Two Hundred War Crime Links

Assembled by Lawrence McGuire (blmcguire@hotmail.com)

I collected these links over the course of the last few months, and I have not put them in any particular order, because I don't have the time, and I don't think it is really necessary right now.

If you have any war crime links that are not on the list, please put them together on a word document first, as I have done here, with an excerpt, and when you have 20 or more collected you can email them to me, and I will add them to this list. Please take the time and effort to verify that your new links are different from what I have here.

I collected them by surfing on the web and adding them to my 'favorites', then I opened one link at a time, copied a paragraph or two, copied the link, and pasted everything onto a Microsoft Word document. Yes, that is a time consuming process. If you have a better system let me know.

Most of the links come from mainstream news sources. Sometimes these sources are collected on other websites like www.commondreams.org or www.informationclearinghouse.info.

Sometimes an article that was once free now requires a payment.

Sometimes an excerpt I have made may be out of the general context of the source article.

Some articles are not kept at all (for example Yahoo does not keep its articles from AP on file very long).

Some articles are not directly about war crimes, but seem directly related in some way to me.

Generally the source is named or can be determined by reading the link.

These collections of links can be used as sources to write articles and to provide evidence for those who doubt the extent of US war crimes in Iraq.

I think the invasion itself constitutes a war crime, the crime of aggressive war, and therefore President Bush and the architects of the war are all guilty of war crimes.

I am also sympathetic with those who see war itself as always a crime, and so the concept 'war crime' is an oxymoron. My disagreement with this is that I think people have a right to self defence against violent aggression, and I hesitate to label this self-defence as a crime too.

Some sites focused solely on US War Crimes:

http://www.worldtribunal.org/

http://i-p-o.org/int-war-crimes-commission-iraq.htm

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan-Criminal-Tribunal10mar04htm

http://www.brusselstribunal.org/

http://www.cageprisoners.com/

Various war crimes are documented below, including:

The crime of aggressive war: The invasion of Iraq

Preventing aid agencies from bring aid into Fallujah

Exporting prisoners from Iraq

Incarcerating people in Guantanamo Bay etc without legal representation

Torture and murder in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib etc

Shooting wounded civilians dead

Deliberately destroying Iraq's civilian infrastructure

Use of Depleted Uranium

Use of cluster bombs in civilian areas

Use of 2000 lb bombs in civilian areas

Selling off Iraq's companies and re-working its constitution

Deliberate killings of civilians

Mass reprisals ( 600 killed in the first onslaught on Fallujah early this year as a
reprisal for 4 US mercenaries)

Destroying hospitals and killing doctors

Indiscriminate bombing of Fallujah

Killing fleeing or non-combatant civilians

Deliberate attacks on Journalists

Preventing civilians from fleeing a combat zone

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1311

Has the U.S. Government Committed War Crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq?
May 23, 2004
Robert Higgs
The Independent Institute

"First, in the light of voluminous evidence now available to everybody, it seems clear that leaders and advisers of the Bush administration engaged in “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.” After all, Iraq posed no threat to the United States. Its government had neither the means nor the intention of waging war against this country; nor did it issue any threat to harm the United States. That high officials of the U.S. government and their supporters in the news media and elsewhere openly made many false statements to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq surely exonerates nobody; if anything, those statements cast the guilty parties in an even starker light."

http://tomwatson.typepad.com/tom_watson/2004/05/war_crimes_tria.html

Tom Watson Blog

"In our name, the American government is holding without charge and in often humiliating conditions, thousands of prisoners - some combatants, some terrorists, some bystanders. They have no redress, no legal protection, no legal status. And in our name, some are being tortured, and some subjected to conditions that lead to their deaths. And this is an Administration that has argued against adherence to the Geneva Conventions - and one reason for that argument was to protect Bush and his ministers from prosecution on war crimes charges by successor administrations."

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov2004/Stainsby1122.htm

Resistance is Warranted
by Macdonald Stainsby
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 22, 2004

"Beginning on November 30, 2004 George W Bush will be in a country that has endorsed the WCC. Despite certain protestations to the contrary, Canada is legally obliged to arrest George W Bush for war crimes. Going all the way back to Nuremberg, the precedent for the WCC, the number one crime -- the crime that got the Nazis hanged -- is to launch “aggressive” war. All other crimes, such as torture at Abu Ghraib, murder of wounded prisoners, targeting of hospitals during war, denying basic medicines -- stem from the primary crime against humanity, the crime against international peace. It is of little consequence how many of these crimes can be proved to involve Bush's direction. What matters is he launched illegal aggressive war. If Canada does not arrest him, it means Canada is in breach of their international obligations as a signatory in the Hague."

http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-2/521/521_04_MediaGuide.shtml

A guide to the U.S. media’s doublespeak

November 19, 2004 |

"CORPORATE JOURNALISTS in the United States are generally little more than stenographers for U.S. government propaganda. But in times of war--or alleged war--they tend to abandon stenography for cheerleading as their preferred mode of “reporting” the “news.”"

