AFGH.html?ex=1085331438&ei=1&en=8ff5d98431e1878d
"And they made insults about our women," he added. He said the American interrogator, through a translator, had taunted him, asking: "Do you know that your wife and daughter are prostitutes now?" "The Americans were asking this and the translators were translating, and they were all laughing," he said. "And I was in my full police uniform with insignia showing my rank."More than once, he said, soldiers inserted their fingers into his anus. He said one had touched his penis and asked, "Why is this unhappy?"
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Brother and sister gunned down as they collected washing
18/05/2004 - 14:14:00
http://212.2.162.45/news/story.asp?j=104603078&p=yx46x3784&n=104603838
A Palestinian brother and sister, aged 13 and 16, were killed by Israeli fire in a Gaza refugee camp today as they took down the washing from a rooftop clothesline, their family said.
Ahmad Mughayer and his sister Asma died from shots fired by troops from the roof of an adjacent building, family members said. Each was killed by a bullet to the head, the relatives said.
The army said it was checking the report.
The teenagers were killed during a major Israeli military offensive in the Rafah camp. The army said it is trying to destroy arms-smuggling tunnels, uncover weapons caches and flush out militants in the raid.
Their father , Mohammed Mughayer, 43, said the family was finishing breakfast when Asma said she wanted to get the washing. He said her mother told her not to go because of the heavy shooting outside.
“Asma said ‘don’t worry, I’ll be careful,”’ said Mughayer.
Her younger brother, Ahmed, decided to tag along to feed the pigeons the family keeps on the roof, their father said.
The family said it took almost an hour to get the children off the roof because the army kept shooting at everyone trying to reach the bodies.
“I was crawling on the roof because of the gunfire. I finally managed to get them out but with great difficulty,” said Ali Mughayer, 25, their older brother.
The bodies were being kept in a room in the family home because ambulances couldn’t reach the area as a result of the heavy fighting, the family said.
Palestinian health officials and residents said the army was keeping ambulances away.
The army denied the claim, saying it was allowing ambulances to get through, but that drivers were often reluctant to drive into areas of battle.
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http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=7626
Settler Rabbi: Killing innocent people in war is allowed if saves lives.
Rabbi Dov Lior, chairman of the settler’s rabbinical council ruled that killing civilians during warfare is permitted if it will save lives. Uri Glickman
The IDF are allowed to hurt so called innocent civilians during warfare, Chairman of the Yesha rabbinical council (Judea, Samaria and Gaza Strip), Rabbi Dov Lior, said in a Halachic (Jewish law) ruling made public Wednesday.
"The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them. This is the real moral behind Israel's Torah and we must not feel guilty due to foreign morals," Lior said.
Sources close to the Rabbi explained that Lior made the remarks Tuesday night and they had nothing to do with Wednesday’s events in Gaza. The IDF is allowed to use all means at its disposal to defeat terrorism “even if it means ‘innocent’ people are killed”, the sources said.
The religious community did not publicly condemn Rabbi Lior’s ruling but warned against its implications. “It is a dangerous step that could test all religious IDF commanders taking part in the current fighting”, sources in the Yesha community told Maariv.
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The other prisoners
Most of the coverage of abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on male detainees.
But what of the five women held in the jail, and the scores elsewhere in Iraq? Luke Harding reports
Thursday May 20, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1220509,00.html
The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.
The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.
Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq".
In November last year, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad. "She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been raped," Swadi says. "Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.'"
Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US military in January, headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor" was entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees - who form a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in US custody since last year's invasion - have also been abused. Nobody appears to know how many. But among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report, images of a US military policeman "having sex" with an Iraqi woman.
Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked female detainees. The Bush administration has refused to release other photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although it has shown them to Congress) - ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent further domestic embarrassment.
Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who investigated the case and found it to be true, said, "She was held for about six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey."
In Iraq, the existence of photographs of women detainees being abused has provoked revulsion and outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women involved may since have disappeared, according to human rights activists. Professor Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University who is researching the subject for Amnesty International, says she thinks "Noor" is now dead. "We believe she was raped and that she was pregnant by a US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her house. The neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been killed."
Honour killings are not unusual in Islamic society, where rape is often equated with shame and where the stigma of being raped by an American soldier would, according to one Islamic cleric, be "unbearable". The prospects for rape victims in Iraq are grave; it is hardly surprising that no women have so far come forward to talk about their experiences in US-run jails where abuse was rife until early January.
One of the most depressing aspects of the saga is that, unaccountably, the US military continues to hold five women in solitary confinement at Abu Ghraib, in cells 2.5m (8ft) long by 1.5m (5ft) wide. Last week, the military escorted a small group of journalists around the camp, where hundreds of relatives gather every day in a dusty car park in the hope of news.
The prison is protected by guard towers, an outer fence topped with razor wire, and blast walls. Inside, more than 3,000 Iraqi men are kept in vast open courtyards, in communal brown tents exposed to dust and sun. (Last month, nearly 30 detainees were killed in two separate mortar attacks on the prison; about a dozen survivors are still in the hospital wing, shackled to their beds with leather belts.) As our bus pulled up, the men ran towards the razor wire. They unfurled banners and T-shirts that read: "Why are we here?" "When are you going to do something about this scandal?" "We cannot talk freely."
The women, however, are kept in another part of the prison, cellblock 1A, together with 19 "high-value" male detainees. It is inside this olive-painted block, which leads into a courtyard of shimmering green saysaban trees and pink flowering shrubs, that the notorious photographs of US troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners were taken, many of them on the same day, November 8 2003. A wooden interrogation shed is a short stroll away. As we arrived at the cellblock, the women shouted to us through the bars. An Iraqi journalist tried to talk to them; a female US soldier interrupted and pushed him away. The windows of the women's cells have been boarded up; birds nest in the outside drainpipe. Captain Dave Quantock, now in charge of prisoner detention at Abu Ghraib, confirmed that the women prisoners are in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. They have no entertainment; they do have a Koran.
Since the scandal first emerged there is general agreement that conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved. A new, superior catering company now provides the inmates' food, and all the guards involved in the original allegations of abuse have left.
Nevertheless, there remain extremely troubling questions as to why these women came to be here. Like other Iraqi prisoners, all five are classified as "security detainees" - a term invented by the Bush administration to justify the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access, as part of the war on terror. US military officials will only say that they are suspected of "anti-coalition activities".
Two of the women are the wives of high-ranking and absconding Ba'ath party members; two are accused of financing the resistance; and one allegedly had a relationship with the former head of Iraq's secret police, the Mukhabarat. The women, in their 40s and 50s, come from Kirkuk and Baghdad; none has seen their families or children since their arrest earlier this year.
According to Swadi, who managed to visit Abu Ghraib in late March, the allegations against the women are "absurd". "One of them is supposed to be the mistress of the former director of the Mukhabarat. In fact, she's a widow who used to own a small shop. She also worked as a taxi driver, ferrying children to and from kindergarten. If she really had a relationship with the director of the Mukhabarat, she would scarcely be running a kiosk. These are baseless charges," she adds angrily. "She is the only person who can provide for her children."
The women appear to have been arrested in violation of international law - not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter instead.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, whose devastating report on human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners was delivered to the government in February but failed to ring alarm bells, says the problem lies with the system. "It is an absence of judicial guarantees," says Nada Doumani, spokesperson for the ICRC. "The system is not fair, precise or properly defined."
During her visit to Abu Ghraib in March, one of the prisoners told Swadi that she had been forced to undress in front of US soldiers. "The Iraqi translator turned his head in embarrassment," she said. The release of detainees, meanwhile, appears to be entirely arbitrary: three weeks ago one woman prisoner who spoke fluent English and who had been telling her guards that she would sue them was suddenly released. "They got fed up with her," another lawyer, Amal Alrawi, says.
Last Friday, about 300 male prisoners were freed from Abu Ghraib, the first detainees to be released since the abuse scandal first broke. A further 475 are due to be released tomorrow, although it is not clear if any of the women will be among them. General Geoffery Miller, who is responsible for overhauling US military jails in Iraq, has promised to release 1,800 prisoners across Iraq "within 45 days". Some 2,000 are likely to remain behind bars, he says. Iraqi lawyers and officials aredemanding that the US military hands the prisons over to Iraqi management on June 30, when the coalition transfers limited powers to a UN-appointed caretaker Iraqi government. Last week, Miller said "negotiations" with Iraqi officials were ongoing.
Relatives who gathered outside Abu Ghraib last Friday said it was common knowledge that women had been abused inside the jail. Hamid Abdul Hussein, 40, who was there hoping to see his brother Jabar freed, said former detainees who had returned to their home town of Mamudiya reported that several women had been raped. "We've know this for months," he said. "We also heard that some women committed suicide."
While the abuse may have stopped, the US military appears to have learned nothing from the experience. Swadi says that when she last tried to visit the women at Abu Ghraib, "The US guards refused to let us in. When we complained, they threatened to arrest us."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221658,00.html
'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'
Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise
Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 2004
The Guardian
The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
"The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.
She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me."
Mrs Shibab's description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.
She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble.
Another relative carried Mrs Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died.
As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.
Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family, their wedding guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among them Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in western Iraq.
Dr Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. "I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village," he said by telephone. "These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?"
Despite the compelling testimony of Mrs Shihab, Dr Alusi and other wedding guests, the US military, faced with appar ent evidence of yet another scandal in Iraq, offered an inexplicably different account of the operation.
The military admitted there had been a raid on the village at 3am on Wednesday but said it had targeted a "suspected foreign fighter safe house".
"During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided," it said in a statement. Soldiers at the scene then recovered weapons, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pounds (worth approximately £800), foreign passports and a "Satcom radio", presumably a satellite telephone.
"We took ground fire and we returned fire," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq. "We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement."
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. "How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive."
When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child's body being lowered into a grave, he replied: "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologise for the conduct of my men."
The celebration at Mukaradeeb was to be one of the biggest events of the year for a small village of just 25 houses. Haji Rakat, the father, had finally arranged a long-negotiated tribal union that would bring together two halves of one large extended family, the Rakats and the Sabahs.
Haji Rakat's second son, Ashad, would marry Rutba, a cousin from the Sabahs. In a second ceremony one of Ashad's female cousins, Sharifa, would marry a young Sabah boy, Munawar.
A large canvas awning had been set up in the garden of the Rakat villa to host the party. A band of musicians was called in, led by Hamid Abdullah, who runs the Music of Arts recording studio in Ramadi, the nearest major town.
He brought his friend Hussein al-Ali, a popular Iraqi singer who performs on Ramadi's own television channel. A handful of other musicians including the singer's brother Mohaned, played the drums and the keyboards.
The ceremonies began on Tuesday morning and stretched through until the late evening. "We were happy because of the wedding. People were dancing and making speeches," said Ma'athi Nawaf, 55, one of the neighbours.
Late in the evening the guests heard the sound of jets overhead. Then in the distance they saw the headlights of what appeared to be a military convoy heading their way across the desert.
The party ended at around 10.30pm and the neighbours left for their homes. At 3am the bombing began. "The first thing they bombed was the tent for the ceremony," said Mr Nawaf. "We saw the family running out of the house. The bombs were falling, destroying the whole area."
Armoured military vehicles then drove into the village, firing machine guns and supported by attack helicopters. "They started to shoot at the house and the people outside the house," he said.
Before dawn two large Chinook helicopters descended and offloaded dozens of troops. They appeared to set explosives in the Rakat house and the building next door and minutes later, just after the Chinooks left again, they exploded into rubble.
"I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world," said Mr Nawaf. "There were children's bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces."
Among the dead was his daughter Fatima Ma'athi, 25, and her two young boys, Raad, four, and Raed, six. "I found Raad dead in her arms. The other boy was lying beside her. I found only his head," he said. His sister Simoya, the wife of Haji Rakat, was also killed with her two daughters. "The Americans call these people foreign fighters. It is a lie. I just want one piece of evidence of what they are saying."
Remarkably among the survivors were the two married couples, who had been staying in tents away from the main house, and Haji Rakat himself, an elderly man who had gone to bed early in a nearby house.
From the mosques of Ramadi volunteers had been called to dig at the graveyard of the tribe, on the southern outskirts of the city.
There lay 27 graves: mounds of dirt each marked with a single square of crudely cut marble, a name scribbled in black paint. Some gave more than one name, and one, belonging to a woman Hamda Suleman, the briefest of explanations: "The American bombing."
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Ex-detainee: US soldiers defiled the Quran
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/68168BCC-608B-4593-91A4-637656C20625.htm
Wednesday 07 July 2004, 0:42 Makka Time, 21:42 GMT
In excerpts from an exclusive interview with Aljazeera, a former Guantanamo detainee reveals details of torture, abuse, and religious persecution.
Wisam Abd al-Rahman Ahmad said he was captured in Iran, transferred to a Kandahar detention facility in Afghanistan, and finally imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
Claiming he was beaten and routinely insulted with profanities while in Afghanistan, Ahmad said that US soldiers tried to "break" him using psychological warfare.
"They stripped me naked with a bag over my head. One of the soldiers turned me around, removed the bag and I saw a female soldier looking at me," he said.
"They knew that it is an insult to our religion to appear thus before women," he said.
But Ahmad claimed that although he had been beaten and abused, he was asked only one question - his relationship to al-Qaida and Usama bin Ladin.
"I told the interrogator, who spoke with an Egyptian accent, that I had no involvement with al-Qaida or anyone, but the man proceeded to insult me and threaten that he would perform profanities on my mother," Ahmad told Aljazeera.
The former Guantanamo detainee - now in Jordan - had told his interrogators that Pakistani intelligence knew of his whereabouts the whole time and could corroborate his story.
Stomping on Quran
However, nothing compared to the agony of seeing the Quran defiled, Ahmad told Aljazeera.
"I could bear all the obscene abuse and all the beatings but I was agonised to see one US soldier stomp on the Holy Quran, while another soldier in Kandahar threw it into the toilet," he said.
While in detention at Bagram air base, Ahmad recounted how a female soldier entered his cell to search him.
She had brought a dog with her and she proceeded to give the dog the Quran to sniff through.
The full interview is to be broadcast in a special segment on Aljazeera later in the week.
Legal controversy
The detention of several hundred prisoners in Afghanistan and Guantanamo is proving to be a political and legal battleground for the Bush administration.
Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled that "foreign terrorism" suspects at a US military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba can use the United States legal system to challenge their detention.
By a six-three vote, the justices ruled on Monday that US courts do have jurisdiction to consider the claims of the prisoners who say in their lawsuits they are being held illegally in violation of their rights.
The ruling did not address the merits of the claims, but allowed the prisoners to pursue their lawsuits, which lower courts had dismissed.
Justice John Paul Stevens said for the majority that US courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.
The justices overturned a US court appeal ruling that lawsuits should be dismissed on the grounds that the military base was outside US sovereign territory and that rights of habeas corpus were unavailable to foreign nationals outside US territory.
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UK troops held torture contests, Iraqi claims KAREN MCVEIGH
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=862202004
A HOTEL worker who says he witnessed British troops beating his friend to death in Iraq spoke yesterday of being subjected to "torture competitions" at the hands of the army. Kifah Taha al-Mutari, from Basra, was speaking on the eve of a High Court challenge to the government over allegations surrounding the role of British troops in the deaths of six Iraqis. Mr Mutari, who flew to Britain for the hearing, said British soldiers arrested him and a fellow hotel worker, Baha Mousa, 26, on suspicion of terrorism. Mr Mousa later died, allegedly after being beaten by soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in September. Mr Mutari, speaking through an interpreter, said they were tortured for three days. "They had competitions among themselves to see who could kick and beat us the most. They were enjoying it. We were screaming and crying for help and the higher we screamed the more they liked it," he said. He said that the soldiers gave them degrading nicknames, such as "pig" or obscene words. "They would ask us our ‘names’ and we would have to answer to our name or we would be beaten more." The beatings ruptured one of his kidneys and he nearly died, he said. According to a medical report by a consultant, Mr al-Mutari suffered acute kidney failure of "life-threatening proportions" - almost certainly as a result of deliberate injury. The death of Baha Mousa is one of six test cases due to go before the High Court in London today. In a three-day hearing, lawyers for the families will ask two judges to rule that the Human Rights Act applies to British soldiers occupying Iraq and that independent inquiries should be held. A Ministry of Defence spokesman said all allegations of death and mistreatment at the hands of British forces were investigated by the military. He said the government would argue that human rights legislation did not apply.
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The Secret File of Abu GhraibNew classified documents implicate U.S. forces in rape and sodomy of Iraqi prisoners By OSHA GRAY DAVIDSON
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=6388256&pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1091216021626&has-player=true&version=6.0.11.780
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=571222
Army chief 'emptied his magazine' at girl in Gaza
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
12 October 2004
Two separate official investigations are under way into the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old girl in Gaza by the Israeli army after soldiers testified that their company commander "emptied his magazine" at her after she had been shot and was presumed dead.
The army has already admitted that the killing of Iman al-Hams in the town of Rafah a week ago was a mistake and that her bag, which it says soldiers thought carried explosives, contained school books.
Soldiers have come forward to explain that her body was riddled with 20 bullets because their immediate commander "confirmed the killing" by shooting two bullets at her already prone body before withdrawing a short distance and then firing a burst of automatic gunfire at the corpse.
The Judge Advocate General, Brigadier General Avi Mandelblit, has instructed the military police to launch a criminal investigation against the commander in the Givati Brigade's crack Shaked Battalion as a result of the claim. Unusually, the investigation was ordered even though the army inquiry is incomplete.
The move follows interviews with soldiers serving in the company published in the Israeli newspaper Yedhiot Ahronot. It quoted them as saying the commander should have been stood down immediately after the incident. One soldier told the newspaper: "The company CO who sprayed the girl with bullets turned us all into vicious animals and besmirched us all ... If he is not dismissed, we will not agree to serve under him." Another said the commander had "desecrated the body".
According to figures produced by 11 UN agencies, 24 Palestinians under the age of 17 have been killed since 28 September when the army entered northern Gaza in response to the firing by Palestinian militants of two Qassam rockets which killed two Israeli children in Sderot. A nine-year-old girl was among 11 Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip over the weekend.
The investigations opened as security sources told the newspaper Haaretz that the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, had rejected a request from army commanders to withdraw from the densely populated Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on the grounds that the fortnight-old operation "Days of Penitence" was endangering troops and that militants had now removed rockets to positions outside the camp.
Mr Sharon told the Knesset at the opening of what promises to be a difficult winter session for the government that it would be voting on 25 October on his plan to withdraw some 7,500 settlers from Gaza.
The level of difficulty was underlined last night when the legislature opposed by 45 to 33 a routine motion noting Mr Sharon's speech. Although it does not threaten Mr Sharon's administration, the defeat emphasised the strong opposition to the plan from the extreme right of Israeli politics and from the far right of his own Likud party, seven of whose members abstained last night.
* A Palestinian farmer, Hani Shadeh, 26, was shot and critically wounded in his olive orchard near Nablus in the West Bank yesterday.
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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041011/ap_on_re_us/disappeared_suspects_1
Group: al-Qaida Detainees 'Disappeared'
Mon Oct 11, 7:54 PM ET U.S. National - AP
By SAM DOLNICK, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - At least 11 al-Qaida suspects have "disappeared" in U.S. custody, and some may have been tortured, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued Monday.
The prisoners are probably being held outside the United States without access to the Red Cross or any oversight of their treatment, the human rights group said. In some cases, the United States will not even acknowledge the prisoners are in custody.
The report said the prisoners include the alleged architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as well as Abu Zubaydah, who is believed to be a close aide to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites).
In refusing to disclose the prisoners' whereabouts or acknowledge the detentions, Human Rights Watch said, the U.S. government has violated international law, international treaties and the Geneva Convention. The group called on the government to bring all the prisoners "under the protection of the law."
"I think the U.S. demeans itself when it adopts the philosophy that the ends justify the means in the fight against terror," said Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch.
CIA (news - web sites) spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency has not seen the report and declined to comment.
The report — titled "The United States' `Disappeared:' The CIA's Long-term 'Ghost Detainees'" — said many of the prisoners have provided valuable intelligence to U.S. officials. But it also cited reports that some detainees have lied under pressure to please their interrogators.
Human Rights Watch has no firsthand knowledge of the treatment of these detainees. Much of the report stems from news accounts that have cited unidentified government sources acknowledging the torture or mistreatment of detainees.
The report provides a brief sketch of 11 detainees believed to be incommunicado in undisclosed locations. They hail from countries across the Arab world, including Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. U.S. authorities have confirmed the detention of six of them, the report said.
___
On the Net:
www.hrw.org
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http://9news.com/acm_news.aspx?OSGNAME=KUSA&IKOBJECTID=6e486323-0abe-421a-005c-64ce6109b520&TEMPLATEID=0c76dce6-ac1f-02d8-0047-c589c01ca7bf
Soldiers allegedly used electrical cord in Iraqi general's death
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - Four Fort Carson soldiers accused of killing an Iraqi general last year allegedly used an electrical cord to help kill him, according to charging documents in the case.
Chief Warrant Officers Lewis E. Welshofer Jr., Jefferson L. Williams, Sgt. 1st Class William J. Sommer and Spc. Jerry L. Loper were charged with murder and dereliction of duty on Monday in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush last November.
According to another document -- a Pentagon report given to Congress in June -- the soldiers allegedly put Mowhoush inside a sleeping bag and then bound him to prevent him from moving.
One of the warrant officers sat on Mowhoush's chest as he was interrogated and then Mowhoush was rolled over and the officer sat on his back, the report said. According to the document, Mowhoush died as the officer sat on his back.
A death certificate issued in May said Mowhoush died of asphyxiation.
All four soldiers charged were assigned to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, based at Fort Carson, at the time of Mowhoush's death and have since returned to the United States. Williams has transferred to the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Gordon, Ga.
Two other Fort Carson soldiers face courts-martial on manslaughter charges in connection with an unrelated death in Iraq.
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/05/1411248
Tuesday, October 5th, 2004
Letter from Guantanamo: British Detainee Says He Was Subjected to Torture, Witnessed U.S. Soldiers Commit Murder
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In a rare uncensored letter from Guantanamo Bay, British detainee Moazzam Begg writes that he was tortured and abused by U.S soldiers during detention and that he witnessed U.S. soldiers murder two detainees in Afghanistan. We speak with president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner. [includes rush transcript]
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The Bush administration is arguing that the president can detain enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay as long as necessary to protect national security and that they have no constitutional rights to hear charges against them.
Facing a deadline to give a federal judge some answers about 60 of the so-called enemy combatants held at the notorious the U.S. Navy base in Cuba, the government filed a 96-page response detailing the reasons it believes it doesn't need to explain why they were detained or how long they might be imprisoned. This according to the Washington Post.
More than 550 people have been held at Guantanamo without charge or trial for more than two years now.
Government lawyers wrote the detentions are "an integral and inexorable part of the Commander-in-Chief"s power to defend the nation and vanquish the enemy."
But the deputy commander of the joint task force that controls Guantanamo thinks otherwise. Brigadier General Martin Lucenti told the Financial Times "Most of [the detainees] weren't fighting. They were running. Even if somebody has been found to be an enemy combatant, many of them will be released because they will be of low intelligence value and low threat status."
Either way, the Pentagon is planning to construct a permanent prison facility in Guantanamo - known as Camp Six. Some see it as a move to fortify the makeshift prison and ultimately place all remaining detainees in permanent structures.
One of those remaining detainees is British citizen Moazzam Begg. He was detained in Pakistan in 2001 and has been imprisoned without charge or trial in Guanatanmo after being transferred there from a base in Afghanistan. Since arriving in Guantanamo, Begg has had no contact with fellow prisoners and has been kept in solitary confinement for over 600 days. Last April, his father Azmat Begg joined us in our studio to talk about his son's imprisonment. Here is some of what he had to say:
Azmat Begg, father of Moazzam Begg speaking on Democracy Now! April 2004.
Well, in Moazzam Begg's latest letter revealed last Friday, he says he was tortured and abused during detention and that he witnessed U.S. soldiers kill two men in Afghanistan.
