WASINGTON,
December 17 (Islamonline.net) - The American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU), the biggest organization defending constitutional rights in
the United States, has released secret reports telling some new
torture stories perpetrated by US occupation forces in Iraq against
Iraqi detainees, attributing the scandalous acts to “leadership
failure of the highest order”.
The
reports which unveil secret documents over abuses committed by the
occupation forces against Iraqi civilians using new torture means
including “burning, electric shocks, dipping faces in mud” came as
part of the union's judicial confrontation with the Pentagon over
“freedom of information”.
The
reports are also an attempt to open Iraqi’s torture files wide to
the public and press.
The
ACLU, through a court ruling, got documents, seen in part by IOL
Thursday, December 16, from the Pentagon. The documents quoted One
Navy criminal investigator in June 2004 as describing his Iraq
caseload “exploding” with “high visibility cases”, in a
reference to abuses perpetrated by American soldiers against Iraqi
detainees.
The
documents cited some of the crimes committed by US occupation soldiers
which took place in the Iraqi city of Al-Mahmudiyah.
These
included severely burning a detainee’s hands after covering them in
alcohol and setting them ablaze in August 2003, shocking a detainee
with an electric transformer, causing the detainee to “dance” as
he was shocked in April, 2004.
The
rights group threatened to go to the federal court again should the
Pentagon fail to come up with more documents about the brutalizing of
captured Iraqis by January 31, 2005.
Culture
of Secrecy
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File photo of the immoral abuse of detainees in Iraq.
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ACLU
further said an “internal culture of secrecy” was spreading in the
Pentagon designed to prevent witnesses from exposing atrocities in
Iraq.
The
documents also revealed that a special operations task force in Iraq
sought to silence Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who observed
abuse and that the Department of Defense adopted questionable
interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay that raised FBI objections.
Some
US military medical personnel and soldiers admitted the receipt of
orders not to provide any Iraqis whether being military men or
civilians with medical aid.
For
example, when describing the Marines’ “rough handling” of Iraqi
prisoners, one Navy corpsman noted, “there was a lot of peer
pressure to keep one’s mouth shut.”
Command
Failure
Commenting
on the reports, ACLU Executive Director, Anthony D. Romero, pointed a
clearly accusing finger at the senior Pentagon officials, insisting
the public should get to the bottom of the well.
“Day
after day, new stories of torture are coming to light, and we need to
know how these abuses were allowed to happen.
“This
kind of widespread abuse could not have taken place without a
leadership failure of the highest order.”
“Abuse
of detainees was not aberrational,” said ACLU staff attorney Jameel
Jaffer. “The Defense Department adopted extreme interrogation
techniques as a matter of policy.”
Some
Congressmen warned that the violations could put he US national
security in jeopardy by escalating the rage among Iraqis and the Arab
and Islamic world against the United States.
In
response to the release of documents last week, New Mexico Senator
Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld calling on him to “expeditiously investigate the
allegations of suppression” and to “take immediate action to make
public all documents related to cases of detainee abuse not critical
to national security and hold accountable those that have attempted to
cover up reports of detainee abuse.”
On
September, 21, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who called the US-led
invasion of Iraq illegal, described the torture of Iraqi prisoners by
US forces as an example of how fundamental laws were being
“shamelessly disregarded”.