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/75E3CA31-83B0-46FD-A762-0C1157C408F9.htm

Falluja troops told to shoot on sight

Thursday 09 December 2004, 10:58 Makka Time, 7:58 GMT

"On the eve of the assault on Falluja, the US military ordered troops to shoot any male on the street between the ages of 15 and 50 if they were seen as a security threat, regardless of whether they had a weapon."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E4F9CD7D-282E-47A9-99C4-B6F5B8BF56CC.htm

Iraqi civilians gunned down at checkpoint

Monday 22 November 2004, 13:18 Makka Time, 10:18 GMT

"US marines have killed several Iraqi civilians after opening fire at a bus which drove through a checkpoint in the city of Ramadi, the US military and Iraqi police say."

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FK20Aa01.html

US military on the scent of oil
By Colonel Daniel Smith

The 2003 Defense Department's "Base Structure Report" lists 702 foreign bases owned or leased by the Pentagon, with about 6,000 more installations in the US and its possessions. As vast as this network seems, the report inexplicably fails to include any locations in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Qatar and Kosovo. And to these must now be added at least 14 garrisons in Iraq.

Then there is "under-reporting". In Asia, the 10 US Marine Corps facilities on Okinawa, including the sprawling 485-hectare USMC Futenma Air Station, have only one entry. The array of intelligence gathering and other military installations in Britain are nowhere to be found in the report, possibly because they all are technically Royal Air Force facilities. Moreover, while a surface-based "boost-phase" missile defense system to counter North Korean missiles can be deployed on ships in the international waters of the Sea of Japan, effective coverage by a surface-based system to counter Iranian missiles would require launch sites in at least Afghanistan and Iraq (and possibly Turkmenistan), according to a Congressional Budget Office study completed in July.

THE ROVING EYE
The recipe for civil war
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FK25Ak04.html

Thousands of Fallujah refugee families are living in dire conditions in makeshift shelters around the city. Those not lucky enough to have relatives in Baghdad are camping in places like the University of Baghdad campus. Nobody has received any aid from Allawi's government and its Ministry of Health - no medicine, no doctors, although there has been a rhetorical promise. Baghdad is filled with refugees telling horror stories of fear under the relentless American bombing, of being sprayed with what they claim was poisonous gas, of snipers killing women and children or anyone trying to cross the Euphrates river, of no water, no electricity and no food. No Sunni in his right mind believes in the "reconstruction" of Fallujah: they point to the example of Sadr City - bombed in October and still in ruins. The Iraqi Red Crescent says all their relief teams are still blocked from entering Fallujah, while the Americans say the refugees will have to wait at least two more weeks before they can go back to their city in ruins.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A809-2004Nov20

Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos
Malnutrition Nearly Double What It Was Before Invasion

By Karl VickWashington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

Dead-Check in Falluja

by Evan Wright
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0447,wright,58644,1.html

November 24 - 30, 2004 "Village Voice" -- In April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam Hussein was being toppled in Baghdad, symbolizing the promised liberation of Iraq, I was embedded with a Marine unit engaged in fierce combat about 30 miles north of the city, on the outskirts of Baquba. Late that afternoon, the Humvee I was in was following about 50 feet behind a Marine Light Armored Vehicle when it pulled alongside a Toyota pickup pushed to the side of the road, its doors riddled with bullet holes. The head of at least one occupant was visible in the truck, but I couldn't determine if he was moving or not. Nor did I see any weapons. As our Humvee stopped behind the truck, a Marine in the vehicle ahead of us leapt out, pointed his rifle into the window of the pickup and sprayed it with gunfire. It was a cold-blooded execution.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7369.htm

Falluja's Health Damage

The bombing of hospitalized patients, forced starvation and dehydration, denial of medicines and health services to the sick and wounded must be recognized for what they are: war crimes and crimes against humanity.

by MILES SCHUMAN

[from the December 13, 2004 issue The Nation Magazine]

While the North American news media have focused on the military triumph of US Marines in Falluja, little attention has been paid to reports that US armed forces killed scores of patients in an attack on a Falluja health center and have deprived civilians of medical care, food and water.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/reichard.php?articleid=4060

November 26, 2004 Greetings from Fallujah!
by L. Reichard White

Preamble:

April 28, 2003: U.S. soldiers kill 18 Fallujah school children.

Act I

April, 2004: In the attack on Fallujah, which ended after 3 weeks in defeat of the "coalition":

"U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; ..The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. ... After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave except for what they called 'military age males,' men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war.

"The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. ... This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.

"In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man's-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic ... only five were 'military-age males.' I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head...

"One thing that snipers were very discriminating about every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn't the mujahedin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded ... and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1359871,00.htm l

Smoking while Iraq burns

Its idolisation of 'the face of Falluja' shows how numb the US is to everyone's pain but its own

Naomi Klein
Friday November 26, 2004
The Guardian

"On second thoughts, perhaps Miller does deserve to be elevated to the status of icon - not of the war in Iraq, but of the new era of supercharged American impunity. Because outside US borders, it is, of course, a different marine who has been awarded the prize as "the face of Falluja": the soldier captured on tape executing a wounded, unarmed prisoner in a mosque. Runners-up are a photograph of a two-year-old Fallujan in a hospital bed with one of his tiny legs blown off; a dead child lying in the street, clutching the headless body of an adult; and an emergency health clinic blasted to rubble. "

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5366150

Tuesday 15.03.2005, CET 00:48

November 26, 2004 3:30 PM

Turk lawmaker says US in Iraq worse than Hitler

By Gareth Jones

ANKARA (Reuters) - The head of Turkey's parliamentary human rights group has accused Washington of genocide in Iraq and
behaving worse than Adolf Hitler, in remarks underscoring the depth of opposition in Turkey to U.S. policy in the region.