In the uncensored letter, Begg protested his innocence of any crime and demanded to know the reason for his detention. He said he was denied natural light and fresh food, had been held in solitary confinement, and was forced to sign and initial documents presented to him by U.S. officials. He also said he was physically abused, stripped and paraded in front of cameras held by U.S. personnel.
The letter came past the usual U.S. military censors, but it was the first communication from Moazzam Begg that was entirely unclassified. It was dated July 12 2004, and addressed to the military command at Guantanamo Bay. In it Begg requests that it be copied to his lawyers and US and British authorities.
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is author of Guantanamo: What the World Should Know.
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is author of the book, Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael.
MICHAEL RATNER: Thank you for having me, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: How significant is this letter?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, it's the first letter that we have gotten that is uncensored, that charges torture, that he saw deaths. So it's very significant, because you can say what’s happening to Moazzam Begg or what happened to him -- the isolation, the torture, the beatings -- is very likely happening to many, many others in Guantanamo. So it's extremely significant. The reason it got out is not chance. It was because Moazzam Begg is the first person who has actually had a lawyer go down to see him. We got a court order allowing a lawyer. He's, since the Supreme Court case, the first one, the only one so far. Shortly before she went to Guantanamo, she got this letter. So, they obviously realized, and as time goes on, as we get lawyer by lawyer down there, I think we'll get more and more stories like Moazzam Begg’s.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to last April, when we were joined in the studio by Moazzam Begg’s father, Azmat Begg. He talked about his son's imprisonment.
AZMAT BEGG: He was captured from Islamabad, which is the capital of Pakistan, where he was staying with his wife and children, very small children, starting from the age of one, two, and four or five. He had three children at that time.
AMY GOODMAN: And where was he taken? When was this?
AZMAT BEGG: Well, that's about two years now, so over two years now. He was taken from his house in front of his daughter and his wife, and two American soldiers assisted by two Pakistani soldiers pulled him out, bundled him up, and put him into the trunk of the car, and took away. He rang me up from the trunk of the car -- possibly he had mobile -- and he told me in the middle of the night, that he had been arrested. I said, “What for?” It was very strange noise. I couldn't believe. He said, “I have been arrested, daddy.” I said, “Why?” He said, “I don't know. They are taking me somewhere which I do not know. Please take care of my wife and children, who are in Islamabad.”
AMY GOODMAN: Where were you?
AZMAT BEGG: I was in England. I was in England. I was half asleep.
AMY GOODMAN: And so he was taken to Guantanamo.
AZMAT BEGG: No, they didn't take him straight away to Guantanamo. They took him to Afghanistan and kept him in a province called Kandahar for a month or so and then they transferred him to another place in Afghanistan, which is known as Bagram Air Base, where he was badly treated, very badly treated.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know?
AZMAT BEGG: Because I received letters. Through the Red Cross. The Red Cross people came down to me to give me the letters. They were having correspondence with him through Red Cross all the time. Then when a little bit of noise was raised in the U.K. they transferred him to Guantanamo Bay. He was badly treated. He was deprived of proper food. He was deprived of natural light, sun, moon, or anything. He said that I haven't seen sun, moon, or sky for the last whole one year except for two minutes. Being treated like an animal, they pulled me and push me into cages, and that's how I am here now. At times I don't get food. My clothes are torn. They don't care. And I don't know whom to go to.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you spoken to him?
AZMAT BEGG: Never.
AMY GOODMAN: He writes you letters?
AZMAT BEGG: He wrote his letters when he was in Kandahar by Bagram and he also wrote letters from Guantanamo Bay, when he was transferred.
AMY GOODMAN: Azmat Begg, he is the father of Moazzam Begg, lives in Britain, has been campaigning to have his son released from Guantanamo. Michael Ratner, yesterday the U.S. government filed a brief. Can you talk about the administration arguing the president can detain what he calls “enemy combatants” as long as necessary?
MICHAEL RATNER: It's remarkable. The Center for Constitutional Rights won this case June 28th of this year. The Supreme Court said clearly, they have to justify detentions on an individual basis, and people have Constitutional rights in Guantanamo. The government is treating the Supreme Court decision essentially as a suggestion. They're saying, we can ignore it. It's incredible. I mean, it's real lawlessness at the most basic level. Everything we have gotten in these cases, whether it's the letter that was released from Moazzam Begg or any detainee out, has just been an uphill battle with the government, inch by inch, but I can tell you, I think we are going to eventually close that camp.
AMY GOODMAN: Even though they're talking about setting up a new one called Camp Six.
MICHAEL RATNER: It's illegality after illegality. They are not living in a lawless zone any longer since the Supreme Court decision. It may take us time, it may take us pushes by other governments -- and so far, I hope they do that in Britain and other places -- to eventually say, this is something from another generation. This will be looked like one day like we now look at the Japanese concentration camps during the Second World War that were in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Some of the people have been released. How many?
MICHAEL RATNER: I think a couple of hundred have been released. A bunch were released before we won in the Supreme Court as a way of trying to influence the Supreme Court. A number have been released after that. Once again, the government is doing it slowly, because I think they don't want the total embarrassment of understanding they are running a camp that's completely irrelevant to the war on terror.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner is author of Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. We're going to go to break. When we come back, there is a new play in New York that opened in London. It is called Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, based on the actual transcripts of prisoners' letters from Guantanamo, as well as their loved ones outside. We are going to hear a clip of the actor playing Moazzam Begg, reading what he has had to say. Then we go to Bishop Tutu who performed in this play this weekend. I had a chance to interview him afterwards. Stay with us. [break]
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, our guest. He's president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, author of the book, Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. Why do we know so much about Moazzam Begg, in particular?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, two reasons. One is his father has been very public and was actually in touch with him at the moment he was arrested in Pakistan. Moazzam Begg was put into the boot of a car or trunk of a car. He had his cell phone with him. He was able to call his father from the cell phone and tell him what happened. Plus his wife and child witnessed American and Pakistani agents coming into his house in Pakistan and taking him away. Then we have gotten a couple of letters. We got one early letter that Azmat Begg described, where he said he had been in Bagram for eleven months and can only see the sun and stars in this infamous underground facility in Bagram, where a lot of bad torture has apparently gone on. Plus, now we have this newest letter from him, but again, we have the newest letter only because his lawyer, Gita Gutierrez, was recently in Guantanamo, and because of that -- she was the first person there -- because of that, the government, I think, felt forced to have to release this letter to her.
AMY GOODMAN: What is he charged with?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Amy, he is charged with nothing. Zero. There has never been a charge against him, despite that. When he got to Guantanamo, he was put into special isolation camp, called Camp Echo. And presumably, and it's a guess, but he may have been put there because he actually witnessed, according to this last letter, as he says partially witnessed the deaths of two people in Afghanistan. He may be being kept there because they don't want him telling that story. And it's only, as I said, only because we are finally opening up Guantanamo, finally, that we are getting any information like this.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1320735,00.html
Two girls, two shots to the head
Palestinian 15-year-olds among growing number of children hit by Israeli snipers during 'Days of Penitence'
Chris McGreal in Jabaliya refugee camp
Wednesday October 6, 2004
The Guardian
Islam Dwidar's classmates were still taking in her shocking death - the teacher weeping outside before facing the girls, her closest friend recounting how they walked to school together each day - when the news arrived about Tahreer Abu El Jidyan.
The two 15-year-old pupils at Jabaliya's school were both shot in the head by Israeli soldiers inside their homes just a few blocks and several hours apart. Islam died almost immediately after the bullet smashed through her forehead as she baked bread with her mother in their yard on Sunday. Tahreer is still on life support at a Gaza hospital after an operation to remove shards of shattered skull from her brain.
She lies motionless, with little to suggest she is alive other than gentle breathing. Doctors do not expect her to survive.
Tahreer's mother, Intisar, was at her bedside yesterday.
"Oh Tahreer, my heart. I wish I were lying in this bed, not you," she whispered to her child. "She was sweeping the floor in front of the door," said Mrs Abu El Jidyan. "I was standing talking to her. We knew the Israeli soldiers were around, we knew they had snipers in the buildings on our street but we didn't expect what happened. They just shot her in the head. Her brains spilled out. She said: 'Mum, I'm hit'. She praised God and she collapsed."
There were two bullets. The first struck Tahreer in the head. As she fell, the second hit the wall behind her. "I've no doubt a sniper shot her deliberately. There was no fighting in the area. There were no other shots, only the ones that hit Tahreer," said her mother.
With her stood Tahreer's 14-year-old brother, Naser, who was wounded by shrapnel last week. Israeli forces killed their father 11 years ago during the first intifada.
Mrs Abu El Jidyan regrets preventing Tahreer from walking to school on Sunday morning. She thought it would be too dangerous to venture out of their home in Jabaliya's Sikka neighbourhood because it is on the edge of the area occupied by Israeli troops and tanks last week. Snipers are posted in buildings overlooking their street and a tank is less than a block away.
"I wouldn't let her out of the house but it was dangerous at home too. When there was fighting, bullets came through the walls. We stopped using some rooms on the side where the Israelis are," she said.
Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups say that about half of the nearly 80 people killed by the army over the past week of "Operation Days of Penitence" are civilians. The military says it has carefully targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters with missile strikes.
But while the numbers are in dispute - in part because it is often hard to say whether youths in their mid to late teens are bystanders or part of the Palestinian resistance - there is no doubt that a growing number of children have been felled by Israeli snipers.
At Islam and Tahreer's school in Jabaliya yesterday morning, the headmistress, Rukaya Kamal al Budani, fielded calls from parents wanting to know if it was safe to send their girls. "If they can get here, it's safe," was her stock reply. But of 1,150 pupils, fewer than 200 turned up.
Before word reached the school about Tahreer, Mrs al Budani was getting to grips with the death of Islam.
"This is our first casualty at the school," she said. "I don't know how to deal with the girls. It's going to have a big impact on her classmates and friends. I'm shocked that no one in the free world condemns the killing of a child."
Then one of the male teachers tells Mrs al Budani about the shooting of Tahreer the previous day. The headmistress sits in silence.
Until June, the two young women had been classmates, but then Tahreer failed her exams and was held back for a year. Asmaa Abu Samaan walked to school with her each morning.
"I met her in front of my house each morning to walk to school. I did my homework with her. I keep thinking that if she is brain-dead and not killed perhaps she is still suffering. I can't stand it," she said.
Asmaa walked to school yesterday morning without her friend."I walked against the wall hoping the soldiers can't see me. I want to go to school because I know the Jews do not want us to study because we need to be educated to build our country," she said.
But the killing went on as the conflict claimed the life of another teenage girl in the Gaza strip yesterday. Palestinian medics said Israeli soldiers fired about 20 bullets into 13- year-old Iman al-Hams, including five into her head.
The military said she had entered a forbidden zone in Rafah refugee camp, and that she dropped a bag that soldiers feared was a bomb.
The Palestinians said Iman was walking to school when troops entered the camp and that she dropped her bag as she ran away in fear.
The bag was not found to contain a bomb.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1382132,00.html
Guantanamo Briton 'in handcuff torture'
David Rose on the allegation that a British detainee was suspended by his wrists as punishment for reciting the Koran while in US military custody
Sunday January 2, 2005
The Observer
A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists.
The reason, the prisoner says, was that he was caught reciting the Koran at a time when talking was banned.
He says he has also been repeatedly shaved against his will. In one such incident, a guard told him: 'This is the part that really gets to you Muslims, isn't it?'
The strappado allegation was one among many made about treatment at both Guantanamo and the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan made to the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith when he visited his clients Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar at the Cuban prison six weeks ago, having tried for the previous 14 months to obtain the necessary security clearance.
But it is clear the disturbing claim is only the tip of the iceberg. Under the rules the United States military has imposed for defence lawyers who visit Guantanamo, Stafford Smith has not been allowed to keep his notes of meetings with prisoners, and will not be able to read them again until they have been examined and de-classified by a government censor.
He cannot disclose in public anything the men have told him until it too has been been de-classified, on pain of likely imprisonment in the US.
Stafford Smith has drawn up a 30-page report on the tortures which Begg and Belmar say they have endured, and sent it as an annexe with a letter to the Prime Minister which Downing Street received shortly before Christmas. For the time being - possibly forever - the report cannot be published, because the Americans claim that the torture allegations amount to descriptions of classified interrogation methods.
However, Stafford Smith's letter to Tony Blair - which has been declassified - says that on his visit to the Guantanamo prisoners, he heard 'credible and consistent evidence that both men have been savagely tortured at the hands of the United States' with Begg having suffered not only physical but 'sexual abuse' which has had 'mental health consequences'.
Thousands of documents obtained last month under the US Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union support the claims of torture at Guantanamo, which has apparently continued long after the publication last April of photographs of detainees being abused at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. They include memos and emails to superiors by FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency officers, who say they were appalled by the methods being used by the young military interrogators at Guantanamo.
According to the memos, the abuse was 'systematic', with frequent beatings, chokings, and sleep deprivation for days on end. Religious humiliation was also routine, with one agent reporting a case in which a prisoner was wrapped in an Israeli flag.
'On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a foetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water,' an anonymous FBI agent wrote on 2 August. 'Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.'
Reports of identical treatment were first published by The Observer last March, in interviews with three British detainees who had been released - Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed. They were then strenuously denied by the Pentagon. But according to another FBI memo dated 10 May, when an agent asked Guantanamo's former commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller, about techniques the FBI regarded as illegal, he was told that the interrogators 'had their marching orders from the Sec[retary] Def[ense]', Donald Rumsfeld. General Miller told the US Congress under oath that although Rumsfeld had authorised the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo, this had never happened. According to the memos, this was inaccurate.
Stafford Smith asks Blair in his letter 'to approach the plight of my clients with renewed vigour'. Asked by The Observer whether he planned to do this last week, a Downing Street spokesman declined to comment.
In a second letter, to the Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons, Stafford Smith suggests that Britain's complicity in abusive techniques at both Guantanamo and Afghanistan, where Begg and Belmar were held before being taken to Cuba, is wider than previously thought.
Begg and Belmar, he writes, were both questioned by an MI5 officer who gave his name as 'Andrew', while they were being abused by Americans both in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. According to the letter, 'he was the one who told Mr Begg that the more Mr Begg (falsely) said he was guilty of something, the quicker he would get home. Andrew was also the one who said that he would not comply with both of my clients' requests for consular notification, as well as Mr Begg's requests to learn whether his pregnant wife, Sally, and their three children were safe in Pakistan.' Stafford Smith is asking for Andrew's full name and access to him, to assist his client's defence.
Having fled Afghanistan where he had been trying to set up a school before the war against the Taliban began in October 2001, Begg was abducted by American agents from the house the family was renting in Islamabad.
Belmar was captured after attending a religious school for a few weeks before the 11 September terrorist attacks. An FBI source who personally questioned him before he was sent to Guantanamo has told The Observer he recommended his immediate release because he had 'no involvement' with terrorism, but was overruled by MI5.
Stafford Smith says in his letter to Baroness Symons that Begg made a false written confession after being tortured in February 2003, when two agents who had abused him at Bagram - where Begg witnessed the deaths of two prisoners officially classed as homicide - came to Guantanamo. But neither he nor Stafford Smith have been allowed to see this statement, which apparently forms the main grounds for his continued incarceration. Stafford Smith asks the Foreign Office for help in obtaining a copy, and asks: 'What kind of civilised legal system does not allow the suspect to see his own statements? How can the prisoner's statement be said to be classified information when, if it were true, the prisoner would already know it?'
Last night the Foreign Office said 'we are trying to do our utmost' for the four British detainees while 'we take every allegation of torture seriously'. The request for information about the MI5 man would be considered.
Azmatt Begg, Moazzam's father, said he had given up hope the British government would intervene in a meaningful way to help his son. 'They are not protecting their own citizens, but merely falling in with whatever the Americans want to do.'
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US Soldiers Murder Couple at Checkpoint, Six Children Soaked in Parents' Blood http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=602608
'Why did they shoot? We have no weapons'
By Chris Hondros in Tal Afar, Iraq
20 January 2005
It was a routine foot patrol. As we made our way up a broad boulevard, in the distance I could see a car making its way toward us. As a defence against potential car bombs, it is now standard practice for foot patrols to stop oncoming vehicles, particularly after dark.
"We have a car coming," someone called out, as we entered an intersection. We could see the car about 100 metres away. It kept coming; I could hear its engine now, a high whine that sounded more like acceleration than slowing down. It was maybe 50 yards away now. "Stop that car!" someone shouted out, seemingly simultaneously with someone firing what sounded like warning shots - a staccato measured burst.
The car continued coming. And then, perhaps less than a second later, a cacophony of fire, shots rattling off in a chaotic overlapping din. The car entered the intersection on its momentum and still shots were penetrating it and slicing it. Finally the shooting stopped, the car drifted listlessly, clearly no longer being steered, and came to a rest on a kerb. Soldiers began to approach it warily. The sound of children crying came from the car. I walked up to the car and a teenaged girl with her head covered emerged from the back, wailing and gesturing wildly. After her came a boy, tumbling on to the ground from the seat, already leaving a pool of blood.
"Civilians!" someone shouted, and soldiers ran up. More children - it ended up being six all told - started emerging, crying, their faces mottled with blood in long streaks. The troops carried them all off to a nearby sidewalk.
It was by now almost completely dark. There, working only by lights mounted on ends of their rifles, an Army medic began assessing the children's injuries, running his hands up and down their bodies, looking for wounds.
Incredibly, the only injuries were to a girl who suffered a cut hand and a boy with a superficial gash in the small of his back that was bleeding heavily but was not life-threatening. The medic immediately began to bind it, while the boy crouched against a wall.
From the pavement I could see into the bullet-mottled windshield more clearly, the driver of the car, a man, was penetrated by so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured. A woman also lay dead in the front, still covered in her Muslim clothing and harder to see.
Meanwhile, the children continued to wail and scream, huddled against a wall, sandwiched between soldiers either binding their wounds or trying to comfort them. The Army's translator later told me that this was a Turkoman family and that the teenaged girl kept shouting, "Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home!" After a delay in getting the armoured vehicles lined up and ready, the convoy moved to the main Tal Afar hospital.
The young children were carried in by soldiers and by their teenaged sister. Only the boy with the gash on his back needed any further medical attention, and the Army medic and an Iraqi doctor quickly chatted over his prognosis, deciding that his wound would be easily repaired. The Army told me that it would probably launch a full investigation.
Chris Hondros is a photographer with Getty Images and is embedded with US troops
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29400-2005Jan22?language=printer
washingtonpost.com
In One Night, Iraqi Turns From Friend to Foe
Man Who Supported U.S. Occupation Calls Americans 'the Devil' After Alleged Raid on His House
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page A20
BAGHDAD -- The day after the soldiers came, Imaad ordered his mother to go through her refrigerator and pantry and throw out all the cheese that had been made outside Iraq. He went around and collected any images of Westerners in the house, threw them in a pile and burned them until they were floating bits of ash. He struck his mother repeatedly and forbade her to watch foreign news or movie channels on their new television.
The Americans were "the devil," Imaad ranted.
By all accounts, Imaad, 32, was a typical, mild-mannered college graduate who spoke English well and had quietly supported the U.S. presence in Iraq -- until Jan. 5, the night the soldiers came.
His story about that night, told days later in his small living room, is the story of how the U.S. military made an enemy of one man during a 20-minute encounter.
The U.S. military, along with Iraqi security forces, routinely conducts raids throughout Iraq to try to catch insurgents. For the troops, the missions are often dangerous; soldiers say one of the greatest difficulties they face is figuring out who is a friend and who is an enemy.
Since the war began in March 2003, 1,077 American troops have died in hostile action, official figures show. In addition, insurgents kill Iraqi troops on an almost daily basis.
Often, soldiers on raids find illegal weapons, ringleaders and vital information that can prevent more attacks. But often, the raids turn up little and leave hard feelings among civilians who resent foreign soldiers bursting into their homes, breaking doors and gates and pointing guns at their heads. They resent these men catching their wives and daughters in their bedclothes. They resent them barking orders, telling them to get on the ground, invading their homes, emptying drawers and turning over mattresses.
On the night of Jan. 5, Imaad and his mother, Um Imaad -- both of whom declined to give their full names for fear of retribution -- were watching a movie in the living room. As in most other parts of the capital for the past two months, their Adhimiya neighborhood has electricity about two hours a day. So the generators outside were humming at about 9 that night, and the television was turned up so they could hear.
Imaad said they were startled by a loud banging at the door. He went quickly to open it. When he did, Imaad said, there were about a dozen U.S. soldiers standing with their guns pointed at his head.
Imaad and his mother said the soldiers rushed in, ordering them to sit together while they searched the house. "You look poor," Imaad recalled one of the soldiers saying. "Why?"
Imaad answered in English: "I have not been able to find a job, although I'm a graduate of the College of Arts." His heart was pounding, Imaad said. His mother, a chatty widow who adores her son, sat next to him, shaking.
The soldiers went to search his bedroom. He heard laughing, and then they called for him, he said. Imaad went to his room and saw that the soldiers had found several magazines he kept hidden from his mother. They had pictures of girls in swimsuits and erotic poses. Imaad said the soldiers spread the magazines on his bed and put his Koran in the middle.
"This is a good match," Imaad said one of the soldiers told him.
"It was a nightmare," he said. "I will never forget those bad soldiers when they put the Koran among the magazines."
Within 20 minutes, the soldiers left without arresting him or his mother. While the soldiers went next door to search his neighbor's house, Imaad began to slap his mother, he said. "The American people are devils," Um Imaad recalled her son repeating.
He left her and went to a mosque to spend the night. "I asked God to forgive me," Imaad said, "because I could not prevent American sins."
The Army's Task Force Baghdad, which includes soldiers from the 1st Cavalry and 82nd Airborne Divisions, are mainly responsible for securing the capital city.
Lt. Col. James Hutton, a spokesman for the 1st Cavalry, said Task Force Baghdad soldiers were not involved in the raid that night. He said other U.S. units, including military police, operate in Baghdad but that he had no information about their possible involvement.
Army Lt. Col. Daniel Baggio, another military spokesman in Baghdad, said he also could not confirm that a raid took place that night. "That sort of behavior is not condoned by the U.S. military, and I find it hard to believe U.S. soldiers would do that," he said. "I'm not saying it didn't happen. It just seems odd."
Neighbors corroborated parts of Imaad's account. They said the soldiers raided their houses on Jan. 5, telling them that they were responding to an explosion in the area. One man said a soldier angrily punched him and broke his nose. The injury was apparent a week later.
They said American soldiers raided one side of the street, and Iraqi security forces raided another. They said the soldiers arrived in armored vehicles and left after about two hours, taking several Iraqi civilians with them.
The neighborhood is known to harbor insurgents, including some who moved to Baghdad from Fallujah after a U.S. offensive there in November. Neighbors acknowledged there were anti-American groups among them, but they said not everyone opposed the foreign troops or Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government.
Imaad and his mother said they had no memorable encounters with soldiers before Jan. 5, no reason to hate or mistrust them. But Um Imaad said she had been distraught since that night at the changes in her son, a plump man with a round face and a receding hairline. His father died in the Iran-Iraq war two decades ago, leaving mother and son with only each other for support.
Um Imaad, who wore a simple white scarf tucked around her brown, crinkled face, said that after the raid she thought she was going to lose her son, too. "He had a crisis," she said, explaining what happened.
Um Imaad brought Imaad pills from the doctor to try to calm him. He looked at the yellow ones, then the red ones and refused to take them. "All these belong to Jewish people," he said, pushing one set aside. "And these others are from bad or foreign people."
Imaad said that two weeks after the raid, he was still struggling to return to normal. He was no longer hitting his mother, but he still would not allow her to watch foreign television or buy products made outside Iraq.
Imaad said he was embracing his Muslim faith as never before. He spends most of his time at the mosque praying or reading the Koran. He is also looking for a job.
Before the war, Imaad worked for a commerce company, making about $50 a month and spending most of it on transportation. He has not been able to find work in the nearly two years since.
