Sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison began as a technique ordered by military intelligence interrogators. An incident has come to light when two drunken interrogators took a female Iraqi prisoner from her cell in the middle of the night and stripped her naked to the waist...

The issue at stake is more than about the staff of the prison. These people were supposed to be trained in human rights. Even if a person is a prisoner, he is a human being first who must be treated with respect and dignity but the supposedly civilised nation stands exposed as more naked than the prisoners for its non-human treatment, barbarism and brutality.

Although it is being said that there is global outrage, this seems to be a frozen reaction for the consumption of media. In India and in all other places there is shocking insensitivity because the condemnation and protest has not been sufficient enough. The puritan response to Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair led to impeachment process but in this case nothing of that sort has emerged as of now. Prisoners abuse is any day more obscene and prornographic than what Clinton and Monica did consensually.

Abu Ghraib is twenty miles west of Baghdad. More the things change in Abu Ghraib, the more it remains the same. Abu Ghraib is a sprawling 280-acre gulag, complete with sniper towers and razor wire, dungeons and the stench of human fear.

Heartrending human rights violations by Saddam Hussein’s regime have been replaced by equally outrageously demeaning human rights violations by George W Bush-Tony Blair Regime in Abu Ghraib in particular and Iraq in general. During Saddam Hussein’s regime it was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. Abu Ghraib has twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits-smaller than the one from which Saddam Hussein was captured.

According to U.S. State Department propaganda released in April 2003 to justify the march toward war, Saddam killed 4,000 prisoners at the institution in 1984, and executed 50 political prisoners there between 2000 and 2001. One entry is particularly revealing "Our hands were tied like this. First the left hand and then the foot. Then a black hood on my head, then they applied electricity." The picture showing U.S. soldiers doing exactly the same thing to an Iraqi prisoner is a telling comment on its similarity with the former regime.

After the collapse of Saddam Hussein regime in April, 2004, Abu Ghraib became a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners were civilians, who fell into three categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.

America is co-terminus with human rights violations and under severe pressure from the international furor over prisoners abuse President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. The photographs from Abu Ghraib would have enormous consequences: for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States’ reputation in the world. There was evidence of such abuses dating back to the Afghanistan war.

Under the fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them.

In June 2004, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. She was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, who had no training in handling prisoners.

After a month, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army’s prison system was initiated which resulted in a fifty-three-page report, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba in February, 2005. The conclusions about the Army prison system were devastating. Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers and also by members of the American intelligence community.

Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men. Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture. The prisoners were punched in the chest so hard that the detainee almost went into cardiac arrest.
Questions are being asked as to who authorized such acts. It has now emerged from letters and e-mails to family members of the soldiers, that “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.

The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,”.
One soldier Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called other government agencies—that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees—was brought to his unit for questioning. “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . ..” The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”

The complaints in these letters and e-mails were reinforced by two internal Army reports—Taguba’s and one by the Army’s chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general.
Taguba, said, “Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryder’s] assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation.” Ryder investigation was at best a failure and at worst a coverup.

Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis. She stated, “MI wanted to get them to talk…”
When asked why chain of command was not informed about the abuse, it was said, “Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing”—where the abuse took place—“belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”
The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M.P. guard force was significantly undermanned and short of resources.

The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.”

What Prisoner abuse means in Iraq by U.S-UK. Forces:

a. Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
f. Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. Writing "I am a Rapest" (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
l. Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.
n. reaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
l. Threatening detainees with a charged pistol;
o. Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
p. Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;
q. Threatening male detainees with rape;
r Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;
s. Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
t. Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

On 30 April 2004, Bush insists: "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America. And so I -- I didn't like it one bit.”

On Friday, May 7, 2004, Rumsfeld told a Senate panel that videotapes of the abuse at Abu Ghraib also exist. The tapes include footage of male minor prisoners being raped. The allegations of "rape and murder" are forthcoming.

The human rights debacle at Abu Ghraib once again reminds humanity what has been known for centuries that people with guns and uniforms tend to go sadistic. The fact that the military's prisoner abuse has lately been revealed to the public is not the problem. The entire process is the problem. Abu Ghraib has become political fodder, and in all cases, the emphasis has been on public perceptions and the impact of these perceptions on American prestige, ambitions, and collective self-esteem. The Bush administration's entire national security strategy is a fiasco in which Iraq serves merely as a metaphor.

On 26 August 2002, Dick Cheney announced that there is "no doubt that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction". It followed that invading Iraq was plain self defense. It is now known that this was untrue. One should not be amazed if the public relations exercise of damage control by U.S. begins to say that Prisoners’ abuse was done in self defense!!

It would be a monumental tragedy if the world’s civil society settles for its reduction to an election-cycle scandal, the likes of which this nation has never seen...with out the setting up unprecedented corrective mechanisms and unpardonable stringent punishments at the highest level of the U.S. administration. For this to happen global outrage must be more vocal and articulate and it must go beyond media statements and rhetoric of human rights organizations.

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