The United Sates embassy said the comments were potentially damaging to Turkish-U.S. relations.

"The occupation has turned into barbarism," Friday's Yeni Safak newspaper quoted Mehmet Elkatmis, head of parliament's human
rights commission, as saying. "The U.S. administration is committing genocide...in Iraq.

"Never in human history have such genocide and cruelty been witnessed. Such a genocide was never seen in the time of the

pharoahs (of ancient Egypt), nor of Hitler nor of (Italy's fascist leader Benito) Mussolini," he said.

"This occupation has entirely imperialist aims," he was quoted as telling the human rights commission on Thursday.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=44358&SelectRegion=Iraq_Crisis&SelectCountry=IRAQ

IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Thousands of families are said to be in a critical humanitarian situation after the Iraqi government and US forces prohibited NGOs from delivering supplies, due to safety concerns.

A convoy carrying thousands of food parcels, blankets, tents and medical supplies arrived in Fallujah with the help of the US-led forces who gave authorisation to the IRCS to deliver and allowed for one of the clinics to be converted into a temporary hospital for treating the injured.

"Bodies can be seen everywhere and people were crying when receiving the food parcels. It is very sad, it is a human disaster," Muhammad al-Nuri, a spokesman for the IRCS, told IRIN in Baghdad.

Al-Nuri added that according to their information, they believe there could be more than 6,000 dead in Fallujah and that it is difficult to move around inside the city due to dead bodies in the streets.

http://news.independentco.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=586045

Witnesses say US forces killed unarmed civilians

By Kim Sengupta in Baghdad

24 November 2004

Allegations of widespread abuse by US forces in Fallujah, including the killing of unarmed civilians and the targeting of a hospital in an attack, have been made by people who have escaped from the city.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112604I.shtml

Where's Picasso?
By Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly

25 November to 01 December 2004 Issue

Falluja: The 21st Century Guernica

On November 12, as U.S. jets bombed Falluja for the ninth straight day, a Redwood City California jury found Scott Peterson guilty of murdering his wife and unborn child. That macabre theme captured the headlines and dominated conversation throughout workplaces and homes.

Indeed, Peterson "news" all but drowned out the U.S. military's claim that successful bombing and shelling of a city of 300,000 residents had struck only sites where "insurgents" had holed up. On November 15, the BBC embedded newsman with a marine detachment claimed that the unofficial death toll estimate had risen to well over 2,000, many of them civilians.

As Iraqi eyewitnesses told BBC reporters he had seen bombs hitting residential targets, Americans exchanged viewpoints and kinky jokes about Peterson. One photographer captured a Falluja man holding his dead son, one of two kids he lost to U.S. bombers. He could not get medical help to stop the bleeding.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/outrage?pid=2028

11/24/2004

The Facts in Iraq

Last weekend, The Washington Post reported that acute malnutrition among children in Iraq has doubled since before the US invasion in March of 2003. That is just one statistic, out of many, that paints a disturbing picture of the US occupation. After reading press dispatches, think-tank reports and public opinion polling, The Daily Outrage compiled this sampling of the facts on the ground.

Epidemics

** 400,000 Iraqi children suffer from chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein, according to a UN development report. Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi--a war-torn central African nation--and is far above both Uganda and Haiti.

** 60 percent of rural residents and 20 percent of urban dwellers have access to nothing but contaminated drinking water.

** Hepatitis outbreaks have doubled since the war began.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002097353_chelala22.html

Monday, November 22, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.

Guest columnist
Another round of misery for the children of Iraq

By César Chelala
Special to The Times

Before the Iraq war, Physicians for Human Rights had warned about the serious public-health and human-rights risks to the already vulnerable Iraqi population, should the war take place.

Its predictions have been recently, and sadly, confirmed by an article in the medical magazine The Lancet. According to the article, there have been in excess of 100,000 civilian deaths since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, including a substantial number of children. Carol Bellamy, UNICEF's executive director, has called the death of 34 children in recent bomb attacks "an unconscionable slaughter of innocents."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1374895,00.html

November 26, 2004

Anybody can be persuaded to be a torturer, says Abu Ghraib study
By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent

VIRTUALLY everybody is capable of the abuse committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, psychologists said yesterday.

The degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war was not the result of particular cruelty or evil on the part of the abusers, but was more heavily influenced by social processes to which all of us are susceptible.

An expert analysis of the scandal, in which naked prisoners were beaten, forced to simulate sex and in one case paraded on a dog’s leash, has indicated that the perpetrators of such crimes are rarely psychopathic or even particularly sadistic.

Evidence from more than 25,000 studies involving eight million participants shows that almost anybody is capable of performing acts of apparently inexplicable cruelty when the conditions are right.