He never really held the Americans responsible for that, he said, until the night of Jan. 5.
"I used to have a good opinion of the Americans," Imaad said. "But they are the enemy. They are bad."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1489147,00.html?gusrc=rss
Report implicates top brass in Bagram scandal
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday May 21, 2005
The Guardian
A leaked report on a military investigation into two killings of detainees at a US prison in Afghanistan has produced new evidence of connivance of senior officers in systematic prisoner abuse.
The investigation shows the military intelligence officers in charge of the detention centre at Bagram airport were redeployed to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003, while still under investigation for the deaths of two detainees months earlier. Despite military prosecutors' recommendations, the officers involved have yet to be charged.
The Bagram case also suggests that some of the prison guards were given little if any training in handling detainees, and were influenced by a White House directive that "terrorist" suspects did not deserve the rights given to prisoners of war under the Geneva convention.
The prosecution dossier from the army's investigation into Bagram, leaked to the New York Times, deals with the deaths of detainees Dilawar and Habibullah (both, as is common for Afghans, taking a single name).
Dilawar was a taxi driver who appears to have driven past a US military base soon after a rocket attack. Habibullah was handed over to the US by an Afghan warlord, and was identified as the brother of a Taliban commander. Both men were seized in late 2002, interrogated, beaten and killed in a hangar used for holding detainees who were being vetted for dispatch to Guantánamo Bay.
The two were chained to the ceilings of their cells for days at a time and beaten on the legs. They had been subjected to a blow known as the "common peroneal strike", aimed at a point just below the knee and intended to disable. Coroners in the Habibullah case said his legs "had basically been pulpified" and looked as though they had been run over by a bus.
Last October, the army's criminal investigation com mand found probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted soldiers with offences ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter in the Dilawar case. Charges were also recommended against 15 of them for the Habibullah case.
Only seven soldiers have been charged, all junior ranks.
John Galligan, a Texas lawyer defending one of them - Private First Class Willie Brand - told the Guardian: "It happened over a period of time and involved a large number of individuals. To turn around and charge PFC Brand fails to take account of the environment and standard operating procedures.
"What is particularly offensive to me is that senior officials have gone unscathed."
Asked about the latest revelations, President George Bush said yesterday: "I think about over 20% of the people thus far that have been held to account as a result of the Abu Ghraib issue have been officers. I'm comfortable that we're getting to the bottom of the situation. And I know we're doing so in a transparent way."
Sergeant James Leahy told investigators that after February 2002 directive from Mr Bush that the Geneva convention did not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban fighters, interrogators believed they "could deviate slightly from the rules".
The Pentagon denied that the Abu Ghraib scandal could have been prevented if the Bagram abuses had been investigated faster. Carrying out an inquiry in Afghanistan was bound to take longer. But John Sifton, an Afghanistan expert at Human Rights Watch, said this was "a convenient excuse".
"The White House always put forward, that Abu Ghraib was an exception, just some rotten apples," he said. "But US personnel in Afghanistan were involved in killings and torture of prisoners well before the Iraq war even started.
"The story begins in Afghanistan."
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=640070
Afghan prisoners were 'tortured to death' by American guards
By Justin Huggler, Asia Correspondent
21 May 2005
Shocking and detailed accounts have emerged of how two Afghan prisoners were tortured to death by American interrogators and prison guards at Bagram air base, outside Kabul.
A 2,000-page report on an internal investigation by the US military leaked to The New York Times and published yesterday provides exhaustive detail on how the two were kept chained in excruciating positions and kicked to death.
The harrowing stories of the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar told in the report could prove as damaging to the US as the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
The report reveals that Dilawar, a taxi driver, died despite the fact that most of the interrogators were convinced he was innocent.
There will be fears of an explosive reaction in Afghanistan. The New York Times report comes a week after at least 15 people were killed in protests in Afghanistan triggered by a Newsweek report which said US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down a lavatory. Newsweek has since retracted the report, saying it was based on a flawed source.
But The New York Times story will not go away so easily for the Bush administration. Its source is the findings of the US military's own investigation. It also comes at a dangerous time in Afghanistan, with violence increasing and signs that the Taliban may be resurgent.
The leaked report contains graphic details of a culture of abuse at Bagram, where detainees are held while the US military decides whether to send them to Guantanamo. In sworn statements, US soldiers tell of a woman interrogator with a taste for humiliation who stepped on the neck of one detainee and kicked another in the genitals.
They also tell of Specialist Damien Corsetti, an interrogator called "Monster" - he had the word tattooed in Italian across his chest - who one sergeant praised as the "king of torture". One Saudi detainee testified that Spc Corsetti held his penis against his face and threatened to rape him.
The report includes the names of all the US soldiers involved. It details the cases of the two Afghan men who died in US custody. The first, Habibullah, was captured in November 2002. He was locked in an isolation cell with his hands shackled to the wire ceiling over his head. The report describes how he was literally kicked to death over several days.
The guards found him "uncooperative", and he was given multiple "peroneal strikes" - a disabling blow to the leg just above the knee. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg," former Sgt Thomas Curtis told investigators.
A lawyer for one of the guards who kneed Habibullah in this fashion told US investigators: "My client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility."
When Habibullah started coughing up phlegm and complaining of chest pains, the guards laughed at him. Eventually his dead body was found hanging from the handcuffs that still chained him to the ceiling. A post-mortem examination found that he was probably killed by a blood clot, caused by the leg injuries, which travelled to his heart and blocked the blood supply to his lungs.
Dilawar, a taxi driver, was detained in December 2002 as he drove past a US base that had earlier come under rocket attack. Passengers he had picked up were carrying suspicious items.
Spc Corey Jones, an interrogator, told investigators that Dilawar spat in his face. He responded with a couple of knee strikes.
"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his God," Spc Jones said. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny." The report says it became a running joke and prison guards kicked Dilawar just to hear him scream "Allah". "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes," he said.
During an interrogation, the severely injured Dilawar begged a translator to get him a doctor. The translator says he told the interrogators, but one replied: "He's OK. He's just trying to get out of his restraints."
An autopsy found that Dilawar died of heart failure caused by "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities". The coroner, Lieutenant-Colonel Elizabeth Rouse, told a pre-trial hearing that his legs "had basically been pulpified ... I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus."
Seven US soldiers face criminal charges.
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http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4581834
'Young Troops Abused Detainees in U.S. Camp of Death'
By Victoria Ward, PA, in New York
Detainees in United States military custody in Afghanistan were the victims of widespread abuse by “young and poorly trained soldiers”, according to a report published today.
A 2,000-page confidential file obtained by The New York Times reveals brutal treatment of prisoners, apparently often born out of little more than boredom.
The report focuses on the deaths of two Afghan men in Bagram in December 2002.
The first, a 22-year-old taxi driver, known as Dilawar, was said to have been so badly beaten his legs could no longer bend. He was chained by the wrists to the ceiling of his cell where he eventually died.
Months later, Army investigators learned that most of his interrogators believed he was an innocent man who drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time, according to the report.
Another detainee, Habibullah, died there six days earlier, also shackled to the ceiling.
“It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared,” said one of the medics called to the scene, Staff Sgt Rodney Glass.
In statements to investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator stepping on the neck of one detainee and kicking another in the genitals.
Another prisoner was said to have been forced to roll back and forth on the floor, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went.
“The Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse,” the New York Times reports.
“The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.”
The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of the file from someone involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military’s response to the deaths.
The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded last October that the Dilawar and Habibullah incidents implicated 28 officers. Seven were later charged.
Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel John Skinner, said the “comprehensive” investigation was indicative of how seriously such reports were taken.
“The humane treatment of detainees has always been our standard,” he said.
“In context there was a relatively small number of incidents, but even one is unacceptable and we take them very seriously and have conducted several thorough investigations.”
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1621181,00.html
America
May 21, 2005
More US shame over detainees shackled, abused and left to die
From Roland Watson in Washington
The unit involved in the deaths of two men at the Afghan military base at Bagram says its men were not trained to interrogate (PHOTO: RICHARD MILLS)
A NEW chapter of horror has opened in the brutal treatment of prisoners by American guards and interrogators, this time in Afghanistan.
A leaked 2,000-page report into the deaths of two detainees details systematic and routine mistreatment at the Bagram military base, 40 miles (64km) north of Kabul.
Each man had spent most of his five days’ captivity shackled to the ceiling or wall of his cell, a technique that has since been labelled by the US military as a criminal assault. They were also subjected to relentless beatings, particularly to their legs, which coroners blamed for their deaths.
In one case, the guards and interrogators believed that their prisoner was not guilty of the assault on an American base for which he was blamed.
But the mistreatment appeared to be habitual, the work of young, ill-trained and bored recruits prone to violence. Many of the individuals involved in the two cases in December 2002 and January 2003 were redeployed to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. They included one interrogator known variously as “Monster” and “the King of Torture”. At Abu Ghraib he was fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning.
The US military’s response has been slow and, in contrast to the Abu Ghraib prison guards charged and sentenced in public view, guarded.
For months after the deaths military spokesmen insisted that they had been because of natural causes even though the coroner in each case had ruled them homicides. In October 2004 the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command found probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted men and women with criminal offences surrounding one of the cases, that of a 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar.
Fifteen of the same group were also found liable in the other, that of Habibullah, the brother of a former Taleban commander. None has so far been convicted. Only seven have been charged, four of them last week, even though the two men died more than two years ago.
The men and women involved said they believed that they were operating according to guidelines set in Washington, where President Bush had ruled that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda or terrorist detainees. Horrific details of the two men’s deaths are spelt out in an army criminal investigation report leaked to The New York Times by a military official unhappy with the Pentagon’s response.
Habibullah was taken to Bagram on December 30, 2002, where he was reported by an American doctor to be in good health. He was swiftly marked down as unco-operative, and shackled by his wrists to the wire-mesh ceiling over the cell.
During the next few days he was severely beaten on the head, chest and legs. The guards used a technique they had been taught, the disabling “common peroneal strike”, or sharp blow to the side of the leg just above the knee. Ali Baryalai, one interrogator, said that Habibullah often did not answer the interrogators’ questions because he did not understand them.
After two days of beatings and being shackled to the ceiling by the wrists, Habibullah was unable to bend his right leg and his foot was swollen. He could not bend his knees to sit in a chair for questioning and was allowed to sit on the floor.
The next day he was found in his cell slumped to one side with his tongue sticking out.
Habibullah, who was a combative detainee, often spitting at the guards, was found dead in his cell on his fifth day at Bagram. A coroner said that the likely cause of death was a blood clot caused by the severe beating to his legs, which travelled to his heart.
Most of the soldiers involved were from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which was bolstered by six Arabic speakers from the Utah National Guard. Only two of the group had ever questioned a real prisoner. “There was nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation,” Staff Sergeant Steven Loring told investigators.
Dilawar was taken to Bagram the day that Habibullah died. He died after five days of similar treatment. The medical examiner who checked his body said that the tissue in the young man’s legs had “basically been pulpified”.
It emerged later that the guards did not believe that Dilawar was guilty of what he had been accused. They were right. He and three other men in his taxi had been turned in by a warlord seeking to curry favour with the Americans. The other three spent 15 months in Guantanamo Bay before being released.
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/579444.html
Channel 10: IDF soldiers use Palestinian as human-shield in West Bank
By The Associated Press
Israel Defense Forces soldiers used a Palestinian teenager as a shield against rock-throwers in the West Bank last week, Channel 10 reported Monday.
The station showed film of soldiers leading the 17-year-old, identified as Fahdi, to a building where soldiers were stationed in the village of Dura in the southern West Bank. In a combination of actual footage and reenactment, the TV report showed how soldiers led the blindfolded youth out onto a second-floor balcony as a soldier aimed a rifle with a tear gas grenade from behind the teenager and other teens threw rocks at the building from across the street.
The IDF denied the allegation, saying the youth was arrested for throwing rocks at the soldiers, who did not use him as a shield but kept him under guard until he was transferred to police custody.
The Supreme Court has forbidden the use of Palestinians as human shields.
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http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jun2005-daily/01-06-2005/world/w13.htm
Jerusalem to demolish 88 Arab homes
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: The Jerusalem municipality wants to demolish 88 homes in an Arab neighbourhood of the city to make room for an archaeological park, according to Israeli government documents and attorneys representing the homeowners. If the courts approve the municipality’s request, it will be one of the largest demolitions since Israel captured traditionally Arab east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, and would cause an uproar among Palestinians who claim that part of the city as a future capital.
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Tuesday warned of grave damage to delicate peace efforts. "I urge the Israeli government not to do this demolition, and to give peace a chance," he said. The 88 homes are located in east Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhood of Silwan, just outside the walled Old City, an area steeped in biblical history.
The municipality wants to enlarge a small archaeological site beside the homes and turn the area into a national park, the Haaretz newspaper quoted Uri Shetrit, the Jerusalem city engineer, as saying. The park would connect several Jewish settlement enclaves in Silwan to the nearby City of David, an area of excavations dating to the biblical King David.
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http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6907945&postID=108390844278288083
We killed police for revenge, Israeli soldiers confessBy Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
03 June 2005
Two Israeli soldiers have come forward to describe how they took part in what they say was an officially ordered "revenge" operation to kill Palestinian police officers among them several unarmed men.
In graphic testimony, one soldier has confessed that he "really enjoyed" a chase in which he shot an unarmed Palestinian in the head who was trying to escape during a series of reprisal raids ordered the day after the killing of six Israeli soldiers in an ambush by militant gunmen three years ago.
In what may be the first inside account of such an operation, the soldiers from two reconnaissance units say they were among troops ordered by their commanders to "liquidate" the police officers at a series of Palestinian West Bank checkpoints even though they were given no evidence they had been involved in the killing of the Israelis.
The raids were among a series of ground and air attacks which, in all, killed 15 Palestinians 12 of them policemen in and around Nablus and Ramallah 24 hours after the six Israeli soldiers were killed at a military post in the village of Ein Arik, west of Ramallah, at the height of the intifada.
One soldier, who took part in the attack on a Palestinian post at Deir es Sudan said they had lain in wait after finding the position empty when they arrived in the middle of the night.
"The idea was simply to kill them all. Whenever they arrived, we would kill them, regardless whether [they were]armed or not. If they were Palestinian policemen, they were to be shot. The order was given and our six opened fire."
The soldier, from the Yael Reconnaissance Troop, said that their [naval] squad commander had told them: "We are going to kill six Palestinian policemen somewhere, revenging our six they took down". He added: "On my question 'what did they do?' the answer was there was a suspicion that the terrorist who killed our six came through that [Palestinian] checkpoint. Suspicion, but no concrete evidence. But I was told: 'it doesn't matter; they took six of ours, and we are going to take six of theirs.'"
The soldier said that, after hitting and wounding two of the Palestinians as they tried to run away, the soldiers continued to fire, as one ran into a corrugated metal shed and another into a cemetery. After they sprayed the shed with bullets, a gas cylinder in it caught fire. "We had a killed policeman, another one in this burning inferno, and a third one, escaping. We ran after him into a graveyard ... stood on the surrounding wall and shot at him. We killed him too."
The soldier said that no fire had been returned by the Palestinians and added: "Later we understood, that not one of them ... was armed." He added that he had inspected the "completely smashed" body of the man in the graveyard after shooting at it to "confirm the kill" and that it was of "a guy in his mid-50s or 60s, very old."
The accounts were originally given to the "Breaking the Silence" group of young former soldiers which is critical of methods used by the army in the occupied territories.
One of the group's spokesmen, Avichai Sharon, a former member of the crack Golani Brigade, claimed the operations on 20 February 2002 were ordered "from high" including the Ministry of Defence and added: "In my eyes, this is a very harsh example of crossing the moral and human boundaries."
He said it indicated that "we are not a defence force any more but a tribe which avenges in blood. As an Israeli, I fear this."
He said the soldiers, whose testimony appears in today's Maariv, had not been named "for legal reasons". Maariv quotes an army spokesman insisting the policemen were "contaminated by terror".
Describing another attack on the same day at the Beit Ha Mitachayim checkpoint on the eastern edge of Nablus in which fire was returned by Palestinian police the other soldier, from the Tzanchanim Paratroop Reconnaissance Unit, said that the order to shoot at Palestinians had given by the unit commander and the brigade commander, a Brigadier Cochavi, had been present at the time.
He said the policemen were ones who normally would have been warned by Israeli liaison officers about any military operations due to take place in their area.
As Israel released 400 Palestinian prisoners yesterday, Dov Weisglass, senior aide to Ariel Sharon, indicated the dismantlement of illegal settlement outposts a demand by the US would have to wait until after disengagement.
3 June 2005 11:11
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http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=643663
Eight arrested after video of Srebrenica executions shownBy Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
03 June 2005
Serbian authorities have arrested at least eight men in connection with the murder of Muslims in Srebrenica after a video of the crime was shown at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
The Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said, after holding talks with the UN's chief war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte, that "a number of suspects" had been arrested by yesterday for the "shocking crime".
Ms del Ponte was on a short visit to Belgrade, during which Serbian leaders promised to hunt down and arrest within a month General Ratko Mladic, who is wanted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for the 1995 slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.
Ms del Ponte described the arrests as "a brilliant operation". "I'm particularly grateful for the reaction on the footage." But she added: "In a few hours they were able to identify the perpetrators. I asked this morning that they react as quickly to arrest the fugitives who are still at large," referring to General Mladic and the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic.
The prosecution presented the videotape at the war crimes tribunal on Wednesday. It showed the execution of six Bosnian Muslim youths by members of the notorious paramilitary "Scorpions" unit of Mr Milosevic's secret police. The unit committed war crimes against non-Serb civilians in Bosnia, Croatia and in Kosovo.
Short clips of the video were shown on Serbian television on Wednesday night. It was taken by a man participating in the murders at Trnovo, 18 miles south of Sarajevo in Serb-held territory, after the fall of the Bosnian "safe haven" of Srebrenica. At one point in the footage, he claims that the battery of his camera is low. The man is told by one of the executioners to go on as long as he can.
The video begins with a Serbian Orthodox priest blessing paramilitaries before they go into battle. It ends with what looks like the same paramilitaries shooting the six civilian prisoners in the back, with machine guns. The young men appeared to have been severely beaten and had their hands tied behind their backs. The killers in the video are wearing the black uniforms of the Scorpions.
The Srebrenica massacre, the worst war crime in Europe since the end of the Second World War, remains a divisive subject for Serbs. Conservatives and nationalists have convinced the public that the crime is the invention of anti-Serb forces abroad with a recent survey showing that only half the population believe it happened. The same survey suggested that two-thirds of the public believedMr Karadzic and General Mladic were heroes.
But analysts say the airing of the video and the quick action of the authorities might be a prelude to the arrest of the two, which is the precondition for Serbia to start talks with the EU on an association agreement, due to open in October. Ms del Ponte wants General Mladic and Mr Karadzic to be arrested and extradited to The Hague by 11 July, the tenth anniversary of the massacre.
3 June 2005 11:11
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/597853.html
Security guard shoots Palestinian teen in family vineyard
By Arnon Regular
A 15-year-old boy was shot to death Friday evening by a civilian security guard securing the separation fence near the village of Beit Lakiya, near Highway 443.
Palestinian sources said that Mahyoub al-Asi was shot by the guard, whom he knew, from a distance while tending his family's vineyard several hundred meters away.
Al-Asi's cousins, Jamal, 14, and Uday, 15, were killed by Israel Defense Forces fire nearby a few months ago. His brother was also killed by a mine explosion near the village several years ago.
According to villagers and official Israeli sources, there had been no demonstration or clash with the guards at the time of the incident. A local ambulance managed to get him to the clinic in the village of Bidu, en route to the hospital in Ramallah, but he died of his wounds.
At least one other Palestinian boy, 12-year-old Zahi Mafarjeh, saw the incident from several hundred meters away. Mafarjeh told a researcher for the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem yesterday that no other boys had been present and there had been no demonstration.
He told Haaretz yesterday evening, "Mahyoub passed by me and said he was going to his family's vineyard. I saw him getting farther away and after a few minutes I heard a single shot. I looked at the hill opposite and saw that Mahyoub, who was in the allotment, began running toward the village but after a few steps, he fell. Then I saw the guard coming out of the guard shed near the fence and drive to the allotment. He reached Mahyoub and knelt over him and then used a colored flag to signal his location to the troops near the fence. A few minutes later, he saw an ambulance arriving from the village and left the scene."
According to testimony by the ambulance crew, Asi was shot while in the fenced family allotment located 200 meters from the bulldozer parking lot being guarded.
Mafarjeh, who knows the guards well, said Asi was shot by a Bedouin guard known to the boys as "Farid."
The shooter was detained for questioning and then released to house arrest.
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New Zealand PM condemns attacks on mosques
www.chinaview.cn 2005-07-10 19:52:26
AUCKLAND, New Zealand, July 10 (Xinhuanet) -- New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark condemned Sunday the attacks on mosques in Auckland.
Clark said she was saddened by the attacks.
Four Islamic centers in Auckland were attacked overnight. The New Zealand Muslim Association mosque in Ponsonby had several windows damaged in one attack. No offenders or suspects were seen.
Windows were smashed at the Al Faroq Cultural Center in Otahuhu,south Auckland. Vandalization at the Mt Roskill Mosque in Sandringham and the South Auckland Mosque and Otahuhu had also been reported.
The attacks happened two days after bombs exploded in London, killing more than 50 people.
Clark said New Zealanders across all communities are horrified by the attacks in London which are the work of evil people.
"But it is wrong to target the Muslim community here in retaliation. New Zealand's Muslim community like all New Zealand's communities is overwhelmingly a law abiding and peaceful community."
"Times like these call for cool heads and for tolerance. The evil acts of some should not lead to scapegoating of minorities inour communities," said Clark. Enditem
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http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/2005-07/10/article06.shtml
Mosques in UK, US, New Zealand Attacked
Additional Reporting By Ahmed Fathy, IOL Staff
CAIRO, July 10, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – No sooner had the London blasts taken place than racist attacks against mosques in Britain, the US and New Zealand were reported.
Anas Al-Tikriti, the spokesman of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), told IslamOnline.net Sunday, July 10, an arsonist attacked a mosque in central London and tried to set it on fire.
Media reports, however, said at least five mosques have come under racist attacks, including one in northwest England set on fire, since the attacks that killed 50 people and injured 700 others on Thursday, July 7.
A man living in a flat above the Shahjalal Mosque, which is part of an Islamic centre in Birkenhead , was treated for smoke inhalation but there were no other injuries, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The mosque door was burnt and there was some damage inside, Merseyside police said.
London police said Sunday there had been a number of racially and religiously-motivated hate crimes since the terror bombings, including one resulting in a serious injury.
"We have had a number of incidents of hate crime, racially and religiously motivated offences, and we take these types of offences very, very seriously," Commander Brian Paddick of the London Metropolitan Police told a press briefing.
"There has been one serious injury."
The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) said in June that the Muslim minority in Britain has been living in a "climate of fear" since the 9/11 attacks.
Hotline
Tikriti told IOL "MAB has registered some 70 verbal assaults, particularly against hijab-clad Muslims, since Thursday, July 7, when London was attacked."
The assaults included offensive phrases like "wicked Islam", "go home" and "you are behind the blasts" as well as emotional outbursts in the face of Muslims, he added.
Tikriti, who championed a list of anti-war activists that vied in the European elections in Yorkshire and the Humber constituency in June of last year, said that two old couples insulted a hijab-clad woman, but she was protected by passers-by.
The activist said that MAB has established a hotline to receive complaints from British Muslims about racist attacks.
He further said that they will embark on a series of social activities and media campaigns to show the true face of Islam in addition to sin-ins and peaceful marches.
"MAB staged a sit-in on Friday, July 8, in cooperation with anti-Iraq war and anti-WMDs movements to condemn the blasts and show solidarity with the families of the victims," he said.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission has given British Muslims a set of safety tips to avoid reprisal attacks following the bombings.