Most people can be persuaded to take part in activities they would normally find morally repugnant by a combination of peer pressure, the influence of authority figures, stress and the portrayal of the enemy as a dehumanised “outgroup”.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1126-01.htm

Published on Friday, November 26, 2004 by the Inter Press Service

'Unusual Weapons' Used in Fallujah

by Dahr Jamail

BAGHDAD, Nov 26 (IPS) - The U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report..

”Poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah,” 35-year-old trader from Fallujah Abu Hammad told IPS. ”They used everything -- tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground.”

Hammad is from the Julan district of Fallujah where some of the heaviest fighting occurred. Other residents of that area report the use of illegal weapons.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1126-02.htm

Published on Friday, November 26, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle

U.S. Threatens to Cut Aid over Court
Congress Wants Immunity Accords for Americans

by Colum Lynch

UNITED NATIONS -- The Republican-controlled Congress has stepped up its campaign to curtail the power of the International Criminal Court, threatening to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in economic aid to governments that refuse to sign immunity accords shielding U.S. personnel from being surrendered to the tribunal.

The move marks an escalation in U.S. efforts to ensure that the first world criminal court can never judge American citizens for crimes committed overseas.

http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=4039

'We Live Like Dogs'
by Dahr Jamail

"Doctors in Fallujah are reporting there are patients in the hospital there who were forced out by the Americans," says Mehdi Abdulla, a 33-year-old ambulance driver at a hospital in Baghdad. "Some doctors there told me they had a major operation going, but the soldiers took the doctors away and left the patient to die."

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-11/22/content_2244359.htm

Ten days in Fallujah battlefield

www.chinaview.cn 2004-11-22 05:31:08

by Li Jizhi, Jiang Xiaofeng

BAGHDAD, Nov. 21 (Xinhuanet)

But he told Xinhua that some doctors in Fallujah were shocked tosee that many bodies were charred without apparent injuries.With fierce clashes on the ground and bombardment by USaircraft, many houses were leveled or people were killed."My friend and I heard the groaning of some injured people underruins of some destroyed houses, but we could do nothing for them."He was the witness of a scene where six injured Iraqis dragged by several US soldiers to a street were rolled over by a tank.He also saw an Iraqi cameraman gunned down by a sniper whileshooting in face of US vehicles

http://logicvoice.blogspot.com/2004/12/tribunal-rules-documents-on-guantanamo.html

Tribunal rules documents on Guantanamo detainee cannot be released as they could "damage international relations"

In other words, the Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal has refused a freedom of information request to release documents relating to Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks because revelations about further abuse and torture could strain the relationship between John Howards ruling government, and the Bush regime.

For those unaware of David Hicks, here's some information for you:

According to sworn testmony by Mr Hicks:

I have been menaced and threatened, directly and indirectly, with firearms and other weapons before and during interrogations.

I have been in the company of other detainees who were beaten while blindfolded and handcuffed. At one point, a group of detainees, including myself, were subjected to being randomly hit over a eight hour session while handcuffed and blindfolded.

I have had my head rammed into asphalt several times (while blindfolded).

I have had medication - the identity of which was unknown to me, despite my requests for information - forced upon me against my will. I have been struck while under the influence of sedatives that were forced upon me by injection.

I have witnessed the activities of the Internal Reaction Force (hereinafter "IRF"), which consists of a squad of soldiers that enter a detainee's cell and brutalize him with the aid of an attack dog. The IRF invasions were so common that the term to be "IRF'd" became part of the language of the detainees. I have seen detainees suffer serious injuries as a result of being IRF'ed. I have seen detainees IRF'ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1255125.htm

Last Update: Wednesday, December 1, 2004. 6:41am (AEDT)

An international legal team has filed a criminal complaint against US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials over the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture and abuse scandal in Iraq.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7436.htm

Afraid To Look in the Moral Abyss

by James Carroll

12/07/04 "Boston Globe"

The main horror of what the "coalition" is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement.

The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in the "normalcy" of the news.

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=5853

Aid finally reaches Fallujah civilians 11/27/2004 9:31:00 PM GMT

''U.S. forces has launched a military operation in Fallujah. The city has become the scene of a human disaster'', Red Crescent Deputy Director General Bulent Ay said on Wednesday.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/23FBDBB2-C104-4E69-BA80-F476CC64C4A1.htm

No end to destruction in Falluja

Sunday 02 January 2005, 12:44 Makka Time, 9:44 GMT

Iraqis returning to Falluja have found their properties either vandalised or demolished and now live in more of a ghetto than a city, according to a national TV station.

Iraq's al-Sharqiya TV said on Friday that locals bussed back into the destroyed city saw the US army knocking over even more homes.

The report added: "Search operations began in the city's east, where each house was either marked with an X or an X inside a circle. X meant the house was safe, where as the circle symbolised the house was a source of danger and was to be demolished."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F0A47D67-7D17-4140-A992-2AEC1CF0624A.htm

US army blocks aid convoy for Falluja

Tuesday 30 November 2004, 8:25 Makka Time, 5:25 GMT

The US military has prevented an aid convoy from reaching the besieged city of Falluja, a doctor based in Baghdad who accompanied the convoy says.

"The Iraqi ministry of health asked us to go to Falluja. When we were on our way, the US army stopped our convoy, and carried out a search," said Dr Ibrahim al-Kubaisi

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/politics/10660755.htm

Posted on Sun, Jan. 16, 2005

Wounded child, mass graves behind soldier's refusal to return to Iraq

RUSS BYNUM

Associated Press

In an interview with The Associated Press at his home just outside Fort Stewart, Benderman said he never grasped the misery that war inflicts on civilians as well as combatants until he saw it all firsthand.

He told of bombed out homes and displaced Iraqis living in mud huts and drinking from mud puddles; mass graves in Khanaqin near the Iranian border where dogs fed off bodies of men, women and children.

He recalled his convoy passing a girl, no older than 10, on the roadside clutching a badly injured arm. Benderman said his executive officer refused to help because the troops had limited medical supplies.

"Her arm was burned, 3rd-degree burns, just black. And she was standing there with her mother begging for help," Benderman said. "That was an eye opener to seeing how insane it really is."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33733-2005Jan24?language=printer

Army Closed Many Abuse Cases Early
Few Detainee-Treatment Inquiries Led to Penalties, Documents Show

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 25, 2005; Page A01

Army personnel have admitted to beating or threatening to kill Iraqi detainees and stealing money from Iraqi civilians but have not been charged with criminal conduct, according to newly released Army documents.

Only a handful of the 54 investigations of alleged detainee abuse and other illicit activities detailed in the documents led to recommended penalties as severe as a court-martial or discharge from military service. Most led to administrative fines or simply withered because investigators could not find victims or evidence.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7629.htm

Army Doctors Implicated in Abuse

Medical Workers Helped Tailor Interrogations of Detainees, Article Says

By Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writer

01/06/05 "Washington Post" -- U.S. Army doctors violated the Geneva Conventions by helping intelligence officers carry out abusive interrogations at military detention centers, perhaps participating in torture, according to an article in today's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Medical personnel helped tailor interrogations to the physical and mental conditions of individual detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to the article. It says that medical workers gave interrogators access to patient medical files, and that psychiatrists and other physicians collaborated with interrogators and guards who, in turn, deprived detainees of sleep, restricted them to diets of bread and water and exposed them to extreme heat and cold.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4113679.stm

New jail abuse allegations hit US

Tuesday, 21 December, 2004, 11:24 GMT

Fresh allegations have emerged of serious mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel.

Memos between FBI officials detailing abuses, some dated after the Abu Ghraib jail scandal, were released as part of a lawsuit against the government.

Others allege serious abuse of inmates held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, mostly captives from the Afghan war.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4066835.stm

Eyewitness: Taking detainee testimony in Iraq

Friday, 24 December, 2004, 12:57 GMT

Peggy Gish, 62, is an American woman who has spent 13 months over the past two years logging the cases of Iraqi detainees with the ecumenical humanitarian group Christian Peacemaker Teams.

She told the BBC News website about her experiences.

We heard about very violent house raids in the middle of the night, in which US soldiers would storm in, and if the men did not get down immediately, they would knock them down and beat them.

Then their house would be ransacked, often with property damage. Many would report that at the end of that time jewellery and money would be missing. Then the men of the household would be taken away.

We also heard about sexual abuse and beatings when they were being questioned. If they did not give information about an explosion or something they would be knocked down, kicked in the groin, and hurt in other ways.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4047469.stm

Aid reaches Falluja's citizens

Saturday, 27 November, 2004, 13:13 GMT

In comments reported by the UN information network Irin, spokesman Muhammad al-Nuri said the Red Crescent believed more than 6,000 people may have died in the fight for Falluja.

He said it was difficult to move around the city due to the number of dead bodies.

"Bodies can be seen everywhere and people were crying when receiving the food parcels. It is very sad, it is a human disaster," Mr Nuri reportedly said.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/12/05/returning_fallujans_will_face_clampdown/

By Anne Barnard, Globe Staff | December 5, 2004

Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/12/26/us_disclosures_signal_wider_detainee_abuse/

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | December 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- A trove of government disclosures forced by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has signaled that the abuse of detainees in Iraq and at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was much broader than the Bush administration has portrayed it since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public this spring.

http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-2/522/522_01_BringThemHome.shtml

Sent to die in Bush’s war for oil and empire
Bring them home now!

December 3, 2004 | Page 1

THE U.S. military has reduced Falluja to a pile of rubble. “They used everything--tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas,” resident Abu Hammad told reporters. “Falluja has been bombed to the ground.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7434.htm

Britain 'complicit in offences at Guantanamo Bay'
By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor

12/08/04 "The Telegraph" -- The first British lawyer to visit the American detention centre at Guantanamo Bay accused Foreign Office officials yesterday of complicity in an offence against humanity.

Clive Stafford Smith, who also holds American citizenship, was cleared to visit his client Moazzam Begg at the base in Cuba last month. Under American law, Mr Stafford Smith is not allowed to reveal what his client told him until written statements lodged last week with a government censor in Washington have been cleared.