Media Onslaughts
Tikriti feared that the media would unleash new anti-Islam campaigns in the wake of the blasts.
"I assume that right-wing and Zionist media, like The Daily Telegraph and The Sun, will mount their anti-Islam campaigns in the days to come, parroting hoary-old claims like Islam was encouraging the killing of infidels and terrifying civilians," he told IOL.
The Muslim activist further said that such media onslaughts are aimed at pitting the Britons against the Muslim minority as it happened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
He citied a Friday article by Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph entitled "Where is the Gandhi of Islam?"
"But we can’t ignore the fact that there are some leading newspapers that do justice to Muslims and Islam like The Guardian and The Independent," Tikriti said.
Senior British parliamentarians admitted in August of last year that anti-terrorism laws are being used "disproportionately" against the Muslim minority.
Domino Effect
The London attacks have already had their domino effect with at least six Islamic centers in New Zealand vandalized and their walls painted with the message "Londoners RIP," police said Sunday.
In what appeared to be a co-coordinated series of attacks across Auckland , vandals smashed windows and doors and left variations of the same message in black paint on walls facing the street, AFP said.
New Zealand Federation of Islamic Associations President Javed Khan said it was the first time an attack on this scale had occurred against the country's 40,000 Muslims, about 25,000 of whom live in Auckland .
He said Muslims were "shocked and saddened" by the incidents in London and appealed to his community to be calm and tolerant of the overnight attacks in Auckland .
Prime Minister Helen Clark was quick to condemn the attacks, saying it was wrong to target the Muslim minority in New Zealand in retaliation for the terrorist attacks in London .
" New Zealand 's Muslim community, like all New Zealand 's communities, is overwhelmingly a law-abiding and peaceful community," she said.
Opposition National Party leader Don Brash said the attacks were "an appalling act of intolerance" and the Green Party described the attackers as no better than the terrorists who brought death to London .
In the US , the FBI and members of its Joint Terrorism Task Force are investigating a fire at a Bloomington mosque in Minnesota on Saturday as a hate crime, the American Indy Star newspaper reported Sunday.
The incident took place at the Islamic Center of Bloomington, where a ground-floor window was broken and an incendiary device was used to start a fire, an official of the mosque said.
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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article298281.ece
Mosques attacked by arsonists as Asians fear surge of race hate
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent Published: 11 July 2005
The terrorist attacks in London have provoked reprisal attacks on Asians. Police are investigating several incidents, including four arson attacks on mosques, that may have been motivated by revenge.
The arson attacks were carried out in mosques in Leeds, Belvedere, Telford and Birkenhead. Three further attacks were reported on mosques in east London and Bristol. In the attack on the east London mosque, 19 windows were smashed, according to the newspaper The Muslim News.
In Hayes, Middlesex, an Asian woman reported attempted arson after she noticed "liquid dripping down her door and smelt petrol" on the day of the terrorist attacks in London. The same day, five white men were arrested after bottles were thrown at the windows of a Sikh temple in south London. In a separate incident, arson was reported at the home of an Asian family in The Broadway, Southall.
In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said that the force was keeping an open mind on the motive for the London attacks, but that many of the allegations involved threatening phone calls or racist abuse. A spokesman said "reassurance patrols" were being carried out in areas considered vulnerable.
A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Great Britain said there was a real sense of "fear and apprehension" among many Muslim communities, particularly in London. Senior Muslim figures met over the weekend to discuss how best to deal with the increasingly tense climate. Sikh community leaders have asked the police for greater protection.
A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said yesterday that there was an "increased level of concern" among the public in general and the Muslim community in particular since the bombings in London on Thursday, but stressed community relations on the whole had been "reassuringly calm".
Acpo's president, Chris Fox, said he believed "low level" incidents of violence had not been reported to the police. "We encourage everyone to report this type of obnoxious and dangerous behaviour, from whatever quarter, for full police investigation because we are determined there will be a very robust enforcement response to it. It is absolutely crucial that there should be no reaction against any section of the community. That would simply play into the hands of the murderers," he said.
Four mosques were also vandalised in Auckland, New Zealand, over the weekend, one with the phrase "R.I.P London".
The terrorist attacks in London have provoked reprisal attacks on Asians. Police are investigating several incidents, including four arson attacks on mosques, that may have been motivated by revenge.
The arson attacks were carried out in mosques in Leeds, Belvedere, Telford and Birkenhead. Three further attacks were reported on mosques in east London and Bristol. In the attack on the east London mosque, 19 windows were smashed, according to the newspaper The Muslim News.
In Hayes, Middlesex, an Asian woman reported attempted arson after she noticed "liquid dripping down her door and smelt petrol" on the day of the terrorist attacks in London. The same day, five white men were arrested after bottles were thrown at the windows of a Sikh temple in south London. In a separate incident, arson was reported at the home of an Asian family in The Broadway, Southall.
In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said that the force was keeping an open mind on the motive for the London attacks, but that many of the allegations involved threatening phone calls or racist abuse. A spokesman said "reassurance patrols" were being carried out in areas considered vulnerable.
A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Great Britain said there was a real sense of "fear and apprehension" among many Muslim communities, particularly in London. Senior Muslim figures met over the weekend to discuss how best to deal with the increasingly tense climate. Sikh community leaders have asked the police for greater protection.
A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said yesterday that there was an "increased level of concern" among the public in general and the Muslim community in particular since the bombings in London on Thursday, but stressed community relations on the whole had been "reassuringly calm".
Acpo's president, Chris Fox, said he believed "low level" incidents of violence had not been reported to the police. "We encourage everyone to report this type of obnoxious and dangerous behaviour, from whatever quarter, for full police investigation because we are determined there will be a very robust enforcement response to it. It is absolutely crucial that there should be no reaction against any section of the community. That would simply play into the hands of the murderers," he said.
Four mosques were also vandalised in Auckland, New Zealand, over the weekend, one with the phrase "R.I.P London".
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What this has done is remove the fig leaf from the U.S. occupation in Iraq. Not only did it make the Iraqi people naked, but it made America naked in terms of its claims of abiding by the rule of law, maintaining human dignity, exercising self-restraint and having a government that's accountable and transparent.
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Dear Friends , these and many other offences prove the fact that USA = Unlimited Satanic Atrocities.
Remember O Muslims; who enjoy their lives without any thought about the other Muslims, that the days of peace have gone away and the enemies of Islam are looking for more opportunities to torment Muslims.This is the time we must strive to strengthen our piety and faith.
Please forward this to all your friends to at least create an awareness of the misery of our sisters and brothers in Iraq and remember that we and our families may be the next to experience the same troubles.
May ALLAH and His Holy Prophet Muhammed ( peace be upon Him), help the Ummah in these days of distress!Aameen.
Please pray for the safety and well being of the Ummah.
Translated by Prof. Dr. Q. Al-Samarrai-----
Samarrai11@hotmail.com
To my own folk, to my own people in Ramadi, Khalidiyya and Falluja… to all the people of the world who endear their dignity and honour, is my appeal.From the American- Zionist prison of Abu Ghraib, your very sister Nur sends you this letter but the question is: from where shall I start? By God I do not know how to describe to you the misery and the indignation in the prison; the hunger we suffer the humiliation we experience while you enjoy your meals to gluttony? Or the thirst while you drink as you please? Or the sleepless nights we are subjected to by our American prisoners? Or our nakedness that our prisoners like us to parade in front of them? O’ dear brother, when we see your trucks and cars transporting building materials for the Americans, our hearts jump because those trucks and cars belong to my people and to my own town then I reflect with a bleeding heart: O’ God! My people have sold their honour and dignity in exchange for a bundle of American Dollars, but when I reflect upon our desecrated honour and my situation, I burst into tears. O’ dear brothers and sisters, how I, in God’s name, can describe or put in words, the suffering we undergo and experience at the hands of the Americans, let alone the severe beating and daily torture because we do not give in to their lusty and sexual desires!!! O’ the spiritual leaders of our beloved faith, where do you hide your faces from the shame and dishonour that the Americans brought upon you and us?? Have you already forgotten the preaching of our most revered Prophet to safeguard your honour? Have you already sold yourselves and us to the American and Zionists in the slave market in return for a few Dollars? Have you lost your honour and dignity?? Have you forgotten that God has put us in you trust; to keep, to cherish and protect our honour from desecration? The Americans in Abu Ghraib have already desecrated your and our honour. In the name of the almighty God and those who read my letter world wide to raise their voices against the brutal treatment we undergo at the hand of our prisoners. It is worse than the Palestinians in the Zionist’s prisoners but here they rape us, they desecrated and violated our sacred honour like wild beasts. We scream for help to save us from these bests but no one seems to hear our desperate cry. Finally, if there still any atom of honour in your hearts,O’ leaders of the community, do attack this notorious prison with every weapon at your disposal killing them and us altogether because our wombs are already pregnant with their bastards. We love to die than bringing shame upon you or upon our families and our land; kill us, I beseech you to the sake of God to kill us with the Americans and their bastards.
Your Sister
Nur.
Arabic Translationhttp://www.albasrah.net/maqalat_mukhtara/arabic/022004/risala_aboghreb.htm
Source www.albasrah.net
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Nadia's Story Told Through Her Tears: "The Americans Have Raped Me like this!"
Jan 29, 2007
Source: lahaonline.com
This article is dedicated to every Muslim who still has blood running in his veins.
Nadia is one of the victims of the American mercenaries in Abu Ghraib prison. She was detained for unknown reasons. When she was released from the prison, didn't throw herself into the arms of her family as most of the oppressed prisoners released have done dose, especially when he is being fueled by the fire of the oppression and a yearning for his family.
Simply, Nadia escaped immediately after she left prison, not because of the shame that will follow her because of some crime she has committed but because of what she and the other Iraqi captive women have been subject to; rape, and torture by the hands of the American mercenaries in Abu Gharib prison. The walls of the prison tell many tragic stories but what Nadia tells is the living truth and a living hell.
Nadia begins her story:
"I was visiting one of my relatives, and suddenly the American forces attacked the home and started to inspect it. They found some light weapons. So, they arrested all people in the home including me. I tried to explain to the interpreter, who was accompanying the American patrol, that I am just a visitor. However, my trials failed. I cried, begged them, and I lost consciousness from fear when they took me to Abu Gharib prison.
Nadia continues "they put me alone in a dark and dirty prison cell. I expected that I will be released soon, especially when the investigation proved that I hadn't committed a crime"
Nadia elaborated while tears poured down her cheek, a telling sign of just how much she has suffered.
"The first day was so burdensome. The cell was malodorous, humid and dark, and this condition increased the fear inside me more and more. The laughs of the soldier outside the cell made me even more scared. I was afraid of what would happen to me. For the first time I felt that I was in a difficult gridlock and that I had entered an unknown world that I would not get out of.
In the middle of these different feelings, I heard a voice for an American soldier woman who was speaking in an Arabic language. She said to me: "I didn't imagine that the weapons' traders in Iraq are women." When I started to explain to her the circumstances of the situation, she beat me cruelly. I cried and shouted "By Allah! I am oppressed, By Allah! I am oppressed"
The soldier showered me with insults in a way that I have never thought possible or that I would ever be subjected to under any circumstances. Then, she started to deride me saying that she was monitoring me all the day via the satellite, and that they can track their enemies even inside their own bedrooms by American technology.
Then she laughed and said: "I was watching you when you were making love with your husband." I replied in a confused voice "But I am not married".
She beat me for more than one an hour and she forced me to drink a glass of water, and I knew later that they put a drug in it. I regained my consciousness after two days to find myself naked. I knew immediately that I have lost something that all the laws in the earth will not be able to return it to me once again. I had been raped. A hysterical fit attacked me and I started to hit my head violently against the walls till more than five American soldiers head by that soldier women entered the cell and started to beat me, and they raped me alternately while they laughing and listening to a loud music.
Day by day the scenario of raping me was repeated. And every day they invent new ways that are crueler than the prior ways."
She went on describing the horrible acts of the American criminals:
"After about one month, a Negro soldier entered my cell and threw me two pieces of American military clothes. He said in weak Arabic language to wear them. After he put a black bag on my head, he led me to a public toilet where there are pipes for cold and hot water and he asked me to bathe. He then closed the door and left.
I was so exhausted and feeling pain, and despite the tremendous number of the bruises in my body, I poured out some water on my body. Before I finish my bath, the Negro soldier came in. I frightened, and I hit him in the face with the water bowl. His reaction was so tough. He raped me cruelly and spit on my face, then he left and returned with two soldiers who returned me to the cell.
The treatment continued that way, to the extent that sometimes I was raped ten times in a day, the matter which affected my health negatively."
Nadia continued in revealing the American horrible actions made against the Iraqi women, saying:
"After more than 4 months, a woman soldier woman came, and I concluded from her conversation with other soldiers that her name is Mary. She said to me "now you have a golden opportunity, since an officer who has a high position will visit us today, if you deal with him positively, you would be released, especially because we are sure you are innocent."
I replied, "If you are sure of I am innocent, why you don't release me?"
She screamed in nervousness, "The only way that guarantees your releasing is to be positive with them."
She took me to the public toilets, and she supervised my bath while she was holding a thick stick, hitting me by it if I didn't perform her orders. Then, she gave me makeup, and warned me not to cry and ruin my makeup. Then she took me to an empty small room where there was nothing but a cover on the floor, and after one an hour she came accompanied with four soldiers who was holding cameras. She took off her clothes and she harassed me as if she was a man. The soldiers were laughing and listening to a noisy music, and taking photographs to me in all poses, and they were emphasizing on my face. The woman asked me to smile otherwise she is going to kill me, and she took a gun from one of her colleagues and fired four bullets near my head, and swore that the fifth bullet will be fired in my head.
After that, the four soldiers raped me alternately the matter which made me lose my consciousness. When I regained the consciousness I found myself in the cell and the traces of their teeth, nails and cigarettes are in everywhere in my body."
Nadia stopped narrating her tragedy to wipe her tears, then she continued: "After one day Mary came and told me that I was cooperative, and I will be released but after I watch the film that they have shot. I was in pain when I saw the film, and she (Mary) said: "you have been created for the sole purpose for us to enjoy". At the moment I became very anger and I attacked her although I was afraid of her reaction, and I would kill her except for the interfering of the soldiers. When the soldiers released me she showered me with hitting, then they left me.
After this incident, nobody harassed me for more then one month; I spent that period in the praying and invocation to Allah, the All-Mighty who has all power, to help me.
Mary came with some soldiers who gave me the clothes that I was wearing when they arrested me and took me to an American car. Then they threw me on the highway road after giving me 10,000 Iraqi Dinars.
I went to a home that was near the place where I have been thrown out and since I know the reaction of my family, I preferred to visit one of my relatives to let them know what happened after my absence. I knew that my brother had held a consolation board for me for more than 4 months, and they considered me as a dead person.
I understand the knife of shame is waiting for me. So, I went to Baghdad where I found a good family who lodged me, and I worked with this family as a maid and governess for their children.
Nadia wonders in pain, regret and bitterness:
"Who will quench my thirst? Who will return my virginity? What is the offense of my family and kin? I have inside me a baby, and I don't know who his father is."
And she ends her story here.
"Did America rape Nadia or did they rape every man and woman in the Ummah? Nadia is me and you, your wife and my wife, your sister and my sister, your mother and my mother. Oh Islam's Sanctity! Oh Our Islam!"
With Kind Regards
Mohammad Usman
K I N D A S A
P O Box: 14221
JEDDAH-21424
SAUDI ARABIA
Tel: +966 2 6270704 extn 105
Fax: +966 2 6270706
Website: www.kindasa.com
Courtesy : This message was posted to me by: Brother Abdul Vahid [ A_Vahid@albannae.ae]; United Arab Emirates
_____________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.itv.com/news/623337.html
'US soldiers abused young girl at Iraqi prison'
She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her" - former Abu Ghraib inmate Suhaib al-Baz
The US military has said it will investigate claims by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison that a girl as young as 12 was stripped and beaten by military personnel
Suhaib al-Baz, a journalist for the al-Jazeera television network, claims to have been tortured at the prison, based west of Baghdad, while held there for 54 days.Mr al-Baz was arrested when reporting clashes between insurgents and coalition forces in November. He said: "They brought a 12-year-old girl into our cellblock late at night. Her brother was a prisoner in the other cells.
"She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her. Her brother was helpless and could only hear her cries. This affected all of us because she was just a child.
The allegations cannot be verified independently but Mr al-Baz maintains psychological and physical violence were commonplace in the jail.
He also claims that a father and his 15-year-old son were tortured in front of his cell.He said: "They made the son carry two jerry cans full of water. An American soldier had a stick and when he stopped, he would beat him.He collapsed so they stripped him and poured cold water over him. They brought a man who was wearing a hood. They pulled it off. The son was shocked to see it was his father and collapsed.When he recovered, he now saw his father dressed in women's underwear and the Americans laughing at himMr al-Baz claims the guards at the prison were keen to take photographs of the abuse and turned it into a competition.They were enjoying taking photographs of the torture. There was a daily competition to see who could take the most gruesome picture.The winner's photo would be stuck on a wall and also put on their laptop computers as a screensaver. had a good opinion of the Americans but since my time in prison, I've changed my mind. In Iraq we still have no freedom or democracy. They are so cruel to us.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has said Iraqis held by US forces have been subjected to systematic degrading treatment, sometimes close to torture, that may have been officially condoned.The ICRC said visits to detention centres in Iraq between March and November 2003 had turned up violations of international treaties on prisoners of war. The ICRC, whose reports on prison visits are confidential, went public with some of its findings after parts of the 24-page document were carried by the Wall Street Journal. The scandal over detainee abuse broke last week with the release of photographs showing the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has taken responsibility for the incidents and apologised to the victims, the Iraqi people and Americans
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Amnesty: UK troops shot civilians
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/10/iraq.british.troops/index.html
Tuesday, May 11, 2004 Posted: 4:58 AM EDT (0858 GMT)
LONDON, England (CNN) -- As furor grows over the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, a report from a human rights group has charged that British troops occupying southern Iraq killed a dozen civilians who posed no threat to them.
Many of those killings have not been investigated by the British military, and the families of the victims have not been compensated, according to a report released on Tuesday in London by Amnesty International.
"In several cases documented by Amnesty International, UK soldiers opened fire and killed Iraqi civilians in circumstances where there was apparently no imminent threat of death or serious injury to themselves or others," the report says.The Ministry of Defence said it was aware of the Amnesty report but had not been able to examine its allegations in detail. A spokeswoman told CNN: "We are aware of the concerns expressed by Amnesty and are considering the points raised. We will respond in detail in due course.
"Some of the allegations if true may give grounds for criminal prosecution. Some cases are indeed already the subject of legal action and for this reason we are unable to comment further."
The ministry spokeswoman added: "We take our obligations under international law seriously and attach great importance to upholding human rights in all circumstances."
The Amnesty report listed examples of 12 civilians who were apparently killed by British forces under questionable circumstances, including the shooting of an eight-year-old girl who was standing with a group of children when a British patrol moved into her town.
A report on the August 21 shooting incident from the First Battalion of the King's Regiment said mobs threw stones at the troops as they drove into Karmat Ali, and one soldier fired a warning shot to disperse the crowds.
However, Hanan Salih Matrood's family said there was no stone-throwing when the British soldiers moved in.
An eyewitness told Amnesty investigators that a few British soldiers got out of an armored vehicle at the entrance to the alley where Hanan lived.
The witness said a group of children, including Hanan, were attracted by the soldiers and stood more than 70 meters (200 feet) away, observing them.
"Suddenly a soldier aimed and fired a shot which hit Hanan in her lower torso," the report says.
The British soldiers took the young girl to a hospital, but she died the next day.
Hanan's family said British military police took pictures of the scene and interviewed witnesses the day after the shooting. But no investigation was launched into the killing by British military authorities, according to information from the UK Minister of State for the Armed Forces, the Amnesty report says.
Britain's Ministry of Defense has said that UK forces have been involved in the killing of 37 civilians since May 1, 2003, according to the report. Amnesty also criticized the British military's investigative procedures, saying officers had too much discretion in deciding whether to launch an inquiry when a civilian was killed. The group also said investigations should be far more open. "The investigations have been shrouded in secrecy -- some victims have not even been aware that they have been opened," the report said. "Families of victims have also not been given adequate information on how to apply for compensation."The report also criticized the process by which Iraqi families could claim compensation for their relatives' deaths, saying it was too difficult and the site where the necessary papers could be obtained was far away and largely inaccessible, especially for poorer families who could not afford to travel.
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Focus shifts to jail abuse of women
Luke Harding in Baghdad
Wednesday May 12, 2004
The Guardian
For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest.
"He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," said Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'" The incident is one of a number in which US soldiers are alleged to have abused, intimidated or sexually humiliated Iraqi women.
According to Prof Shaker, several women held in Abu Ghraib jail were sexually abused, including one who was raped by an American military policeman and became pregnant. She has now disappeared.
Most of the coverage of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on Iraqi men. But there is compelling evidence that several female prisoners, who are in a minority at the jail, were abused as well.
"A female colleague of mine was arrested and taken there. When I asked her after she was released what happened at Abu Ghraib she started crying," Prof Shaker said.
"Ladies here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects. They say everything is OK. Even in a very advanced society in the west it is very difficult to talk about rape. But I think it happened."
Few women released from US detention have come forward to talk about their experiences in a Muslim society where rape is sometimes equated with shame and victims can be killed to salvage family honour.( DUE TO IGNORANCE, It is not allowed in ISLAM any way)
According to the New Yorker magazine the photos and videos so far unreleased by the Pentagon show American soldiers "having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner", and a secret report by General Antonio Taguba into the scandal confirms that US guards videotaped and photographed naked female prisoners and that "a male MP [military police] guard" is shown "having sex with a female detainee". Yesterday Prof Shaker, who began researching the subject this year for Amnesty International, said she believed the woman involved had been killed.
"The girl was called Noor. When I went to her house in Baghdad earlier this year she had disappeared. The neighbours said that she and her family had moved away."
Since the US military began its inquiry into prisoner abuse in January, many female detainees have been released from Abu Ghraib and the other US detention facilities across Iraq.
But five women are still in solitary confinement in Abu Ghraib's notorious 1A cellblock where as many as 1,500 pictures were taken in November and December.
According to Rajaa Habib Khuzaai, an obstetrician who is one of three women on the US-appointed Iraqi governing council, none of the five has been raped or sexually abused. US officials allowed Dr Khuzaai to visit them yesterday and interview them privately.
Two of the women told her that US soldiers had beaten them after their arrest in December and January while they were in custody at Baghdad international airport, before their transfer to Abu Ghraib.
"They were a little embarrassed. They merely said they had been beaten and that was it," Dr Khuzaai told the Guardian.
She added: "They are now paid special attention. Conditions are OK and they have given them some privacy."
But there are unanswered questions as to why the women have been locked up without charge.
According to Dr Khuzaai, two of the women are married to high-ranking and absconding Ba'ath party officials, two are accused of financing the Iraqi resistance, and one had a relationship with the director of Iraq's former secret police, the mukhabarat.
Human rights campaigners say the US military frequently arrests wives and daughters during raids if the male suspect is not at home. US officials have acknowledged detaining women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information: a strategy that is in violation of international law.
"The issue is the system," Nada Doumani of the International Committee of the Red Cross said yesterday.
"It is an absence of judicial guarantees. People are being kept in custody without knowing what for. The system is not fair, precise or properly defined."
Senior US military officers who escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib on Monday admitted that rape had taken place in the cellblock where 19 "high-value" male detainees are also being held.
Asked how it could have happened, Colonel Dave Quantock, who is now in charge of the prison's detention facilities, said: "I don't know. It's all about leadership. Apparently it wasn't there."
Journalists were forbidden from talking to the women, who are kept upstairs in windowless 2.5 metre by 1.5 metre cells. The women wailed and shouted.
They were kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, Col Quantock said, with only a Koran.
Other allegations being investigated are that a 12- or 13-year-old girl had been stripped naked in the block and paraded in front of male inmates.
Yesterday Prof Shaker said after her ordeal in February her friends dragged her back into the car and drove off. "I vowed never to talk to another American soldier," she said.
She said the US and Britain should learn from the affair. "You can't treat human beings in this way. I hope they have learned from this."
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CRUSADERS RAPE MUSLIM CHILDREN ALSO
UNICEF: Did US Troops Abuse Iraqi Children, Too?http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=44410006&p=444yx3x8
UNICEF 'disturbed' over child abuse claims11/05/2004 - 13:00:23
The United Nations children’s agency said today it was “profoundly disturbed” by reports that children may have been abused in prisons in Iraq.
“Any mistreatment, sexual abuse, exploitation or torture of children in detention is a violation of international law,” UNICEF spokesman Damien Personnaz said.
“UNICEF is profoundly disturbed by news reports alleging that children may have been among those abused.”
The US network NBC News reported last week that unreleased videotapes, apparently shot by US personnel, showed Iraqi guards at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison raping young boys. British newspapers have reported that children were tortured under interrogation.
Personnaz said UNICEF so far had no independent confirmation of the reports.
UNICEF stressed that mistreating children breached the UN treaties on children’s rights, torture and civil rights, as well as the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war.
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An Afghan Gives His Own Account of U.S. AbuseBy CARLOTTA GALL
Published: May 12, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/12/international/asia/12AFGH.html?ex=1085331438&ei=1&en=8ff5d98431e1878d
"And they made insults about our women," he added. He said the American interrogator, through a translator, had taunted him, asking: "Do you know that your wife and daughter are prostitutes now?" "The Americans were asking this and the translators were translating, and they were all laughing," he said. "And I was in my full police uniform with insignia showing my rank."More than once, he said, soldiers inserted their fingers into his anus. He said one had touched his penis and asked, "Why is this unhappy?"
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Brother and sister gunned down as they collected washing
18/05/2004 - 14:14:00
http://212.2.162.45/news/story.asp?j=104603078&p=yx46x3784&n=104603838
A Palestinian brother and sister, aged 13 and 16, were killed by Israeli fire in a Gaza refugee camp today as they took down the washing from a rooftop clothesline, their family said.
Ahmad Mughayer and his sister Asma died from shots fired by troops from the roof of an adjacent building, family members said. Each was killed by a bullet to the head, the relatives said.
The army said it was checking the report.
The teenagers were killed during a major Israeli military offensive in the Rafah camp. The army said it is trying to destroy arms-smuggling tunnels, uncover weapons caches and flush out militants in the raid.
Their father , Mohammed Mughayer, 43, said the family was finishing breakfast when Asma said she wanted to get the washing. He said her mother told her not to go because of the heavy shooting outside.
“Asma said ‘don’t worry, I’ll be careful,”’ said Mughayer.
Her younger brother, Ahmed, decided to tag along to feed the pigeons the family keeps on the roof, their father said.
The family said it took almost an hour to get the children off the roof because the army kept shooting at everyone trying to reach the bodies.
“I was crawling on the roof because of the gunfire. I finally managed to get them out but with great difficulty,” said Ali Mughayer, 25, their older brother.
The bodies were being kept in a room in the family home because ambulances couldn’t reach the area as a result of the heavy fighting, the family said.
Palestinian health officials and residents said the army was keeping ambulances away.
The army denied the claim, saying it was allowing ambulances to get through, but that drivers were often reluctant to drive into areas of battle.
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http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=7626
Settler Rabbi: Killing innocent people in war is allowed if saves lives.
Rabbi Dov Lior, chairman of the settler’s rabbinical council ruled that killing civilians during warfare is permitted if it will save lives. Uri Glickman
The IDF are allowed to hurt so called innocent civilians during warfare, Chairman of the Yesha rabbinical council (Judea, Samaria and Gaza Strip), Rabbi Dov Lior, said in a Halachic (Jewish law) ruling made public Wednesday.
"The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them. This is the real moral behind Israel's Torah and we must not feel guilty due to foreign morals," Lior said.
Sources close to the Rabbi explained that Lior made the remarks Tuesday night and they had nothing to do with Wednesday’s events in Gaza. The IDF is allowed to use all means at its disposal to defeat terrorism “even if it means ‘innocent’ people are killed”, the sources said.
The religious community did not publicly condemn Rabbi Lior’s ruling but warned against its implications. “It is a dangerous step that could test all religious IDF commanders taking part in the current fighting”, sources in the Yesha community told Maariv.
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The other prisoners
Most of the coverage of abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on male detainees.
But what of the five women held in the jail, and the scores elsewhere in Iraq? Luke Harding reports
Thursday May 20, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1220509,00.html
The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.
The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.
Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq".
In November last year, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad. "She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been raped," Swadi says. "Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.'"
Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US military in January, headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor" was entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees - who form a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in US custody since last year's invasion - have also been abused. Nobody appears to know how many. But among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report, images of a US military policeman "having sex" with an Iraqi woman.
Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked female detainees. The Bush administration has refused to release other photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although it has shown them to Congress) - ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent further domestic embarrassment.
Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who investigated the case and found it to be true, said, "She was held for about six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey."
In Iraq, the existence of photographs of women detainees being abused has provoked revulsion and outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women involved may since have disappeared, according to human rights activists. Professor Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University who is researching the subject for Amnesty International, says she thinks "Noor" is now dead. "We believe she was raped and that she was pregnant by a US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her house. The neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been killed."
Honour killings are not unusual in Islamic society, where rape is often equated with shame and where the stigma of being raped by an American soldier would, according to one Islamic cleric, be "unbearable". The prospects for rape victims in Iraq are grave; it is hardly surprising that no women have so far come forward to talk about their experiences in US-run jails where abuse was rife until early January.
One of the most depressing aspects of the saga is that, unaccountably, the US military continues to hold five women in solitary confinement at Abu Ghraib, in cells 2.5m (8ft) long by 1.5m (5ft) wide. Last week, the military escorted a small group of journalists around the camp, where hundreds of relatives gather every day in a dusty car park in the hope of news.
The prison is protected by guard towers, an outer fence topped with razor wire, and blast walls. Inside, more than 3,000 Iraqi men are kept in vast open courtyards, in communal brown tents exposed to dust and sun. (Last month, nearly 30 detainees were killed in two separate mortar attacks on the prison; about a dozen survivors are still in the hospital wing, shackled to their beds with leather belts.) As our bus pulled up, the men ran towards the razor wire. They unfurled banners and T-shirts that read: "Why are we here?" "When are you going to do something about this scandal?" "We cannot talk freely."
The women, however, are kept in another part of the prison, cellblock 1A, together with 19 "high-value" male detainees. It is inside this olive-painted block, which leads into a courtyard of shimmering green saysaban trees and pink flowering shrubs, that the notorious photographs of US troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners were taken, many of them on the same day, November 8 2003. A wooden interrogation shed is a short stroll away. As we arrived at the cellblock, the women shouted to us through the bars. An Iraqi journalist tried to talk to them; a female US soldier interrupted and pushed him away. The windows of the women's cells have been boarded up; birds nest in the outside drainpipe. Captain Dave Quantock, now in charge of prisoner detention at Abu Ghraib, confirmed that the women prisoners are in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. They have no entertainment; they do have a Koran.
Since the scandal first emerged there is general agreement that conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved. A new, superior catering company now provides the inmates' food, and all the guards involved in the original allegations of abuse have left.
Nevertheless, there remain extremely troubling questions as to why these women came to be here. Like other Iraqi prisoners, all five are classified as "security detainees" - a term invented by the Bush administration to justify the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access, as part of the war on terror. US military officials will only say that they are suspected of "anti-coalition activities".
Two of the women are the wives of high-ranking and absconding Ba'ath party members; two are accused of financing the resistance; and one allegedly had a relationship with the former head of Iraq's secret police, the Mukhabarat. The women, in their 40s and 50s, come from Kirkuk and Baghdad; none has seen their families or children since their arrest earlier this year.
According to Swadi, who managed to visit Abu Ghraib in late March, the allegations against the women are "absurd". "One of them is supposed to be the mistress of the former director of the Mukhabarat. In fact, she's a widow who used to own a small shop. She also worked as a taxi driver, ferrying children to and from kindergarten. If she really had a relationship with the director of the Mukhabarat, she would scarcely be running a kiosk. These are baseless charges," she adds angrily. "She is the only person who can provide for her children."
The women appear to have been arrested in violation of international law - not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter instead.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, whose devastating report on human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners was delivered to the government in February but failed to ring alarm bells, says the problem lies with the system. "It is an absence of judicial guarantees," says Nada Doumani, spokesperson for the ICRC. "The system is not fair, precise or properly defined."
During her visit to Abu Ghraib in March, one of the prisoners told Swadi that she had been forced to undress in front of US soldiers. "The Iraqi translator turned his head in embarrassment," she said. The release of detainees, meanwhile, appears to be entirely arbitrary: three weeks ago one woman prisoner who spoke fluent English and who had been telling her guards that she would sue them was suddenly released. "They got fed up with her," another lawyer, Amal Alrawi, says.
Last Friday, about 300 male prisoners were freed from Abu Ghraib, the first detainees to be released since the abuse scandal first broke. A further 475 are due to be released tomorrow, although it is not clear if any of the women will be among them. General Geoffery Miller, who is responsible for overhauling US military jails in Iraq, has promised to release 1,800 prisoners across Iraq "within 45 days". Some 2,000 are likely to remain behind bars, he says. Iraqi lawyers and officials aredemanding that the US military hands the prisons over to Iraqi management on June 30, when the coalition transfers limited powers to a UN-appointed caretaker Iraqi government. Last week, Miller said "negotiations" with Iraqi officials were ongoing.
Relatives who gathered outside Abu Ghraib last Friday said it was common knowledge that women had been abused inside the jail. Hamid Abdul Hussein, 40, who was there hoping to see his brother Jabar freed, said former detainees who had returned to their home town of Mamudiya reported that several women had been raped. "We've know this for months," he said. "We also heard that some women committed suicide."
While the abuse may have stopped, the US military appears to have learned nothing from the experience. Swadi says that when she last tried to visit the women at Abu Ghraib, "The US guards refused to let us in. When we complained, they threatened to arrest us."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1221658,00.html
'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'
Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise
Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 2004
The Guardian
The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
"The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.
She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me."
Mrs Shibab's description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.
She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble.
Another relative carried Mrs Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died.
As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.
Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family, their wedding guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among them Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in western Iraq.
Dr Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. "I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village," he said by telephone. "These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?"
Despite the compelling testimony of Mrs Shihab, Dr Alusi and other wedding guests, the US military, faced with appar ent evidence of yet another scandal in Iraq, offered an inexplicably different account of the operation.
The military admitted there had been a raid on the village at 3am on Wednesday but said it had targeted a "suspected foreign fighter safe house".
"During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided," it said in a statement. Soldiers at the scene then recovered weapons, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pounds (worth approximately £800), foreign passports and a "Satcom radio", presumably a satellite telephone.
"We took ground fire and we returned fire," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq. "We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement."
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. "How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive."
When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child's body being lowered into a grave, he replied: "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologise for the conduct of my men."
The celebration at Mukaradeeb was to be one of the biggest events of the year for a small village of just 25 houses. Haji Rakat, the father, had finally arranged a long-negotiated tribal union that would bring together two halves of one large extended family, the Rakats and the Sabahs.
Haji Rakat's second son, Ashad, would marry Rutba, a cousin from the Sabahs. In a second ceremony one of Ashad's female cousins, Sharifa, would marry a young Sabah boy, Munawar.
A large canvas awning had been set up in the garden of the Rakat villa to host the party. A band of musicians was called in, led by Hamid Abdullah, who runs the Music of Arts recording studio in Ramadi, the nearest major town.
He brought his friend Hussein al-Ali, a popular Iraqi singer who performs on Ramadi's own television channel. A handful of other musicians including the singer's brother Mohaned, played the drums and the keyboards.
The ceremonies began on Tuesday morning and stretched through until the late evening. "We were happy because of the wedding. People were dancing and making speeches," said Ma'athi Nawaf, 55, one of the neighbours.
Late in the evening the guests heard the sound of jets overhead. Then in the distance they saw the headlights of what appeared to be a military convoy heading their way across the desert.
The party ended at around 10.30pm and the neighbours left for their homes. At 3am the bombing began. "The first thing they bombed was the tent for the ceremony," said Mr Nawaf. "We saw the family running out of the house. The bombs were falling, destroying the whole area."
Armoured military vehicles then drove into the village, firing machine guns and supported by attack helicopters. "They started to shoot at the house and the people outside the house," he said.
Before dawn two large Chinook helicopters descended and offloaded dozens of troops. They appeared to set explosives in the Rakat house and the building next door and minutes later, just after the Chinooks left again, they exploded into rubble.
"I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world," said Mr Nawaf. "There were children's bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces."
Among the dead was his daughter Fatima Ma'athi, 25, and her two young boys, Raad, four, and Raed, six. "I found Raad dead in her arms. The other boy was lying beside her. I found only his head," he said. His sister Simoya, the wife of Haji Rakat, was also killed with her two daughters. "The Americans call these people foreign fighters. It is a lie. I just want one piece of evidence of what they are saying."
Remarkably among the survivors were the two married couples, who had been staying in tents away from the main house, and Haji Rakat himself, an elderly man who had gone to bed early in a nearby house.
From the mosques of Ramadi volunteers had been called to dig at the graveyard of the tribe, on the southern outskirts of the city.
There lay 27 graves: mounds of dirt each marked with a single square of crudely cut marble, a name scribbled in black paint. Some gave more than one name, and one, belonging to a woman Hamda Suleman, the briefest of explanations: "The American bombing."
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Ex-detainee: US soldiers defiled the Quran
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/68168BCC-608B-4593-91A4-637656C20625.htm
Wednesday 07 July 2004, 0:42 Makka Time, 21:42 GMT
In excerpts from an exclusive interview with Aljazeera, a former Guantanamo detainee reveals details of torture, abuse, and religious persecution.
Wisam Abd al-Rahman Ahmad said he was captured in Iran, transferred to a Kandahar detention facility in Afghanistan, and finally imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
Claiming he was beaten and routinely insulted with profanities while in Afghanistan, Ahmad said that US soldiers tried to "break" him using psychological warfare.
"They stripped me naked with a bag over my head. One of the soldiers turned me around, removed the bag and I saw a female soldier looking at me," he said.
"They knew that it is an insult to our religion to appear thus before women," he said.
But Ahmad claimed that although he had been beaten and abused, he was asked only one question - his relationship to al-Qaida and Usama bin Ladin.
"I told the interrogator, who spoke with an Egyptian accent, that I had no involvement with al-Qaida or anyone, but the man proceeded to insult me and threaten that he would perform profanities on my mother," Ahmad told Aljazeera.
The former Guantanamo detainee - now in Jordan - had told his interrogators that Pakistani intelligence knew of his whereabouts the whole time and could corroborate his story.
Stomping on Quran
However, nothing compared to the agony of seeing the Quran defiled, Ahmad told Aljazeera.
"I could bear all the obscene abuse and all the beatings but I was agonised to see one US soldier stomp on the Holy Quran, while another soldier in Kandahar threw it into the toilet," he said.
While in detention at Bagram air base, Ahmad recounted how a female soldier entered his cell to search him.
She had brought a dog with her and she proceeded to give the dog the Quran to sniff through.
The full interview is to be broadcast in a special segment on Aljazeera later in the week.
Legal controversy
The detention of several hundred prisoners in Afghanistan and Guantanamo is proving to be a political and legal battleground for the Bush administration.
Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled that "foreign terrorism" suspects at a US military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba can use the United States legal system to challenge their detention.
By a six-three vote, the justices ruled on Monday that US courts do have jurisdiction to consider the claims of the prisoners who say in their lawsuits they are being held illegally in violation of their rights.
The ruling did not address the merits of the claims, but allowed the prisoners to pursue their lawsuits, which lower courts had dismissed.
Justice John Paul Stevens said for the majority that US courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.
The justices overturned a US court appeal ruling that lawsuits should be dismissed on the grounds that the military base was outside US sovereign territory and that rights of habeas corpus were unavailable to foreign nationals outside US territory.
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UK troops held torture contests, Iraqi claims KAREN MCVEIGH
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=862202004
A HOTEL worker who says he witnessed British troops beating his friend to death in Iraq spoke yesterday of being subjected to "torture competitions" at the hands of the army. Kifah Taha al-Mutari, from Basra, was speaking on the eve of a High Court challenge to the government over allegations surrounding the role of British troops in the deaths of six Iraqis. Mr Mutari, who flew to Britain for the hearing, said British soldiers arrested him and a fellow hotel worker, Baha Mousa, 26, on suspicion of terrorism. Mr Mousa later died, allegedly after being beaten by soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in September. Mr Mutari, speaking through an interpreter, said they were tortured for three days. "They had competitions among themselves to see who could kick and beat us the most. They were enjoying it. We were screaming and crying for help and the higher we screamed the more they liked it," he said. He said that the soldiers gave them degrading nicknames, such as "pig" or obscene words. "They would ask us our ‘names’ and we would have to answer to our name or we would be beaten more." The beatings ruptured one of his kidneys and he nearly died, he said. According to a medical report by a consultant, Mr al-Mutari suffered acute kidney failure of "life-threatening proportions" - almost certainly as a result of deliberate injury. The death of Baha Mousa is one of six test cases due to go before the High Court in London today. In a three-day hearing, lawyers for the families will ask two judges to rule that the Human Rights Act applies to British soldiers occupying Iraq and that independent inquiries should be held. A Ministry of Defence spokesman said all allegations of death and mistreatment at the hands of British forces were investigated by the military. He said the government would argue that human rights legislation did not apply.
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The Secret File of Abu GhraibNew classified documents implicate U.S. forces in rape and sodomy of Iraqi prisoners By OSHA GRAY DAVIDSON
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=6388256&pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1091216021626&has-player=true&version=6.0.11.780
It has been months since the now-infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib revealed that American soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners -- yet the Bush administration has failed to get to the bottom of the abuses."There are some serious unanswered questions," says Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican on the Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon is stalling on several investigations, and congressional inquiries have ground to a halt. The foot-dragging is astonishing, given that Congress has access to classified documents detailing the abuses outlined by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in his report on Abu Ghraib. Rolling Stone obtained those files in June and offers this report on their contents. -The Editors
The new classified military documents offer a chilling picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib -- including detailed reports that U.S. troops and translators sodomized and raped Iraqi prisoners. The secret files -- 106 "annexes" that the Defense Department withheld from the Taguba report last spring -- include nearly 6,000 pages of internal Army memos and e-mails, reports on prison riots and escapes, and sworn statements by soldiers, officers, private contractors and detainees. The files depict a prison in complete chaos. Prisoners were fed bug-infested food and forced to live in squalid conditions; detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were killed and wounded in nightly mortar attacks; and loyalists of Saddam Hussein served as guards in the facility, apparently smuggling weapons to prisoners inside.
The files make clear that responsibility for what Taguba called "sadistic, blatant and wanton" abuses extends to several high-ranking officers still serving in command positions. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who is now in charge of all military prisons in Iraq, was dispatched to Abu Ghraib by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last August. In a report marked secret, Miller recommended that military police at the prison be "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees." After his plan was adopted, guards began depriving prisoners of sleep and food, subjecting them to painful "stress positions" and terrorizing them with dogs. A former Army intelligence officer tells Rolling Stone that the intent of Miller's report was clear to everyone involved: "It means treat the detainees like shit until they will sell their mother for a blanket, some food without bugs in it and some sleep." In the files, prisoner after prisoner at Abu Ghraib describes acts of torture that Taguba found "credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses." The abuses took place at the Hard Site, a two-story cinder-block unit at the sprawling prison that housed Iraqi criminals and insurgents, not members of Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. In one sworn statement, Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee number 151108, said he witnessed a translator referred to only as Abu Hamid raping a teenage boy. "I saw Abu Hamid, who was wearing the military uniform, putting his dick in the little kid's ass," Hilas testified. "The kid was hurting very bad." A female soldier took pictures of the rape, Hilas said.
During the Muslim holy period of Ramadan, Hilas saw Spc. Charles Graner Jr. and an unnamed "helper" tie a detainee to a bed around midnight. "They . . . inserted the phosphoric light in his ass, and he was yelling for God's help," the prisoner testified. Again, the same female soldier photographed the torture.
Another prisoner, Abd Alwhab Youss, was punished after guards accused him of plotting to attack an MP with a broken toothbrush. Guards took Youss into a closed room, poured cold water on him, pushed his head into urine and beat him with a broom. Then the guards "pressed my ass with a broom and spit on it," Youss said.
Mohanded Juma, detainee number 152307, testified that on his first day at Tier 1A, the west wing of the Hard Site where prisoners were brought for interrogation, he was stripped and left naked in his cell for six days. Graner, the guard in charge of the tier, entered Juma's cell at 2 a.m., cuffed his hands and feet, and took him to the shower room, where a female interrogator questioned him. After she left, Graner and another man threw pepper in Juma's face, beat him with a chair until it broke and choked him until he thought he was going to die. The assault lasted for half an hour. "They got tired from beating me," Juma told investigators. "They took a little break, and then they started kicking me very hard with their feet until I passed out." In another instance, Graner and a fellow guard reportedly beat a detainee until his nose split open.
Torin Nelson, one of thirty-two private contractors who worked as interrogators at Abu Ghraib, told investigators that he spoke with an interpreter who witnessed an interrogator toss a handcuffed prisoner from a car. "The interrogator then yells at him for falling on the ground and starts dragging or pulling the detainee by the cuffs," Nelson testified. He believed the story, Nelson added, "based on the stuff that I have heard and seen."
The sworn statement of Amjed Isail Waleed, detainee number 151365, is especially graphic. On his first day at the Hard Site, he told investigators, guards "put me in a dark room and started hitting me in the head and stomach and legs." Then, one day in November, five soldiers took him into a room, put a bag over his head and started beating him. "I could see their feet, only, from under the bag. . . . Some of the things they did was make me sit down like a dog, and they would hold the string from the bag, and they made me bark like a dog, and they were laughing at me." A soldier slammed Waleed's head against the wall, causing the bag to fall off. "One of the police was telling me to crawl, in Arabic," he testified, "so I crawled on my stomach, and the police were spitting on me when I was crawling and hitting me on my back, my head and my feet. It kept going on until their shift ended at four o'clock in the morning. The same thing would happen in the following days."
Finally, after several beatings so severe that he lost consciousness, Waleed was forced to lay on the ground. "One of the police was pissing on me and laughing at me," the prisoner said. He was placed in a dark room and beaten with a broom. "And one of the police, he put a part of his stick that he always carries inside my ass, and I felt it going inside me about two centimeters, approximately. And I started screaming, and he pulled it out and he washed it with water inside the room. And the two American girls that were there when they were beating me, they were hitting me with a ball made of sponge on my dick. And when I was tied up in my room, one of the girls, with blond hair, she is white, she was playing with my dick. I saw inside this facility a lot of punishment just like what they did to me and more. And they were taking pictures of me during all these instances."
In the classified files, some of the photographed soldiers also provide firsthand accounts of the abuses. Pvt. Lynndie England testified that on November 8th -- the evening of her twenty-first birthday -- she went to the Hard Site to visit Spc. Graner, her boyfriend. Just after midnight, seven Iraqi detainees accused of taking part in a fight at one of the many tent compounds used to house prisoners at Abu Ghraib were brought to Tier 1A. For England, the evening was a break from the tedium of her job processing prisoners. For Nori Al-Yasseri, detainee number 7787, it quickly became a "night which we felt like 1,000 nights."
Al-Yasseri and the other prisoners arrived at the Hard Site with empty sandbags over their heads to prevent them from seeing where they were and their hands bound behind their backs with plastic handcuffs. The guards threw the men against the walls until they collapsed on the floor in what England called a "dog pile." Some of the MPs took turns running across the room and leaping on top of the men. "A couple of the detainees kind of made an 'ah' sound, as if this hurt them or caused them some type of pain," Spc. Jeremy Sivits testified in a sworn statement. While the Iraqis were on the floor, England and Sgt. Javal Davis stomped on their fingers and feet. Sivits was certain that the men felt pain this time because he heard them scream.