However, the lawyer said that the conditions under which his client was being held were "worse than any death row I have ever seen". Mr Begg had been held in solitary for more than 18 months, said Mr Stafford Smith.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7909.htm
Briton saw detainees beaten to death
By AFP
From correspondents in London

January 30, 2005 "Daily Telegraph" -- ONE of four Britons freed last week from US detention in Guantanamo Bay has described being tortured, witnessing the killing of fellow detainees by US interrogators and receiving threats to his family.

Moazzam Begg's testimony was quoted in Britain's Independent on Sunday today.

He said his ordeal, beginning at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, included being shackled and dragged, having a "suffocating hood" placed on his head and being struck in the head several times.

http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/ccr/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=394

Call for a Special Prosecutor to Investigate U.S. Torture

The Center for Constitutional Rights is calling for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to conduct a full, independent and public inquiry into the role of high-ranking U.S. officials in the abuse and torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere around the world.

With each week, more appalling government memos and documents come to light from a Freedom of Information Act request CCR filed with the American Civil Liberties Union, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace: the Bush Administration has systematically encouraged torture techniques prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and the Covenant against Torture.

Our clients who have been released from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib describe a deliberate program of abuse. Other CCR clients have been shipped off by our government to countries like Syria and Egypt to be interrogated under torture, a practice called “extraordinary rendition” chronicled in an early-February New Yorker article and a Bob Herbert’s column in The Times.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/kelly.php?articleid=4093

December 2, 2004 Child Sacrifice in Iraq
by Kathy Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness

Shortly before sunrise this morning, a small band of us gathered at a busy Chicago intersection and unfurled vinyl banners bearing enlarged pictures of Iraqi children. One banner called for an end to U.S. warfare in Iraq. On my banner was Johan, smiling wanly, a 14-year-old child who weighed 75 pounds shortly before she died of cancer in the oncology ward of a Baghdad hospital on Sept. 21, 2003. As our banners flapped in the wind, I tried to compose a letter in my head to her teenage brother, Laith, who recently wrote to tell me how much he misses her.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/30/falluja.residents/index.html

From CNN Producer Arwa Damon
Wednesday, December 1, 2004 Posted: 0738 GMT (1538 HKT)

FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- Mahmoud Zubari and his family fled their home in Falluja after it was bombed and his 13-year-old son was killed.

Zubari, his wife and their remaining eight children, ages 2 to 16, spent the next 20 days in the house of a friend while the U.S.-led onslaught to drive out insurgents in the city got under way.

Last week, the family was picked up by the Iraqi Red Crescent, under Marine escort, and taken to the humanitarian group's compound in the city. Tuesday, the family returned to the home they took sanctuary in.

"All the wealth will not bring back my son, but now I have to think of the future for the rest of my children," said Zubari's wife, Selma. "What will become of us?"

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/12/02/guantanamo.detainees/index.html

Government: Evidence gained by torture allowed

Wednesday, December 8, 2004 Posted: 0842 GMT (1642 HKT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court Thursday.

The acknowledgment by Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle came during a U.S. District Court hearing on lawsuits brought by some of the 550 foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The lawsuits challenge their detention without charges for up to three years so far.

Attorneys for the prisoners argued that some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the detainees "have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court."

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1208-05.htm

Published on Wednesday, December 8, 2004 by OneWorld.net

Congress Moves to Cut Aid to Allies That Support World Criminal Court

by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON -- Amid persistent tensions between the United States and its allies, the Republican-led Congress is expected to ban tens of millions of dollars in U.S. economic aid to some of its closest friends overseas unless they formally agree to exempt U.S. citizens from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1230-01.htm

Published on Thursday, December 30, 2004 by the Inter Press Service

Dead Soldier's Dad Finds No Enemy in Iraq

by Rebecca Romani

At the hospitals he saw youngsters dying from the lack of medicine and learned that a number of others had been killed picking up unexploded cluster bombs or when trying to hand them in to U.S. soldiers.

The bombs look like tennis balls or beer cans, Suarez explains. And when the children try to give them to U.S. soldiers, they are shot on the spot -- military orders.

Cluster bombs, munitions that scatter hundreds of small "bomblets" over a wide area, are designed to inflict high numbers of casualties. "I asked a colonel why they couldn't clean up the cluster bombs, and I was told, confidentially, that they couldn't, there were too many."

And then Suarez's voice gets hard.

"They say Saddam had illegal weapons. Jesus died because of an illegal weapon. Cluster bombs are illegal under the Geneva Conventions."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7614.htm

Death in Fallujah rising, doctors say

Reuters

01/04/05 FALLUJAH -- (IRIN) - "It was really distressing picking up dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children. It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started," Dr Rafa'ah al-Iyssaue, director of the main hospital in Fallujah city, some 60 km west of Baghdad, told IRIN.