So did Sgt. Shannon Snider, who was working in an office on the top tier. Drawn by the cries of pain, Snider leaned over the railing and in a fury yelled down to Davis to stop abusing the prisoners. Davis stepped away from the men, and Snider left.
"I believe that Sgt. Snider thought it was an isolated incident," Sivits testified, "and that when he ordered Sgt. Davis to stop, it was over." But it was just getting started.
After Snider had gone, the MPs pulled the prisoners to their feet one by one and removed their handcuffs. Graner, who had learned a few key phrases in Arabic, ordered the detainees to strip. As one prisoner took off his clothes, Graner cradled the man's head in one arm and smashed his fist into the naked and hooded man's temple. "Damn, that hurt!" Graner complained, waving his hand in the air. The prisoner went limp, and someone removed his hood. "I walked over to see if the detainee was still alive," Sivits testified. "I could tell that the detainee was unconscious, because his eyes were closed and he was not moving, but I could see his chest rise and fall, so I knew he was still alive."
According to England, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick made an X on another prisoner's chest with his finger and said, "Watch this." Then the six-foot-tall Fredericks punched the man in the chest. The hooded prisoner lurched backward and fell to his knees. He gasped for air. "Frederick said he thought he put the detainee in cardiac arrest," Sivits later told investigators. England was asked why she thought Frederick assaulted the man. "I guess just because he wanted to hit him," she said.
Eventually, all seven Iraqis were standing naked and hooded, and the MPs got out their cameras. A few pictures had been taken earlier in the evening, but now the abuse turned into a photo-op. Men taught to be ashamed of appearing naked in front of other men were forced to assume a series of humiliating and bizarre poses. Graner had them climb on top of each other to form a human pyramid, and the MPs took turns taking each other's picture standing behind the men. In one photo, Graner and England smile and give the thumbs-up sign behind the men, who are naked except for the green sandbags covering their heads. The Iraqis were made to crawl across the floor on their hands and knees while the guards rode on their backs. Two were posed as if performing oral sex on each other, and others were lined up against the wall and forced to masturbate while England pointed at their genitals and leered. And all the while, the Americans were laughing, cracking jokes and taking pictures.
An Army investigator later asked one of the seven Iraqis how he felt that night. "I was trying to kill myself," replied Hussein Al-Zayiadi, detainee number 19446, "but I didn't have any way of doing it."
The secret files make clear that day-to-day living conditions at Abu Ghraib were "deplorable" for soldiers as well as prisoners. The facility was under constant attack from mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. The files make no reference to the number of attacks, but a partial list obtained by Rolling Stone indicates that there were more than two dozen explosions between July and September alone. Six detainees and two soldiers were killed, and seventy-one were injured. But officers at Abu Ghraib told Taguba that their repeated requests for combat troops and armored vehicles to protect the facility were ignored by top brass. "I feel, and my soldiers feel, that we're just sitting out there, waiting to die," said Cpt. James Jones of the 229th MP Company. "As a commander, I'm charged with bringing my soldiers home, but how do I control that? It's frustrating. It's frightening."
The prison was filled far beyond capacity. Some 7,000 prisoners were jammed into Abu Ghraib, a complex erected to hold no more than 4,000 detainees. Prisoners were held in canvas tents that became ovens in the summer heat and filled with rain in the cold winter. One report found that the compound "is covered with mud and many prisoner tents are close to being under water." Another report described the conditions in one compound: "The area is littered with trash, has pools of water standing around latrines, and the bottles of water carried by detainees for water consumption are filthy. The tents lack floors and are inadequate to provide protection from the elements." Detainees wore soiled clothes because laundry facilities were inadequate; mentally ill detainees were "receiving no treatment."
In a series of increasingly desperate e-mails sent to his higher-ups, Maj. David DiNenna of the 320th MP Battalion reported that food delivered by private contractors was often inedible. "At least three to four times a week, the food cannot be served because it has bugs," DiNenna reported. "Today an entire compound of 500 prisoners could not be fed due to bugs and dirt in the food." Four days later, DiNenna sent another e-mail marked "URGENT URGENT URGENT!!!!!!!!" He reported that "for the past two days prisoners have been vomiting after they eat."
Officers reported that their repeated pleas for adequate food and supplies went unheeded, even though prisoners were attacking soldiers. "I don't know how they're not rioting every day," Jones told Taguba. The worst riot occurred on November 24th. According to an internal investigation, prisoners in one compound "were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush,' and 'Bush is bad' and other slogans to that effect." The detainees threw rocks at guard towers and at soldiers on the other side of the concertina wire. One guard said that "the sky was black with rocks"; another added that he "feared for his life." The riot quickly spread to other compounds, where several guards were injured by flying debris. The soldiers fired nonlethal ammunition at the mob but quickly exhausted their meager supplies. Fearing they were on the verge of a mass prison break, the guards were given the go-ahead to use deadly force, and they opened fire with live ammunition. Three detainees were killed and nine were wounded. Nine soldiers were also injured in the riot.
That same evening, a detainee in Tier 1A told an MP that a prisoner had a gun and several knives. The informant even knew where he was: Cell 35. The guards instructed every prisoner on the tier to put their hands through the cell bars to be handcuffed, a standard precaution before searching a cell or moving a prisoner. But when the MPs came to Cell 35, the man inside refused to put his hands out. Instead, he told the guards he "had no gun."
No one had used the word gun around the prisoner. Sgt. William Cathcart, one of the MPs on duty that night, immediately made a grab for the man's wrists. The prisoner pulled away and fell to his knees to say a prayer. "At that point," Cathcart told investigators, "I knew it would be a gun battle." He was right. The detainee suddenly turned, withdrew a 9 mm pistol from under his pillow and opened fire on Cathcart from close range. A bullet struck the MP in the chest. Fortunately, before beginning the search, Cathcart had put on his "full battle rattle" - a Kevlar vest with pockets holding ceramic plates - and wasn't injured. Another MP shot the inmate with two nonlethal rounds, knocking the man down. But the prisoner jumped back up and continued to fire. An MP finally ended the incident by firing a load of buckshot into the man's legs.
How did a detainee in the Army's toughest prison in Iraq get his hands on a gun?
According to an internal Army investigation contained in the secret files, the civilian-run Coalition Provisional Authority had hired at least five members of Fedayeen Saddam -- a paramilitary organization of fanatical Saddam loyalists -- to work as guards at the prison. An Iraqi guard, probably one of "Saddam's martyrs," had smuggled the gun and two knives into the prison in an inner tube, placed them in a sheet and tossed them up to the second-story window of Cell 35. In May, when Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen.Wayne Allard asked him a direct question: "Did we have terrorists in the population at this prison?" Taguba answered, "Sir, none that we were made aware of." His own files make clear, however, that a more accurate response would have been: "Yes, sir -- but only among the guards."
Taguba was only authorized to investigate the role of military police in the torture at Abu Ghraib -- even though the Hard Site was controlled by military intelligence when the worst abuses occurred. Nevertheless, the classified annexes indicate that responsibility for the torture extends at least as high as several top-ranking officers in Iraq who have yet to be disciplined or removed from command. Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, who remains director of military intelligence in Iraq, was aware of the conditions at Abu Ghraib and received regular reports from officers at the prison. Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, who directed intelligence at the prison, admitted to Taguba that he did not actually report to the British colonel who was supposedly his supervisor. "On paper, I work directly for him," Jordan told Taguba. "But between you, me and the fence post, I work directly for General Fast." Fast is currently under investigation, but unlike lower-ranking officers and soldiers, she has not been reprimanded or charged in the abuses.
Miller, who was sent by Rumsfeld to speed up interrogations at Abu Ghraib, spent ten days in Iraq touring prisons and meeting with intelligence officials. The two-star general was commander of the military prison at Guantenamo Bay, Cuba -- known as Gitmo -- where "enemy combatants" were already being subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, including the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners. According to Col. Thomas Pappas, who commanded the military intelligence brigade at Abu Ghraib, Miller spoke with him about using dogs on prisoners: "He said that they used military working dogs, and that they were effective in setting the atmosphere for which, you know, you could get information." Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of all military prisons in Iraq, told Rolling Stone that Miller described his plan to "Gitmo-ize interrogation operations" in Iraq and boasted that prisoners at Guantenamo "were treated like dogs, because you can never let them be in charge."
Miller has denied making either statement. But whatever he said, his plan to "rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence" was quickly adopted at Abu Ghraib. A slide presentation in the classified files spells out the new "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," specifying that soldiers, with proper approval, may subject prisoners to dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, stress positions and the "presence of mil working dogs." In at least one instance documented by Taguba and photographed by soldiers, a prisoner at Abu Ghraib was bitten by a dog. Most of the MPs who have been charged with crimes say they were told by military intelligence officers to "soften up" prisoners prior to interrogations. "MI wanted to get them to talk," Spc. Sabrina Harman told investigators, saying she was told to keep detainees awake. Sgt. Davis, who jumped on the pile of seven detainees on November 8th, said intelligence officers would tell guards to "loosen this guy up for us" and "make sure he has a bad night."
The classified files also show that intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib felt pressured to produce results. "Sir," Lt. Col. Jordan told Taguba, "I was told a couple of times . . . that some of the reporting was getting read by Rumsfeld, folks out at Langley [the Central Intelligence Agency], some very senior folks."
In May, after photos of the torture were published, Rumsfeld declared that he would take "all measures necessary" to ensure that such abuse "does not happen again." But the defense secretary had already sent a clear signal to commanders in Iraq about his position on the proper way to interrogate prisoners. In April, Rumsfeld transferred Gen. Miller from Guant?namo to Baghdad, putting him in charge of all military prisons in Iraq. Instead of court-martialing the man who authored the plan to subject prisoners at Abu Ghraib to harsh abuses, Rumsfeld has left him in charge of the facility.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have changed this," Miller told reporters in May. "Trust us. We are doing this right."(Posted Jul 28, 2004).
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=571222
Army chief 'emptied his magazine' at girl in Gaza
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
12 October 2004
Two separate official investigations are under way into the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old girl in Gaza by the Israeli army after soldiers testified that their company commander "emptied his magazine" at her after she had been shot and was presumed dead.
The army has already admitted that the killing of Iman al-Hams in the town of Rafah a week ago was a mistake and that her bag, which it says soldiers thought carried explosives, contained school books.
Soldiers have come forward to explain that her body was riddled with 20 bullets because their immediate commander "confirmed the killing" by shooting two bullets at her already prone body before withdrawing a short distance and then firing a burst of automatic gunfire at the corpse.
The Judge Advocate General, Brigadier General Avi Mandelblit, has instructed the military police to launch a criminal investigation against the commander in the Givati Brigade's crack Shaked Battalion as a result of the claim. Unusually, the investigation was ordered even though the army inquiry is incomplete.
The move follows interviews with soldiers serving in the company published in the Israeli newspaper Yedhiot Ahronot. It quoted them as saying the commander should have been stood down immediately after the incident. One soldier told the newspaper: "The company CO who sprayed the girl with bullets turned us all into vicious animals and besmirched us all ... If he is not dismissed, we will not agree to serve under him." Another said the commander had "desecrated the body".
According to figures produced by 11 UN agencies, 24 Palestinians under the age of 17 have been killed since 28 September when the army entered northern Gaza in response to the firing by Palestinian militants of two Qassam rockets which killed two Israeli children in Sderot. A nine-year-old girl was among 11 Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip over the weekend.
The investigations opened as security sources told the newspaper Haaretz that the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, had rejected a request from army commanders to withdraw from the densely populated Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on the grounds that the fortnight-old operation "Days of Penitence" was endangering troops and that militants had now removed rockets to positions outside the camp.
Mr Sharon told the Knesset at the opening of what promises to be a difficult winter session for the government that it would be voting on 25 October on his plan to withdraw some 7,500 settlers from Gaza.
The level of difficulty was underlined last night when the legislature opposed by 45 to 33 a routine motion noting Mr Sharon's speech. Although it does not threaten Mr Sharon's administration, the defeat emphasised the strong opposition to the plan from the extreme right of Israeli politics and from the far right of his own Likud party, seven of whose members abstained last night.
* A Palestinian farmer, Hani Shadeh, 26, was shot and critically wounded in his olive orchard near Nablus in the West Bank yesterday.
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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041011/ap_on_re_us/disappeared_suspects_1
Group: al-Qaida Detainees 'Disappeared'
Mon Oct 11, 7:54 PM ET U.S. National - AP
By SAM DOLNICK, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - At least 11 al-Qaida suspects have "disappeared" in U.S. custody, and some may have been tortured, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued Monday.
The prisoners are probably being held outside the United States without access to the Red Cross or any oversight of their treatment, the human rights group said. In some cases, the United States will not even acknowledge the prisoners are in custody.
The report said the prisoners include the alleged architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as well as Abu Zubaydah, who is believed to be a close aide to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites).
In refusing to disclose the prisoners' whereabouts or acknowledge the detentions, Human Rights Watch said, the U.S. government has violated international law, international treaties and the Geneva Convention. The group called on the government to bring all the prisoners "under the protection of the law."
"I think the U.S. demeans itself when it adopts the philosophy that the ends justify the means in the fight against terror," said Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch.
CIA (news - web sites) spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency has not seen the report and declined to comment.
The report — titled "The United States' `Disappeared:' The CIA's Long-term 'Ghost Detainees'" — said many of the prisoners have provided valuable intelligence to U.S. officials. But it also cited reports that some detainees have lied under pressure to please their interrogators.
Human Rights Watch has no firsthand knowledge of the treatment of these detainees. Much of the report stems from news accounts that have cited unidentified government sources acknowledging the torture or mistreatment of detainees.
The report provides a brief sketch of 11 detainees believed to be incommunicado in undisclosed locations. They hail from countries across the Arab world, including Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. U.S. authorities have confirmed the detention of six of them, the report said.
___
On the Net:
www.hrw.org
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http://9news.com/acm_news.aspx?OSGNAME=KUSA&IKOBJECTID=6e486323-0abe-421a-005c-64ce6109b520&TEMPLATEID=0c76dce6-ac1f-02d8-0047-c589c01ca7bf
Soldiers allegedly used electrical cord in Iraqi general's death
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - Four Fort Carson soldiers accused of killing an Iraqi general last year allegedly used an electrical cord to help kill him, according to charging documents in the case.
Chief Warrant Officers Lewis E. Welshofer Jr., Jefferson L. Williams, Sgt. 1st Class William J. Sommer and Spc. Jerry L. Loper were charged with murder and dereliction of duty on Monday in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush last November.
According to another document -- a Pentagon report given to Congress in June -- the soldiers allegedly put Mowhoush inside a sleeping bag and then bound him to prevent him from moving.
One of the warrant officers sat on Mowhoush's chest as he was interrogated and then Mowhoush was rolled over and the officer sat on his back, the report said. According to the document, Mowhoush died as the officer sat on his back.
A death certificate issued in May said Mowhoush died of asphyxiation.
All four soldiers charged were assigned to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, based at Fort Carson, at the time of Mowhoush's death and have since returned to the United States. Williams has transferred to the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Gordon, Ga.
Two other Fort Carson soldiers face courts-martial on manslaughter charges in connection with an unrelated death in Iraq.
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/05/1411248
Tuesday, October 5th, 2004
Letter from Guantanamo: British Detainee Says He Was Subjected to Torture, Witnessed U.S. Soldiers Commit Murder
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In a rare uncensored letter from Guantanamo Bay, British detainee Moazzam Begg writes that he was tortured and abused by U.S soldiers during detention and that he witnessed U.S. soldiers murder two detainees in Afghanistan. We speak with president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner. [includes rush transcript]
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The Bush administration is arguing that the president can detain enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay as long as necessary to protect national security and that they have no constitutional rights to hear charges against them.
Facing a deadline to give a federal judge some answers about 60 of the so-called enemy combatants held at the notorious the U.S. Navy base in Cuba, the government filed a 96-page response detailing the reasons it believes it doesn't need to explain why they were detained or how long they might be imprisoned. This according to the Washington Post.
More than 550 people have been held at Guantanamo without charge or trial for more than two years now.
Government lawyers wrote the detentions are "an integral and inexorable part of the Commander-in-Chief"s power to defend the nation and vanquish the enemy."
But the deputy commander of the joint task force that controls Guantanamo thinks otherwise. Brigadier General Martin Lucenti told the Financial Times "Most of [the detainees] weren't fighting. They were running. Even if somebody has been found to be an enemy combatant, many of them will be released because they will be of low intelligence value and low threat status."
Either way, the Pentagon is planning to construct a permanent prison facility in Guantanamo - known as Camp Six. Some see it as a move to fortify the makeshift prison and ultimately place all remaining detainees in permanent structures.
One of those remaining detainees is British citizen Moazzam Begg. He was detained in Pakistan in 2001 and has been imprisoned without charge or trial in Guanatanmo after being transferred there from a base in Afghanistan. Since arriving in Guantanamo, Begg has had no contact with fellow prisoners and has been kept in solitary confinement for over 600 days. Last April, his father Azmat Begg joined us in our studio to talk about his son's imprisonment. Here is some of what he had to say:
Azmat Begg, father of Moazzam Begg speaking on Democracy Now! April 2004.
Well, in Moazzam Begg's latest letter revealed last Friday, he says he was tortured and abused during detention and that he witnessed U.S. soldiers kill two men in Afghanistan.
In the uncensored letter, Begg protested his innocence of any crime and demanded to know the reason for his detention. He said he was denied natural light and fresh food, had been held in solitary confinement, and was forced to sign and initial documents presented to him by U.S. officials. He also said he was physically abused, stripped and paraded in front of cameras held by U.S. personnel.
The letter came past the usual U.S. military censors, but it was the first communication from Moazzam Begg that was entirely unclassified. It was dated July 12 2004, and addressed to the military command at Guantanamo Bay. In it Begg requests that it be copied to his lawyers and US and British authorities.
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is author of Guantanamo: What the World Should Know.
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is author of the book, Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael.
MICHAEL RATNER: Thank you for having me, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: How significant is this letter?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, it's the first letter that we have gotten that is uncensored, that charges torture, that he saw deaths. So it's very significant, because you can say what’s happening to Moazzam Begg or what happened to him -- the isolation, the torture, the beatings -- is very likely happening to many, many others in Guantanamo. So it's extremely significant. The reason it got out is not chance. It was because Moazzam Begg is the first person who has actually had a lawyer go down to see him. We got a court order allowing a lawyer. He's, since the Supreme Court case, the first one, the only one so far. Shortly before she went to Guantanamo, she got this letter. So, they obviously realized, and as time goes on, as we get lawyer by lawyer down there, I think we'll get more and more stories like Moazzam Begg’s.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to last April, when we were joined in the studio by Moazzam Begg’s father, Azmat Begg. He talked about his son's imprisonment.
AZMAT BEGG: He was captured from Islamabad, which is the capital of Pakistan, where he was staying with his wife and children, very small children, starting from the age of one, two, and four or five. He had three children at that time.
AMY GOODMAN: And where was he taken? When was this?
AZMAT BEGG: Well, that's about two years now, so over two years now. He was taken from his house in front of his daughter and his wife, and two American soldiers assisted by two Pakistani soldiers pulled him out, bundled him up, and put him into the trunk of the car, and took away. He rang me up from the trunk of the car -- possibly he had mobile -- and he told me in the middle of the night, that he had been arrested. I said, “What for?” It was very strange noise. I couldn't believe. He said, “I have been arrested, daddy.” I said, “Why?” He said, “I don't know. They are taking me somewhere which I do not know. Please take care of my wife and children, who are in Islamabad.”
AMY GOODMAN: Where were you?
AZMAT BEGG: I was in England. I was in England. I was half asleep.
AMY GOODMAN: And so he was taken to Guantanamo.
AZMAT BEGG: No, they didn't take him straight away to Guantanamo. They took him to Afghanistan and kept him in a province called Kandahar for a month or so and then they transferred him to another place in Afghanistan, which is known as Bagram Air Base, where he was badly treated, very badly treated.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know?
AZMAT BEGG: Because I received letters. Through the Red Cross. The Red Cross people came down to me to give me the letters. They were having correspondence with him through Red Cross all the time. Then when a little bit of noise was raised in the U.K. they transferred him to Guantanamo Bay. He was badly treated. He was deprived of proper food. He was deprived of natural light, sun, moon, or anything. He said that I haven't seen sun, moon, or sky for the last whole one year except for two minutes. Being treated like an animal, they pulled me and push me into cages, and that's how I am here now. At times I don't get food. My clothes are torn. They don't care. And I don't know whom to go to.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you spoken to him?
AZMAT BEGG: Never.
AMY GOODMAN: He writes you letters?
AZMAT BEGG: He wrote his letters when he was in Kandahar by Bagram and he also wrote letters from Guantanamo Bay, when he was transferred.
AMY GOODMAN: Azmat Begg, he is the father of Moazzam Begg, lives in Britain, has been campaigning to have his son released from Guantanamo. Michael Ratner, yesterday the U.S. government filed a brief. Can you talk about the administration arguing the president can detain what he calls “enemy combatants” as long as necessary?
MICHAEL RATNER: It's remarkable. The Center for Constitutional Rights won this case June 28th of this year. The Supreme Court said clearly, they have to justify detentions on an individual basis, and people have Constitutional rights in Guantanamo. The government is treating the Supreme Court decision essentially as a suggestion. They're saying, we can ignore it. It's incredible. I mean, it's real lawlessness at the most basic level. Everything we have gotten in these cases, whether it's the letter that was released from Moazzam Begg or any detainee out, has just been an uphill battle with the government, inch by inch, but I can tell you, I think we are going to eventually close that camp.
AMY GOODMAN: Even though they're talking about setting up a new one called Camp Six.
MICHAEL RATNER: It's illegality after illegality. They are not living in a lawless zone any longer since the Supreme Court decision. It may take us time, it may take us pushes by other governments -- and so far, I hope they do that in Britain and other places -- to eventually say, this is something from another generation. This will be looked like one day like we now look at the Japanese concentration camps during the Second World War that were in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Some of the people have been released. How many?
MICHAEL RATNER: I think a couple of hundred have been released. A bunch were released before we won in the Supreme Court as a way of trying to influence the Supreme Court. A number have been released after that. Once again, the government is doing it slowly, because I think they don't want the total embarrassment of understanding they are running a camp that's completely irrelevant to the war on terror.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner is author of Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. We're going to go to break. When we come back, there is a new play in New York that opened in London. It is called Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, based on the actual transcripts of prisoners' letters from Guantanamo, as well as their loved ones outside. We are going to hear a clip of the actor playing Moazzam Begg, reading what he has had to say. Then we go to Bishop Tutu who performed in this play this weekend. I had a chance to interview him afterwards. Stay with us. [break]
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, our guest. He's president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, author of the book, Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. Why do we know so much about Moazzam Begg, in particular?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, two reasons. One is his father has been very public and was actually in touch with him at the moment he was arrested in Pakistan. Moazzam Begg was put into the boot of a car or trunk of a car. He had his cell phone with him. He was able to call his father from the cell phone and tell him what happened. Plus his wife and child witnessed American and Pakistani agents coming into his house in Pakistan and taking him away. Then we have gotten a couple of letters. We got one early letter that Azmat Begg described, where he said he had been in Bagram for eleven months and can only see the sun and stars in this infamous underground facility in Bagram, where a lot of bad torture has apparently gone on. Plus, now we have this newest letter from him, but again, we have the newest letter only because his lawyer, Gita Gutierrez, was recently in Guantanamo, and because of that -- she was the first person there -- because of that, the government, I think, felt forced to have to release this letter to her.
AMY GOODMAN: What is he charged with?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Amy, he is charged with nothing. Zero. There has never been a charge against him, despite that. When he got to Guantanamo, he was put into special isolation camp, called Camp Echo. And presumably, and it's a guess, but he may have been put there because he actually witnessed, according to this last letter, as he says partially witnessed the deaths of two people in Afghanistan. He may be being kept there because they don't want him telling that story. And it's only, as I said, only because we are finally opening up Guantanamo, finally, that we are getting any information like this.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1320735,00.html
Two girls, two shots to the head
Palestinian 15-year-olds among growing number of children hit by Israeli snipers during 'Days of Penitence'
Chris McGreal in Jabaliya refugee camp
Wednesday October 6, 2004
The Guardian
Islam Dwidar's classmates were still taking in her shocking death - the teacher weeping outside before facing the girls, her closest friend recounting how they walked to school together each day - when the news arrived about Tahreer Abu El Jidyan.
The two 15-year-old pupils at Jabaliya's school were both shot in the head by Israeli soldiers inside their homes just a few blocks and several hours apart. Islam died almost immediately after the bullet smashed through her forehead as she baked bread with her mother in their yard on Sunday. Tahreer is still on life support at a Gaza hospital after an operation to remove shards of shattered skull from her brain.
She lies motionless, with little to suggest she is alive other than gentle breathing. Doctors do not expect her to survive.
Tahreer's mother, Intisar, was at her bedside yesterday.
"Oh Tahreer, my heart. I wish I were lying in this bed, not you," she whispered to her child. "She was sweeping the floor in front of the door," said Mrs Abu El Jidyan. "I was standing talking to her. We knew the Israeli soldiers were around, we knew they had snipers in the buildings on our street but we didn't expect what happened. They just shot her in the head. Her brains spilled out. She said: 'Mum, I'm hit'. She praised God and she collapsed."
There were two bullets. The first struck Tahreer in the head. As she fell, the second hit the wall behind her. "I've no doubt a sniper shot her deliberately. There was no fighting in the area. There were no other shots, only the ones that hit Tahreer," said her mother.
With her stood Tahreer's 14-year-old brother, Naser, who was wounded by shrapnel last week. Israeli forces killed their father 11 years ago during the first intifada.
Mrs Abu El Jidyan regrets preventing Tahreer from walking to school on Sunday morning. She thought it would be too dangerous to venture out of their home in Jabaliya's Sikka neighbourhood because it is on the edge of the area occupied by Israeli troops and tanks last week. Snipers are posted in buildings overlooking their street and a tank is less than a block away.
"I wouldn't let her out of the house but it was dangerous at home too. When there was fighting, bullets came through the walls. We stopped using some rooms on the side where the Israelis are," she said.
Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups say that about half of the nearly 80 people killed by the army over the past week of "Operation Days of Penitence" are civilians. The military says it has carefully targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters with missile strikes.
But while the numbers are in dispute - in part because it is often hard to say whether youths in their mid to late teens are bystanders or part of the Palestinian resistance - there is no doubt that a growing number of children have been felled by Israeli snipers.
At Islam and Tahreer's school in Jabaliya yesterday morning, the headmistress, Rukaya Kamal al Budani, fielded calls from parents wanting to know if it was safe to send their girls. "If they can get here, it's safe," was her stock reply. But of 1,150 pupils, fewer than 200 turned up.
Before word reached the school about Tahreer, Mrs al Budani was getting to grips with the death of Islam.
"This is our first casualty at the school," she said. "I don't know how to deal with the girls. It's going to have a big impact on her classmates and friends. I'm shocked that no one in the free world condemns the killing of a child."
Then one of the male teachers tells Mrs al Budani about the shooting of Tahreer the previous day. The headmistress sits in silence.
Until June, the two young women had been classmates, but then Tahreer failed her exams and was held back for a year. Asmaa Abu Samaan walked to school with her each morning.
"I met her in front of my house each morning to walk to school. I did my homework with her. I keep thinking that if she is brain-dead and not killed perhaps she is still suffering. I can't stand it," she said.
Asmaa walked to school yesterday morning without her friend."I walked against the wall hoping the soldiers can't see me. I want to go to school because I know the Jews do not want us to study because we need to be educated to build our country," she said.
But the killing went on as the conflict claimed the life of another teenage girl in the Gaza strip yesterday. Palestinian medics said Israeli soldiers fired about 20 bullets into 13- year-old Iman al-Hams, including five into her head.
The military said she had entered a forbidden zone in Rafah refugee camp, and that she dropped a bag that soldiers feared was a bomb.
The Palestinians said Iman was walking to school when troops entered the camp and that she dropped her bag as she ran away in fear.
The bag was not found to contain a bomb.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1382132,00.html
Guantanamo Briton 'in handcuff torture'
David Rose on the allegation that a British detainee was suspended by his wrists as punishment for reciting the Koran while in US military custody
Sunday January 2, 2005
The Observer
A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists.
The reason, the prisoner says, was that he was caught reciting the Koran at a time when talking was banned.
He says he has also been repeatedly shaved against his will. In one such incident, a guard told him: 'This is the part that really gets to you Muslims, isn't it?'
The strappado allegation was one among many made about treatment at both Guantanamo and the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan made to the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith when he visited his clients Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar at the Cuban prison six weeks ago, having tried for the previous 14 months to obtain the necessary security clearance.
But it is clear the disturbing claim is only the tip of the iceberg. Under the rules the United States military has imposed for defence lawyers who visit Guantanamo, Stafford Smith has not been allowed to keep his notes of meetings with prisoners, and will not be able to read them again until they have been examined and de-classified by a government censor.
He cannot disclose in public anything the men have told him until it too has been been de-classified, on pain of likely imprisonment in the US.
Stafford Smith has drawn up a 30-page report on the tortures which Begg and Belmar say they have endured, and sent it as an annexe with a letter to the Prime Minister which Downing Street received shortly before Christmas. For the time being - possibly forever - the report cannot be published, because the Americans claim that the torture allegations amount to descriptions of classified interrogation methods.
However, Stafford Smith's letter to Tony Blair - which has been declassified - says that on his visit to the Guantanamo prisoners, he heard 'credible and consistent evidence that both men have been savagely tortured at the hands of the United States' with Begg having suffered not only physical but 'sexual abuse' which has had 'mental health consequences'.
Thousands of documents obtained last month under the US Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union support the claims of torture at Guantanamo, which has apparently continued long after the publication last April of photographs of detainees being abused at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. They include memos and emails to superiors by FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency officers, who say they were appalled by the methods being used by the young military interrogators at Guantanamo.
According to the memos, the abuse was 'systematic', with frequent beatings, chokings, and sleep deprivation for days on end. Religious humiliation was also routine, with one agent reporting a case in which a prisoner was wrapped in an Israeli flag.
'On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a foetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water,' an anonymous FBI agent wrote on 2 August. 'Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.'
Reports of identical treatment were first published by The Observer last March, in interviews with three British detainees who had been released - Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed. They were then strenuously denied by the Pentagon. But according to another FBI memo dated 10 May, when an agent asked Guantanamo's former commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller, about techniques the FBI regarded as illegal, he was told that the interrogators 'had their marching orders from the Sec[retary] Def[ense]', Donald Rumsfeld. General Miller told the US Congress under oath that although Rumsfeld had authorised the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo, this had never happened. According to the memos, this was inaccurate.
Stafford Smith asks Blair in his letter 'to approach the plight of my clients with renewed vigour'. Asked by The Observer whether he planned to do this last week, a Downing Street spokesman declined to comment.
In a second letter, to the Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons, Stafford Smith suggests that Britain's complicity in abusive techniques at both Guantanamo and Afghanistan, where Begg and Belmar were held before being taken to Cuba, is wider than previously thought.
Begg and Belmar, he writes, were both questioned by an MI5 officer who gave his name as 'Andrew', while they were being abused by Americans both in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. According to the letter, 'he was the one who told Mr Begg that the more Mr Begg (falsely) said he was guilty of something, the quicker he would get home. Andrew was also the one who said that he would not comply with both of my clients' requests for consular notification, as well as Mr Begg's requests to learn whether his pregnant wife, Sally, and their three children were safe in Pakistan.' Stafford Smith is asking for Andrew's full name and access to him, to assist his client's defence.
Having fled Afghanistan where he had been trying to set up a school before the war against the Taliban began in October 2001, Begg was abducted by American agents from the house the family was renting in Islamabad.
Belmar was captured after attending a religious school for a few weeks before the 11 September terrorist attacks. An FBI source who personally questioned him before he was sent to Guantanamo has told The Observer he recommended his immediate release because he had 'no involvement' with terrorism, but was overruled by MI5.
Stafford Smith says in his letter to Baroness Symons that Begg made a false written confession after being tortured in February 2003, when two agents who had abused him at Bagram - where Begg witnessed the deaths of two prisoners officially classed as homicide - came to Guantanamo. But neither he nor Stafford Smith have been allowed to see this statement, which apparently forms the main grounds for his continued incarceration. Stafford Smith asks the Foreign Office for help in obtaining a copy, and asks: 'What kind of civilised legal system does not allow the suspect to see his own statements? How can the prisoner's statement be said to be classified information when, if it were true, the prisoner would already know it?'
Last night the Foreign Office said 'we are trying to do our utmost' for the four British detainees while 'we take every allegation of torture seriously'. The request for information about the MI5 man would be considered.
Azmatt Begg, Moazzam's father, said he had given up hope the British government would intervene in a meaningful way to help his son. 'They are not protecting their own citizens, but merely falling in with whatever the Americans want to do.'
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US Soldiers Murder Couple at Checkpoint, Six Children Soaked in Parents' Blood http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=602608
'Why did they shoot? We have no weapons'
By Chris Hondros in Tal Afar, Iraq
20 January 2005
It was a routine foot patrol. As we made our way up a broad boulevard, in the distance I could see a car making its way toward us. As a defence against potential car bombs, it is now standard practice for foot patrols to stop oncoming vehicles, particularly after dark.
"We have a car coming," someone called out, as we entered an intersection. We could see the car about 100 metres away. It kept coming; I could hear its engine now, a high whine that sounded more like acceleration than slowing down. It was maybe 50 yards away now. "Stop that car!" someone shouted out, seemingly simultaneously with someone firing what sounded like warning shots - a staccato measured burst.
The car continued coming. And then, perhaps less than a second later, a cacophony of fire, shots rattling off in a chaotic overlapping din. The car entered the intersection on its momentum and still shots were penetrating it and slicing it. Finally the shooting stopped, the car drifted listlessly, clearly no longer being steered, and came to a rest on a kerb. Soldiers began to approach it warily. The sound of children crying came from the car. I walked up to the car and a teenaged girl with her head covered emerged from the back, wailing and gesturing wildly. After her came a boy, tumbling on to the ground from the seat, already leaving a pool of blood.
"Civilians!" someone shouted, and soldiers ran up. More children - it ended up being six all told - started emerging, crying, their faces mottled with blood in long streaks. The troops carried them all off to a nearby sidewalk.
It was by now almost completely dark. There, working only by lights mounted on ends of their rifles, an Army medic began assessing the children's injuries, running his hands up and down their bodies, looking for wounds.
Incredibly, the only injuries were to a girl who suffered a cut hand and a boy with a superficial gash in the small of his back that was bleeding heavily but was not life-threatening. The medic immediately began to bind it, while the boy crouched against a wall.
From the pavement I could see into the bullet-mottled windshield more clearly, the driver of the car, a man, was penetrated by so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured. A woman also lay dead in the front, still covered in her Muslim clothing and harder to see.
Meanwhile, the children continued to wail and scream, huddled against a wall, sandwiched between soldiers either binding their wounds or trying to comfort them. The Army's translator later told me that this was a Turkoman family and that the teenaged girl kept shouting, "Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home!" After a delay in getting the armoured vehicles lined up and ready, the convoy moved to the main Tal Afar hospital.
The young children were carried in by soldiers and by their teenaged sister. Only the boy with the gash on his back needed any further medical attention, and the Army medic and an Iraqi doctor quickly chatted over his prognosis, deciding that his wound would be easily repaired. The Army told me that it would probably launch a full investigation.
Chris Hondros is a photographer with Getty Images and is embedded with US troops
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29400-2005Jan22?language=printer
washingtonpost.com
In One Night, Iraqi Turns From Friend to Foe
Man Who Supported U.S. Occupation Calls Americans 'the Devil' After Alleged Raid on His House
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page A20
BAGHDAD -- The day after the soldiers came, Imaad ordered his mother to go through her refrigerator and pantry and throw out all the cheese that had been made outside Iraq. He went around and collected any images of Westerners in the house, threw them in a pile and burned them until they were floating bits of ash. He struck his mother repeatedly and forbade her to watch foreign news or movie channels on their new television.
The Americans were "the devil," Imaad ranted.
By all accounts, Imaad, 32, was a typical, mild-mannered college graduate who spoke English well and had quietly supported the U.S. presence in Iraq -- until Jan. 5, the night the soldiers came.
His story about that night, told days later in his small living room, is the story of how the U.S. military made an enemy of one man during a 20-minute encounter.
The U.S. military, along with Iraqi security forces, routinely conducts raids throughout Iraq to try to catch insurgents. For the troops, the missions are often dangerous; soldiers say one of the greatest difficulties they face is figuring out who is a friend and who is an enemy.
Since the war began in March 2003, 1,077 American troops have died in hostile action, official figures show. In addition, insurgents kill Iraqi troops on an almost daily basis.
Often, soldiers on raids find illegal weapons, ringleaders and vital information that can prevent more attacks. But often, the raids turn up little and leave hard feelings among civilians who resent foreign soldiers bursting into their homes, breaking doors and gates and pointing guns at their heads. They resent these men catching their wives and daughters in their bedclothes. They resent them barking orders, telling them to get on the ground, invading their homes, emptying drawers and turning over mattresses.
On the night of Jan. 5, Imaad and his mother, Um Imaad -- both of whom declined to give their full names for fear of retribution -- were watching a movie in the living room. As in most other parts of the capital for the past two months, their Adhimiya neighborhood has electricity about two hours a day. So the generators outside were humming at about 9 that night, and the television was turned up so they could hear.
Imaad said they were startled by a loud banging at the door. He went quickly to open it. When he did, Imaad said, there were about a dozen U.S. soldiers standing with their guns pointed at his head.
Imaad and his mother said the soldiers rushed in, ordering them to sit together while they searched the house. "You look poor," Imaad recalled one of the soldiers saying. "Why?"
Imaad answered in English: "I have not been able to find a job, although I'm a graduate of the College of Arts." His heart was pounding, Imaad said. His mother, a chatty widow who adores her son, sat next to him, shaking.
The soldiers went to search his bedroom. He heard laughing, and then they called for him, he said. Imaad went to his room and saw that the soldiers had found several magazines he kept hidden from his mother. They had pictures of girls in swimsuits and erotic poses. Imaad said the soldiers spread the magazines on his bed and put his Koran in the middle.
"This is a good match," Imaad said one of the soldiers told him.
"It was a nightmare," he said. "I will never forget those bad soldiers when they put the Koran among the magazines."
Within 20 minutes, the soldiers left without arresting him or his mother. While the soldiers went next door to search his neighbor's house, Imaad began to slap his mother, he said. "The American people are devils," Um Imaad recalled her son repeating.
He left her and went to a mosque to spend the night. "I asked God to forgive me," Imaad said, "because I could not prevent American sins."
The Army's Task Force Baghdad, which includes soldiers from the 1st Cavalry and 82nd Airborne Divisions, are mainly responsible for securing the capital city.
Lt. Col. James Hutton, a spokesman for the 1st Cavalry, said Task Force Baghdad soldiers were not involved in the raid that night. He said other U.S. units, including military police, operate in Baghdad but that he had no information about their possible involvement.
Army Lt. Col. Daniel Baggio, another military spokesman in Baghdad, said he also could not confirm that a raid took place that night. "That sort of behavior is not condoned by the U.S. military, and I find it hard to believe U.S. soldiers would do that," he said. "I'm not saying it didn't happen. It just seems odd."
Neighbors corroborated parts of Imaad's account. They said the soldiers raided their houses on Jan. 5, telling them that they were responding to an explosion in the area. One man said a soldier angrily punched him and broke his nose. The injury was apparent a week later.
They said American soldiers raided one side of the street, and Iraqi security forces raided another. They said the soldiers arrived in armored vehicles and left after about two hours, taking several Iraqi civilians with them.
The neighborhood is known to harbor insurgents, including some who moved to Baghdad from Fallujah after a U.S. offensive there in November. Neighbors acknowledged there were anti-American groups among them, but they said not everyone opposed the foreign troops or Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government.
Imaad and his mother said they had no memorable encounters with soldiers before Jan. 5, no reason to hate or mistrust them. But Um Imaad said she had been distraught since that night at the changes in her son, a plump man with a round face and a receding hairline. His father died in the Iran-Iraq war two decades ago, leaving mother and son with only each other for support.
Um Imaad, who wore a simple white scarf tucked around her brown, crinkled face, said that after the raid she thought she was going to lose her son, too. "He had a crisis," she said, explaining what happened.
Um Imaad brought Imaad pills from the doctor to try to calm him. He looked at the yellow ones, then the red ones and refused to take them. "All these belong to Jewish people," he said, pushing one set aside. "And these others are from bad or foreign people."
Imaad said that two weeks after the raid, he was still struggling to return to normal. He was no longer hitting his mother, but he still would not allow her to watch foreign television or buy products made outside Iraq.
Imaad said he was embracing his Muslim faith as never before. He spends most of his time at the mosque praying or reading the Koran. He is also looking for a job.
Before the war, Imaad worked for a commerce company, making about $50 a month and spending most of it on transportation. He has not been able to find work in the nearly two years since.
He never really held the Americans responsible for that, he said, until the night of Jan. 5.
"I used to have a good opinion of the Americans," Imaad said. "But they are the enemy. They are bad."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1489147,00.html?gusrc=rss
Report implicates top brass in Bagram scandal
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday May 21, 2005
The Guardian
A leaked report on a military investigation into two killings of detainees at a US prison in Afghanistan has produced new evidence of connivance of senior officers in systematic prisoner abuse.
The investigation shows the military intelligence officers in charge of the detention centre at Bagram airport were redeployed to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003, while still under investigation for the deaths of two detainees months earlier. Despite military prosecutors' recommendations, the officers involved have yet to be charged.
The Bagram case also suggests that some of the prison guards were given little if any training in handling detainees, and were influenced by a White House directive that "terrorist" suspects did not deserve the rights given to prisoners of war under the Geneva convention.
The prosecution dossier from the army's investigation into Bagram, leaked to the New York Times, deals with the deaths of detainees Dilawar and Habibullah (both, as is common for Afghans, taking a single name).
Dilawar was a taxi driver who appears to have driven past a US military base soon after a rocket attack. Habibullah was handed over to the US by an Afghan warlord, and was identified as the brother of a Taliban commander. Both men were seized in late 2002, interrogated, beaten and killed in a hangar used for holding detainees who were being vetted for dispatch to Guantánamo Bay.
The two were chained to the ceilings of their cells for days at a time and beaten on the legs. They had been subjected to a blow known as the "common peroneal strike", aimed at a point just below the knee and intended to disable. Coroners in the Habibullah case said his legs "had basically been pulpified" and looked as though they had been run over by a bus.
Last October, the army's criminal investigation com mand found probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted soldiers with offences ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter in the Dilawar case. Charges were also recommended against 15 of them for the Habibullah case.
Only seven soldiers have been charged, all junior ranks.
John Galligan, a Texas lawyer defending one of them - Private First Class Willie Brand - told the Guardian: "It happened over a period of time and involved a large number of individuals. To turn around and charge PFC Brand fails to take account of the environment and standard operating procedures.
"What is particularly offensive to me is that senior officials have gone unscathed."
Asked about the latest revelations, President George Bush said yesterday: "I think about over 20% of the people thus far that have been held to account as a result of the Abu Ghraib issue have been officers. I'm comfortable that we're getting to the bottom of the situation. And I know we're doing so in a transparent way."
Sergeant James Leahy told investigators that after February 2002 directive from Mr Bush that the Geneva convention did not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban fighters, interrogators believed they "could deviate slightly from the rules".
The Pentagon denied that the Abu Ghraib scandal could have been prevented if the Bagram abuses had been investigated faster. Carrying out an inquiry in Afghanistan was bound to take longer. But John Sifton, an Afghanistan expert at Human Rights Watch, said this was "a convenient excuse".
"The White House always put forward, that Abu Ghraib was an exception, just some rotten apples," he said. "But US personnel in Afghanistan were involved in killings and torture of prisoners well before the Iraq war even started.
"The story begins in Afghanistan."
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=640070
Afghan prisoners were 'tortured to death' by American guards
By Justin Huggler, Asia Correspondent
21 May 2005
Shocking and detailed accounts have emerged of how two Afghan prisoners were tortured to death by American interrogators and prison guards at Bagram air base, outside Kabul.
A 2,000-page report on an internal investigation by the US military leaked to The New York Times and published yesterday provides exhaustive detail on how the two were kept chained in excruciating positions and kicked to death.
The harrowing stories of the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar told in the report could prove as damaging to the US as the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
The report reveals that Dilawar, a taxi driver, died despite the fact that most of the interrogators were convinced he was innocent.
There will be fears of an explosive reaction in Afghanistan. The New York Times report comes a week after at least 15 people were killed in protests in Afghanistan triggered by a Newsweek report which said US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down a lavatory. Newsweek has since retracted the report, saying it was based on a flawed source.
But The New York Times story will not go away so easily for the Bush administration. Its source is the findings of the US military's own investigation. It also comes at a dangerous time in Afghanistan, with violence increasing and signs that the Taliban may be resurgent.
The leaked report contains graphic details of a culture of abuse at Bagram, where detainees are held while the US military decides whether to send them to Guantanamo. In sworn statements, US soldiers tell of a woman interrogator with a taste for humiliation who stepped on the neck of one detainee and kicked another in the genitals.
They also tell of Specialist Damien Corsetti, an interrogator called "Monster" - he had the word tattooed in Italian across his chest - who one sergeant praised as the "king of torture". One Saudi detainee testified that Spc Corsetti held his penis against his face and threatened to rape him.
The report includes the names of all the US soldiers involved. It details the cases of the two Afghan men who died in US custody. The first, Habibullah, was captured in November 2002. He was locked in an isolation cell with his hands shackled to the wire ceiling over his head. The report describes how he was literally kicked to death over several days.
The guards found him "uncooperative", and he was given multiple "peroneal strikes" - a disabling blow to the leg just above the knee. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg," former Sgt Thomas Curtis told investigators.
A lawyer for one of the guards who kneed Habibullah in this fashion told US investigators: "My client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility."
When Habibullah started coughing up phlegm and complaining of chest pains, the guards laughed at him. Eventually his dead body was found hanging from the handcuffs that still chained him to the ceiling. A post-mortem examination found that he was probably killed by a blood clot, caused by the leg injuries, which travelled to his heart and blocked the blood supply to his lungs.
Dilawar, a taxi driver, was detained in December 2002 as he drove past a US base that had earlier come under rocket attack. Passengers he had picked up were carrying suspicious items.
Spc Corey Jones, an interrogator, told investigators that Dilawar spat in his face. He responded with a couple of knee strikes.
"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his God," Spc Jones said. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny." The report says it became a running joke and prison guards kicked Dilawar just to hear him scream "Allah". "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes," he said.
During an interrogation, the severely injured Dilawar begged a translator to get him a doctor. The translator says he told the interrogators, but one replied: "He's OK. He's just trying to get out of his restraints."
An autopsy found that Dilawar died of heart failure caused by "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities". The coroner, Lieutenant-Colonel Elizabeth Rouse, told a pre-trial hearing that his legs "had basically been pulpified ... I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus."
Seven US soldiers face criminal charges.
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http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4581834
'Young Troops Abused Detainees in U.S. Camp of Death'
By Victoria Ward, PA, in New York
Detainees in United States military custody in Afghanistan were the victims of widespread abuse by “young and poorly trained soldiers”, according to a report published today.
A 2,000-page confidential file obtained by The New York Times reveals brutal treatment of prisoners, apparently often born out of little more than boredom.