According to al-Iyssaue, the hospital emergency team has recovered more than 700 bodies from rubble where houses and shops once stood, adding that more than 550 were women and children. He said a very small number of men were found in these places and most were elderly.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/26/1450204

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"

On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1215-01.htm

Published on Wednesday, December 15, 2004 by the Los Angeles Times

Details of Marines Mistreating Prisoners in Iraq Are Revealed

by Richard A. Serrano

WASHINGTON — Marines in Iraq conducted mock executions of juvenile prisoners last year, burned and tortured other detainees with electrical shocks, and warned a Navy corpsman they would kill him if he treated any injured Iraqis, according to military documents made public Tuesday.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7519.htm
Disgraced by Silence
Editorial

12/19/04 "Los Angeles Times" -- When will the president respond to the cascading allegations of prisoner abuse by the military? A Marine guard in Iraq sprayed an alcohol-based liquid on a detainee, struck a match and ignited the prisoner, burning and blistering the man's hands. Another Marine held wires from an electric transformer to a detainee's shoulders, so that the man "danced as he was shocked," according to military documents made public this month.

In photographs now under investigation, Navy SEALs appeared to sit on a hooded and handcuffed Iraqi prisoner and to point a gun at another, bleeding detainee. Army troops repeatedly beat Afghan prisoners in their custody, ripped off their toenails, shocked them and dunked them in cold water, according to recent reports from a U.N. group. Most incidents occurred in 2002 and 2003.

The cascading allegations of prisoner abuse, of which these are but a few examples, long ago demolished the president's claim that only a few bad apples were responsible. So did reports that soldiers and officers who complained to their superiors about this mistreatment were threatened with reprisals and even physical harm. Yet as reports of unexplained deaths, humiliations and depravity across the services multiply, President Bush has recently remained silent.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cassel01042005.html

January 4, 2005

They Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial Charged with No Crime, Implicated in No Wrongdoing By ELAINE CASSEL

On Sunday, Jan 2, Dana Priest, writing in the Washington Post, described the plans of the Pentagon and the Justice Department to imprison indefinitely, perhaps for life, persons it wants "removed" from society. Having committed no crime, but believed to be associated with "terrorism" however that is defined at any given moment in time"the people will live in prison camps modeled on American prisons.

At this moment, the CIA admits that it has imprisoned hundreds of people in foreign prisons. Amnesty International puts that number at well over 1000. At least one American citizen, Ahmed Abu Ali, has been thus imprisoned in Saudi Arabia at the demand of federal prosecutors. Charged with no crime, implicated in no wrongdoing.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1203-09.htm

Published on Friday, December 3, 2004 by the Boston Globe

Escaping Blame for Abu Ghraib

by Derrick Z. Jackson

While England remains the face of Abu Ghraib, reports keep coming out that her superiors were warned earlier than previously thought that widespread abuse existed beyond Abu Ghraib. The Washington Post reported this week that a report by retired Colonel Stuart Harrington found that Special Operations and CIA task force members abused Iraqi prisoners throughout that nation in secret facilities. The report found that the US military sweeps of thousands of people off the streets were so indiscriminate that they were "counterproductive to the coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry."

This is on top of the New York Times report this week on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Times obtained a confidential Red Cross report issued in July that cited extensive physical and psychological abuse. The report said, "The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment and a form of torture."

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1203-02.htm

Published on Friday, December 3, 2004 by the Associated Press

Evidence Gained Through Using Torture OK, US Officials Say

by Michael J. Sniffen

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7508.htm

Democracy Now!

Exclusive: Conscientious Objector Witnessed Abuse, Killing of Iraqi Detainees at Abu Ghraib
We speak with former Army Reserve Specialist Aidan Delgado. At Abu Ghraib, he witnessed U.S. soldiers abuse and killing of Iraqi detainees.

AIDAN DELGADO: Yeah, I had given in my weapon long ago. So, but everyone else in my unit went out there, because there was a prisoner demonstration that had become out of control. They were throwing tent stakes and pieces of stone and debris. And they had struck one of the soldiers with a rock. He wasn't seriously injured, but he was annoyed. And so in response, they had asked for the permission to use lethal force. It was still unclear afterwards, in the military's very cursory investigation, whether they actually got the order to use lethal force-- it was obscure. So, they opened fire with a heavy machine gun and they killed five prisoners-- several of whom took several days to die. This is something that I learned about from the horse's mouth when they came back and told me, “Oh, here is a photo of the guys we killed. I killed three, I killed two. My guy took three days to die, I shot him in the groin with a machine gun.” And the command had even posted these photographs in our headquarters, and they had been very ghoulishly circulating them. It was very much a trophy-taking thing. And I remember just sort of questioning the guy, saying, “Do you really feel proud of having shot an unarmed man who threw a stone?” He was like, “Well, I'm doing my job.” It was a very machismo thing, to have killed someone. I felt this immense loathing and this immense disgust for the whole incident.

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes475.html

Falloujans Get an Unsettling Look at Their City
Refugees eager to return change their minds after seeing the ruin. Will balloting be feasible?
By Edmund Sanders
Times Staff Writer

December 30, 2004

BAGHDAD — Yasser Abbas Atiya swore he'd sooner sleep on the streets of his beloved hometown of Fallouja than spend another night in the squalid Baghdad shelter where his family had been squatting.

Thirty minutes after he returned home this week, however, Atiya had seen enough. He left in disgust and had no plans to go back.

"I couldn't stand it," the grocer said. "I was born in that town. I know every inch of it. But when I got there, I didn't recognize it."