The report focuses on the deaths of two Afghan men in Bagram in December 2002.
The first, a 22-year-old taxi driver, known as Dilawar, was said to have been so badly beaten his legs could no longer bend. He was chained by the wrists to the ceiling of his cell where he eventually died.
Months later, Army investigators learned that most of his interrogators believed he was an innocent man who drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time, according to the report.
Another detainee, Habibullah, died there six days earlier, also shackled to the ceiling.
“It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared,” said one of the medics called to the scene, Staff Sgt Rodney Glass.
In statements to investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator stepping on the neck of one detainee and kicking another in the genitals.
Another prisoner was said to have been forced to roll back and forth on the floor, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went.
“The Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse,” the New York Times reports.
“The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.”
The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of the file from someone involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military’s response to the deaths.
The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded last October that the Dilawar and Habibullah incidents implicated 28 officers. Seven were later charged.
Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel John Skinner, said the “comprehensive” investigation was indicative of how seriously such reports were taken.
“The humane treatment of detainees has always been our standard,” he said.
“In context there was a relatively small number of incidents, but even one is unacceptable and we take them very seriously and have conducted several thorough investigations.”
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1621181,00.html
America
May 21, 2005
More US shame over detainees shackled, abused and left to die
From Roland Watson in Washington
The unit involved in the deaths of two men at the Afghan military base at Bagram says its men were not trained to interrogate (PHOTO: RICHARD MILLS)
A NEW chapter of horror has opened in the brutal treatment of prisoners by American guards and interrogators, this time in Afghanistan.
A leaked 2,000-page report into the deaths of two detainees details systematic and routine mistreatment at the Bagram military base, 40 miles (64km) north of Kabul.
Each man had spent most of his five days’ captivity shackled to the ceiling or wall of his cell, a technique that has since been labelled by the US military as a criminal assault. They were also subjected to relentless beatings, particularly to their legs, which coroners blamed for their deaths.
In one case, the guards and interrogators believed that their prisoner was not guilty of the assault on an American base for which he was blamed.
But the mistreatment appeared to be habitual, the work of young, ill-trained and bored recruits prone to violence. Many of the individuals involved in the two cases in December 2002 and January 2003 were redeployed to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. They included one interrogator known variously as “Monster” and “the King of Torture”. At Abu Ghraib he was fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning.
The US military’s response has been slow and, in contrast to the Abu Ghraib prison guards charged and sentenced in public view, guarded.
For months after the deaths military spokesmen insisted that they had been because of natural causes even though the coroner in each case had ruled them homicides. In October 2004 the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command found probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted men and women with criminal offences surrounding one of the cases, that of a 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar.
Fifteen of the same group were also found liable in the other, that of Habibullah, the brother of a former Taleban commander. None has so far been convicted. Only seven have been charged, four of them last week, even though the two men died more than two years ago.
The men and women involved said they believed that they were operating according to guidelines set in Washington, where President Bush had ruled that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda or terrorist detainees. Horrific details of the two men’s deaths are spelt out in an army criminal investigation report leaked to The New York Times by a military official unhappy with the Pentagon’s response.
Habibullah was taken to Bagram on December 30, 2002, where he was reported by an American doctor to be in good health. He was swiftly marked down as unco-operative, and shackled by his wrists to the wire-mesh ceiling over the cell.
During the next few days he was severely beaten on the head, chest and legs. The guards used a technique they had been taught, the disabling “common peroneal strike”, or sharp blow to the side of the leg just above the knee. Ali Baryalai, one interrogator, said that Habibullah often did not answer the interrogators’ questions because he did not understand them.
After two days of beatings and being shackled to the ceiling by the wrists, Habibullah was unable to bend his right leg and his foot was swollen. He could not bend his knees to sit in a chair for questioning and was allowed to sit on the floor.
The next day he was found in his cell slumped to one side with his tongue sticking out.
Habibullah, who was a combative detainee, often spitting at the guards, was found dead in his cell on his fifth day at Bagram. A coroner said that the likely cause of death was a blood clot caused by the severe beating to his legs, which travelled to his heart.
Most of the soldiers involved were from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which was bolstered by six Arabic speakers from the Utah National Guard. Only two of the group had ever questioned a real prisoner. “There was nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation,” Staff Sergeant Steven Loring told investigators.
Dilawar was taken to Bagram the day that Habibullah died. He died after five days of similar treatment. The medical examiner who checked his body said that the tissue in the young man’s legs had “basically been pulpified”.
It emerged later that the guards did not believe that Dilawar was guilty of what he had been accused. They were right. He and three other men in his taxi had been turned in by a warlord seeking to curry favour with the Americans. The other three spent 15 months in Guantanamo Bay before being released.
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/579444.html
Channel 10: IDF soldiers use Palestinian as human-shield in West Bank
By The Associated Press
Israel Defense Forces soldiers used a Palestinian teenager as a shield against rock-throwers in the West Bank last week, Channel 10 reported Monday.
The station showed film of soldiers leading the 17-year-old, identified as Fahdi, to a building where soldiers were stationed in the village of Dura in the southern West Bank. In a combination of actual footage and reenactment, the TV report showed how soldiers led the blindfolded youth out onto a second-floor balcony as a soldier aimed a rifle with a tear gas grenade from behind the teenager and other teens threw rocks at the building from across the street.
The IDF denied the allegation, saying the youth was arrested for throwing rocks at the soldiers, who did not use him as a shield but kept him under guard until he was transferred to police custody.
The Supreme Court has forbidden the use of Palestinians as human shields.
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http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jun2005-daily/01-06-2005/world/w13.htm
Jerusalem to demolish 88 Arab homes
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: The Jerusalem municipality wants to demolish 88 homes in an Arab neighbourhood of the city to make room for an archaeological park, according to Israeli government documents and attorneys representing the homeowners. If the courts approve the municipality’s request, it will be one of the largest demolitions since Israel captured traditionally Arab east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, and would cause an uproar among Palestinians who claim that part of the city as a future capital.
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Tuesday warned of grave damage to delicate peace efforts. "I urge the Israeli government not to do this demolition, and to give peace a chance," he said. The 88 homes are located in east Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhood of Silwan, just outside the walled Old City, an area steeped in biblical history.
The municipality wants to enlarge a small archaeological site beside the homes and turn the area into a national park, the Haaretz newspaper quoted Uri Shetrit, the Jerusalem city engineer, as saying. The park would connect several Jewish settlement enclaves in Silwan to the nearby City of David, an area of excavations dating to the biblical King David.
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http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6907945&postID=108390844278288083
We killed police for revenge, Israeli soldiers confessBy Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
03 June 2005
Two Israeli soldiers have come forward to describe how they took part in what they say was an officially ordered "revenge" operation to kill Palestinian police officers among them several unarmed men.
In graphic testimony, one soldier has confessed that he "really enjoyed" a chase in which he shot an unarmed Palestinian in the head who was trying to escape during a series of reprisal raids ordered the day after the killing of six Israeli soldiers in an ambush by militant gunmen three years ago.
In what may be the first inside account of such an operation, the soldiers from two reconnaissance units say they were among troops ordered by their commanders to "liquidate" the police officers at a series of Palestinian West Bank checkpoints even though they were given no evidence they had been involved in the killing of the Israelis.
The raids were among a series of ground and air attacks which, in all, killed 15 Palestinians 12 of them policemen in and around Nablus and Ramallah 24 hours after the six Israeli soldiers were killed at a military post in the village of Ein Arik, west of Ramallah, at the height of the intifada.
One soldier, who took part in the attack on a Palestinian post at Deir es Sudan said they had lain in wait after finding the position empty when they arrived in the middle of the night.
"The idea was simply to kill them all. Whenever they arrived, we would kill them, regardless whether [they were]armed or not. If they were Palestinian policemen, they were to be shot. The order was given and our six opened fire."
The soldier, from the Yael Reconnaissance Troop, said that their [naval] squad commander had told them: "We are going to kill six Palestinian policemen somewhere, revenging our six they took down". He added: "On my question 'what did they do?' the answer was there was a suspicion that the terrorist who killed our six came through that [Palestinian] checkpoint. Suspicion, but no concrete evidence. But I was told: 'it doesn't matter; they took six of ours, and we are going to take six of theirs.'"
The soldier said that, after hitting and wounding two of the Palestinians as they tried to run away, the soldiers continued to fire, as one ran into a corrugated metal shed and another into a cemetery. After they sprayed the shed with bullets, a gas cylinder in it caught fire. "We had a killed policeman, another one in this burning inferno, and a third one, escaping. We ran after him into a graveyard ... stood on the surrounding wall and shot at him. We killed him too."
The soldier said that no fire had been returned by the Palestinians and added: "Later we understood, that not one of them ... was armed." He added that he had inspected the "completely smashed" body of the man in the graveyard after shooting at it to "confirm the kill" and that it was of "a guy in his mid-50s or 60s, very old."
The accounts were originally given to the "Breaking the Silence" group of young former soldiers which is critical of methods used by the army in the occupied territories.
One of the group's spokesmen, Avichai Sharon, a former member of the crack Golani Brigade, claimed the operations on 20 February 2002 were ordered "from high" including the Ministry of Defence and added: "In my eyes, this is a very harsh example of crossing the moral and human boundaries."
He said it indicated that "we are not a defence force any more but a tribe which avenges in blood. As an Israeli, I fear this."
He said the soldiers, whose testimony appears in today's Maariv, had not been named "for legal reasons". Maariv quotes an army spokesman insisting the policemen were "contaminated by terror".
Describing another attack on the same day at the Beit Ha Mitachayim checkpoint on the eastern edge of Nablus in which fire was returned by Palestinian police the other soldier, from the Tzanchanim Paratroop Reconnaissance Unit, said that the order to shoot at Palestinians had given by the unit commander and the brigade commander, a Brigadier Cochavi, had been present at the time.
He said the policemen were ones who normally would have been warned by Israeli liaison officers about any military operations due to take place in their area.
As Israel released 400 Palestinian prisoners yesterday, Dov Weisglass, senior aide to Ariel Sharon, indicated the dismantlement of illegal settlement outposts a demand by the US would have to wait until after disengagement.
3 June 2005 11:11
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http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=643663
Eight arrested after video of Srebrenica executions shownBy Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
03 June 2005
Serbian authorities have arrested at least eight men in connection with the murder of Muslims in Srebrenica after a video of the crime was shown at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
The Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said, after holding talks with the UN's chief war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte, that "a number of suspects" had been arrested by yesterday for the "shocking crime".
Ms del Ponte was on a short visit to Belgrade, during which Serbian leaders promised to hunt down and arrest within a month General Ratko Mladic, who is wanted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for the 1995 slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.
Ms del Ponte described the arrests as "a brilliant operation". "I'm particularly grateful for the reaction on the footage." But she added: "In a few hours they were able to identify the perpetrators. I asked this morning that they react as quickly to arrest the fugitives who are still at large," referring to General Mladic and the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic.
The prosecution presented the videotape at the war crimes tribunal on Wednesday. It showed the execution of six Bosnian Muslim youths by members of the notorious paramilitary "Scorpions" unit of Mr Milosevic's secret police. The unit committed war crimes against non-Serb civilians in Bosnia, Croatia and in Kosovo.
Short clips of the video were shown on Serbian television on Wednesday night. It was taken by a man participating in the murders at Trnovo, 18 miles south of Sarajevo in Serb-held territory, after the fall of the Bosnian "safe haven" of Srebrenica. At one point in the footage, he claims that the battery of his camera is low. The man is told by one of the executioners to go on as long as he can.
The video begins with a Serbian Orthodox priest blessing paramilitaries before they go into battle. It ends with what looks like the same paramilitaries shooting the six civilian prisoners in the back, with machine guns. The young men appeared to have been severely beaten and had their hands tied behind their backs. The killers in the video are wearing the black uniforms of the Scorpions.
The Srebrenica massacre, the worst war crime in Europe since the end of the Second World War, remains a divisive subject for Serbs. Conservatives and nationalists have convinced the public that the crime is the invention of anti-Serb forces abroad with a recent survey showing that only half the population believe it happened. The same survey suggested that two-thirds of the public believedMr Karadzic and General Mladic were heroes.
But analysts say the airing of the video and the quick action of the authorities might be a prelude to the arrest of the two, which is the precondition for Serbia to start talks with the EU on an association agreement, due to open in October. Ms del Ponte wants General Mladic and Mr Karadzic to be arrested and extradited to The Hague by 11 July, the tenth anniversary of the massacre.
3 June 2005 11:11
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/597853.html
Security guard shoots Palestinian teen in family vineyard
By Arnon Regular
A 15-year-old boy was shot to death Friday evening by a civilian security guard securing the separation fence near the village of Beit Lakiya, near Highway 443.
Palestinian sources said that Mahyoub al-Asi was shot by the guard, whom he knew, from a distance while tending his family's vineyard several hundred meters away.
Al-Asi's cousins, Jamal, 14, and Uday, 15, were killed by Israel Defense Forces fire nearby a few months ago. His brother was also killed by a mine explosion near the village several years ago.
According to villagers and official Israeli sources, there had been no demonstration or clash with the guards at the time of the incident. A local ambulance managed to get him to the clinic in the village of Bidu, en route to the hospital in Ramallah, but he died of his wounds.
At least one other Palestinian boy, 12-year-old Zahi Mafarjeh, saw the incident from several hundred meters away. Mafarjeh told a researcher for the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem yesterday that no other boys had been present and there had been no demonstration.
He told Haaretz yesterday evening, "Mahyoub passed by me and said he was going to his family's vineyard. I saw him getting farther away and after a few minutes I heard a single shot. I looked at the hill opposite and saw that Mahyoub, who was in the allotment, began running toward the village but after a few steps, he fell. Then I saw the guard coming out of the guard shed near the fence and drive to the allotment. He reached Mahyoub and knelt over him and then used a colored flag to signal his location to the troops near the fence. A few minutes later, he saw an ambulance arriving from the village and left the scene."
According to testimony by the ambulance crew, Asi was shot while in the fenced family allotment located 200 meters from the bulldozer parking lot being guarded.
Mafarjeh, who knows the guards well, said Asi was shot by a Bedouin guard known to the boys as "Farid."
The shooter was detained for questioning and then released to house arrest.
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New Zealand PM condemns attacks on mosques
www.chinaview.cn 2005-07-10 19:52:26
AUCKLAND, New Zealand, July 10 (Xinhuanet) -- New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark condemned Sunday the attacks on mosques in Auckland.
Clark said she was saddened by the attacks.
Four Islamic centers in Auckland were attacked overnight. The New Zealand Muslim Association mosque in Ponsonby had several windows damaged in one attack. No offenders or suspects were seen.
Windows were smashed at the Al Faroq Cultural Center in Otahuhu,south Auckland. Vandalization at the Mt Roskill Mosque in Sandringham and the South Auckland Mosque and Otahuhu had also been reported.
The attacks happened two days after bombs exploded in London, killing more than 50 people.
Clark said New Zealanders across all communities are horrified by the attacks in London which are the work of evil people.
"But it is wrong to target the Muslim community here in retaliation. New Zealand's Muslim community like all New Zealand's communities is overwhelmingly a law abiding and peaceful community."
"Times like these call for cool heads and for tolerance. The evil acts of some should not lead to scapegoating of minorities inour communities," said Clark. Enditem
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http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/2005-07/10/article06.shtml
Mosques in UK, US, New Zealand Attacked
Additional Reporting By Ahmed Fathy, IOL Staff
CAIRO, July 10, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – No sooner had the London blasts taken place than racist attacks against mosques in Britain, the US and New Zealand were reported.
Anas Al-Tikriti, the spokesman of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), told IslamOnline.net Sunday, July 10, an arsonist attacked a mosque in central London and tried to set it on fire.
Media reports, however, said at least five mosques have come under racist attacks, including one in northwest England set on fire, since the attacks that killed 50 people and injured 700 others on Thursday, July 7.
A man living in a flat above the Shahjalal Mosque, which is part of an Islamic centre in Birkenhead , was treated for smoke inhalation but there were no other injuries, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The mosque door was burnt and there was some damage inside, Merseyside police said.
London police said Sunday there had been a number of racially and religiously-motivated hate crimes since the terror bombings, including one resulting in a serious injury.
"We have had a number of incidents of hate crime, racially and religiously motivated offences, and we take these types of offences very, very seriously," Commander Brian Paddick of the London Metropolitan Police told a press briefing.
"There has been one serious injury."
The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) said in June that the Muslim minority in Britain has been living in a "climate of fear" since the 9/11 attacks.
Hotline
Tikriti told IOL "MAB has registered some 70 verbal assaults, particularly against hijab-clad Muslims, since Thursday, July 7, when London was attacked."
The assaults included offensive phrases like "wicked Islam", "go home" and "you are behind the blasts" as well as emotional outbursts in the face of Muslims, he added.
Tikriti, who championed a list of anti-war activists that vied in the European elections in Yorkshire and the Humber constituency in June of last year, said that two old couples insulted a hijab-clad woman, but she was protected by passers-by.
The activist said that MAB has established a hotline to receive complaints from British Muslims about racist attacks.
He further said that they will embark on a series of social activities and media campaigns to show the true face of Islam in addition to sin-ins and peaceful marches.
"MAB staged a sit-in on Friday, July 8, in cooperation with anti-Iraq war and anti-WMDs movements to condemn the blasts and show solidarity with the families of the victims," he said.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission has given British Muslims a set of safety tips to avoid reprisal attacks following the bombings.
Media Onslaughts
Tikriti feared that the media would unleash new anti-Islam campaigns in the wake of the blasts.
"I assume that right-wing and Zionist media, like The Daily Telegraph and The Sun, will mount their anti-Islam campaigns in the days to come, parroting hoary-old claims like Islam was encouraging the killing of infidels and terrifying civilians," he told IOL.
The Muslim activist further said that such media onslaughts are aimed at pitting the Britons against the Muslim minority as it happened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
He citied a Friday article by Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph entitled "Where is the Gandhi of Islam?"
"But we can’t ignore the fact that there are some leading newspapers that do justice to Muslims and Islam like The Guardian and The Independent," Tikriti said.
Senior British parliamentarians admitted in August of last year that anti-terrorism laws are being used "disproportionately" against the Muslim minority.
Domino Effect
The London attacks have already had their domino effect with at least six Islamic centers in New Zealand vandalized and their walls painted with the message "Londoners RIP," police said Sunday.
In what appeared to be a co-coordinated series of attacks across Auckland , vandals smashed windows and doors and left variations of the same message in black paint on walls facing the street, AFP said.
New Zealand Federation of Islamic Associations President Javed Khan said it was the first time an attack on this scale had occurred against the country's 40,000 Muslims, about 25,000 of whom live in Auckland .
He said Muslims were "shocked and saddened" by the incidents in London and appealed to his community to be calm and tolerant of the overnight attacks in Auckland .
Prime Minister Helen Clark was quick to condemn the attacks, saying it was wrong to target the Muslim minority in New Zealand in retaliation for the terrorist attacks in London .
" New Zealand 's Muslim community, like all New Zealand 's communities, is overwhelmingly a law-abiding and peaceful community," she said.
Opposition National Party leader Don Brash said the attacks were "an appalling act of intolerance" and the Green Party described the attackers as no better than the terrorists who brought death to London .
In the US , the FBI and members of its Joint Terrorism Task Force are investigating a fire at a Bloomington mosque in Minnesota on Saturday as a hate crime, the American Indy Star newspaper reported Sunday.
The incident took place at the Islamic Center of Bloomington, where a ground-floor window was broken and an incendiary device was used to start a fire, an official of the mosque said.
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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article298281.ece
Mosques attacked by arsonists as Asians fear surge of race hate
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent Published: 11 July 2005
The terrorist attacks in London have provoked reprisal attacks on Asians. Police are investigating several incidents, including four arson attacks on mosques, that may have been motivated by revenge.
The arson attacks were carried out in mosques in Leeds, Belvedere, Telford and Birkenhead. Three further attacks were reported on mosques in east London and Bristol. In the attack on the east London mosque, 19 windows were smashed, according to the newspaper The Muslim News.
In Hayes, Middlesex, an Asian woman reported attempted arson after she noticed "liquid dripping down her door and smelt petrol" on the day of the terrorist attacks in London. The same day, five white men were arrested after bottles were thrown at the windows of a Sikh temple in south London. In a separate incident, arson was reported at the home of an Asian family in The Broadway, Southall.
In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said that the force was keeping an open mind on the motive for the London attacks, but that many of the allegations involved threatening phone calls or racist abuse. A spokesman said "reassurance patrols" were being carried out in areas considered vulnerable.
A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Great Britain said there was a real sense of "fear and apprehension" among many Muslim communities, particularly in London. Senior Muslim figures met over the weekend to discuss how best to deal with the increasingly tense climate. Sikh community leaders have asked the police for greater protection.
A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said yesterday that there was an "increased level of concern" among the public in general and the Muslim community in particular since the bombings in London on Thursday, but stressed community relations on the whole had been "reassuringly calm".
Acpo's president, Chris Fox, said he believed "low level" incidents of violence had not been reported to the police. "We encourage everyone to report this type of obnoxious and dangerous behaviour, from whatever quarter, for full police investigation because we are determined there will be a very robust enforcement response to it. It is absolutely crucial that there should be no reaction against any section of the community. That would simply play into the hands of the murderers," he said.
Four mosques were also vandalised in Auckland, New Zealand, over the weekend, one with the phrase "R.I.P London".
The terrorist attacks in London have provoked reprisal attacks on Asians. Police are investigating several incidents, including four arson attacks on mosques, that may have been motivated by revenge.
The arson attacks were carried out in mosques in Leeds, Belvedere, Telford and Birkenhead. Three further attacks were reported on mosques in east London and Bristol. In the attack on the east London mosque, 19 windows were smashed, according to the newspaper The Muslim News.
In Hayes, Middlesex, an Asian woman reported attempted arson after she noticed "liquid dripping down her door and smelt petrol" on the day of the terrorist attacks in London. The same day, five white men were arrested after bottles were thrown at the windows of a Sikh temple in south London. In a separate incident, arson was reported at the home of an Asian family in The Broadway, Southall.
In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said that the force was keeping an open mind on the motive for the London attacks, but that many of the allegations involved threatening phone calls or racist abuse. A spokesman said "reassurance patrols" were being carried out in areas considered vulnerable.
A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Great Britain said there was a real sense of "fear and apprehension" among many Muslim communities, particularly in London. Senior Muslim figures met over the weekend to discuss how best to deal with the increasingly tense climate. Sikh community leaders have asked the police for greater protection.
A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said yesterday that there was an "increased level of concern" among the public in general and the Muslim community in particular since the bombings in London on Thursday, but stressed community relations on the whole had been "reassuringly calm".
Acpo's president, Chris Fox, said he believed "low level" incidents of violence had not been reported to the police. "We encourage everyone to report this type of obnoxious and dangerous behaviour, from whatever quarter, for full police investigation because we are determined there will be a very robust enforcement response to it. It is absolutely crucial that there should be no reaction against any section of the community. That would simply play into the hands of the murderers," he said.
Four mosques were also vandalised in Auckland, New Zealand, over the weekend, one with the phrase "R.I.P London".
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What this has done is remove the fig leaf from the U.S. occupation in Iraq. Not only did it make the Iraqi people naked, but it made America naked in terms of its claims of abiding by the rule of law, maintaining human dignity, exercising self-restraint and having a government that's accountable and transparent.
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Dear Friends , these and many other offences prove the fact that USA = Unlimited Satanic Atrocities.
Remember O Muslims; who enjoy their lives without any thought about the other Muslims, that the days of peace have gone away and the enemies of Islam are looking for more opportunities to torment Muslims.This is the time we must strive to strengthen our piety and faith.
Please forward this to all your friends to at least create an awareness of the misery of our sisters and brothers in Iraq and remember that we and our families may be the next to experience the same troubles.
May ALLAH and His Holy Prophet Muhammed ( peace be upon Him), help the Ummah in these days of distress!Aameen.
Please pray for the safety and well being of the Ummah.