Lakes of sewage in the streets. The smell of corpses inside charred buildings. No water or electricity. Long waits and thorough searches by U.S. troops at checkpoints. Warnings to watch out for land mines and booby traps.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1210-23.htm

Published on Friday, December 10, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Falluja Atrocities Expose True Face of U.S. War

by Joseph Nevins

Images of a U.S. marine killing an unarmed wounded prisoner during the recent battle for Falluja resulted in widespread shock, leading the Pentagon to withdraw the soldier from battle and launch an investigation. However, the issue--similar to Abu Ghraib--has served as a smokescreen, diverting attention from much larger atrocities and the very nature of war.

No doubt many U.S. soldiers took care in Falluja--as elsewhere in Iraq--to respect international humanitarian law and avoid injuring civilians. But as throughout the U.S. invasion and the ongoing conflict, war crimes and civilian casualties were frequent and often systematic, rather than rare and exceptional.

In breach of the Geneva Conventions, for example, U.S. troops refused to allow males of "military-age" (16 to 55)--defining them all as potential enemy combatants--to flee Falluja. Given the heavy American bombardment of the city, one wonders how many of these men are among the estimated 1,200 to 1,600 categorized by U.S. authorities as dead insurgents.

http://crisispictures.org

Friday, February 25, 2005

OUTSIDE KIRKUK, IRAQ
This is NOT Home

Ahmed Rawi, a spokesman for the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), told IRIN that the situation of internally displaced people (IDPs) from Fallujah was critical, requiring a huge quantity of supplies. Perhaps if there were a flood, someone might care, but that seems unlikely.

What We Are

Crisis Pictures is a non-commercial organization dedicated to building awareness of global crisis areas through pictures. Our goal is to make distant events personal by showing real people living through them. The face of a mother mourning her child needs no explanation. Crisis Pictures makes “stories about other people” into “stories about other people just like me."

Faith in the character of the American people if they are shown the whole truth about what is done in their name and on their dollar.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/121004_fallujah_napalmed.shtml

FALLUJAH NAPALMED

Nov 28 2004
US uses banned weapon... but was Tony Blair told?
By Paul Gilfeather, Political Editor

http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14920109&method=full&siteid=106694&
headline=fallujah-napalmed-name_page.html

US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujah.

News that President George W. Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments around the world.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7413.htm

Fallujah Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone

*Journalists and residents who have fled Fallujah share accounts of US troops killing unarmed and wounded people; Dahr Jamail continues interviewing survivors as images of a city under US assault further emerge.*

by Dahr Jamail

Baghdad , Dec 3 " NewStandard" -- Men now seeking refuge in the Baghdad area are telling horrific stories of indiscriminate killings by US forces during the peak of fighting last month in the largely annihilated city of Fallujah.

In an interview with The NewStandard, Burhan Fasa’a, an Iraqi journalist who works for the popular Lebanese satellite TV station, LBC, said he witnessed US crimes up close. Burhan Fasa’a, who was in Fallujah for nine days during the most intense combat, said Americans grew easily frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English.

"Americans did not have interpreters with them," Fasa’a said, "so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and [they] shot people because [the people] didn’t obey [the soldiers’] orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English."

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=4324

January 11, 2005 Fresh Horrors at Guantanamo
by William Fisher

NEW YORK - A leading civil rights group says that government records pertaining to an investigation of prisoner abuses at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba are still being withheld, and those it has received under a court order are so heavily censored that they "raise more questions than they answer."

Still, correspondence handed over to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recounts what one observer calls "treatment that was not only aggressive, but personally very upsetting," including leaving prisoners shackled in the fetal position and covered in urine and feces.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7397.htm

From Guernica to Fallujah

"It's difficult to believe that in this day and age, when people are blogging, emailing and communicating at the speed of light, a whole city is being destroyed and genocide is being committed - and the whole world is aware and silent. Darfur, Americans? Take a look at what you've done in Fallujah." - Female Iraqi blogger Riverbend

Pepe Escobar

12/01/04 "Asia Times" -- The Fallujah offensive has virtually disappeared from the news cycle. But history - if written by Iraqis - may well enshrine it as the new Guernica. Paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre memorably writing about the Algerian War (1956-62), after Fallujah no two Americans shall meet without a corpse lying between them: the up to 500,000 victims of the sanctions in the 1990s, according to United Nations experts; the up to 100,000 victims since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, according to the British medical paper The Lancet; and at least 6,000 victims, and counting, in Fallujah, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1221-01.htm

Published on Tuesday, December 21, 2004 by the Associated Press

Group Says FBI Ruse Used at Guantanamo

by John J Lumpkin

The ACLU's latest disclosures primarily constitute e-mails between FBI officials whose names the government removed before releasing them. In several, the writers describe and criticize various interrogation techniques they say they witnessed at Guantanamo.

In one of the e-mails message, dated from August, the writer reports more than once witnessing prisoners chained to the floor in a fetal position, with no food or water. They had often soiled themselves.

On one occasion, the temperature in a room was lowered so much the barefooted detainee shivered. In another, the room was so hot the detainee had pulled out some of his hair before passing out.

In one e-mail, the writer described seeing a "detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing." Another Guantanamo prisoner has, in a court petition, described detainees wrapped in Israeli flags, among other allegations. At the time, a Guantanamo Bay spokesman denied his statements.