US treatment of prisoners (actual video footage)

[Donut]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: quote: Originally posted by WillowIX: And very true for the "aggressors" ( [img]tongue.gif[/img] ) as well.

Absolutely wrong. When contractors were massacred, I didn't see any Iraqis on TV trying to apologize for the behavior of their fellows. Yet, we are taking this very seriously in the US -- the president will be addressing Iraq directly on TV (today, I think) about this issue. It may have been a joke, but it's very wrong. I think this thread itself is additional proof. [/QUOTE]Sorry I'm lost. Proof of what? What may have been a joke?

[Memnoch]

Well, it's widening...

More photos of abused Iraqi prisoners surface - the Sydney Morning Herald


[ 05-06-2004, 09:32 AM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

[Timber Loftis]

Donut, the "joke" I referred to was Willow's quip.

This thread is proof that it's being taken seriously in America -- a stark contrast to how Iraq was run before.

Who decided to inspect for abuses? Who wrote the report? Who blew the whistle? Who leaked the photos? Who promises to investigate? The US is the answer to all of these. We have a just system set up where the government polices itself. Our people give a damn when these abuses happen.

[Timber Loftis]

May 6, 2004
THE PRESIDENT
Bush, on Arab TV, Denounces Abuse of Iraqi Captives
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, May 5 — President Bush went on Arab television on Wednesday in an effort to limit the diplomatic damage from the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, offering no direct apology but saying the mistreatment "does not represent the America that I know."

A day after the Pentagon said it had conducted more than 30 criminal investigations over the last 16 months into misconduct by American captors in Iraq and Afghanistan, federal law enforcement officials said the Justice Department was investigating the involvement of C.I.A. officers and contract employees in three suspicious detainee deaths, two in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

In another example of how the abuse case has left the Bush administration on the defensive, State Department officials acknowledged Wednesday that they had put off the release of an annual report on human rights abuses around the world because they did not want to face awkward questions about how the United States could point fingers at a time when its own record had been sullied.

As Mr. Bush sought to contain the damage to the credibility and reputation of the United States abroad, his Democratic rival in the presidential race, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, signaled for the first time that he would make the case a political issue at home. At a news conference in Los Angeles, Mr. Kerry called the administration's response "slow and inappropriate" and said he wanted to know who knew what and when.

In Congress, where senior members of both parties have expressed anger at the failure of the Pentagon to keep Congress fully informed about the abuse, Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he had summoned Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to a public hearing on Friday.

In the president's separate interviews with Al Hurra, a United States government-sponsored satellite network that sends its signal throughout the Middle East, and with Al Arabiya, a Dubai-based broadcaster with a wide following in the region, Mr. Bush said the mistreatment of the prisoners was abhorrent, pledged to bring all the facts into the open and said the guilty would be held accountable.

"It's a matter that reflects badly on my country," he told Al Arabiya during an 11-minute interview in the Map Room of the White House.

"Our citizens in America are appalled by what they saw, just like people in the Middle East are appalled," he said. "We share the same deep concerns. And we will find the truth, we will fully investigate. The world will see the investigation and justice will be served."

Mr. Bush faced direct but not hostile questions in the interviews. Al Arabiya broadcast his comments in English with Arabic subtitles.

Although the president did not apologize, his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, did so in interviews with Arab broadcasters on Tuesday. The new commandant of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, also apologized to the Iraqi people, as did the military spokesman in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.

Asked why the president had passed up the opportunity to apologize directly to Iraqis and Muslims in the Middle East who were particularly offended by the nature of the abuse, his spokesman, Scott McClellan, offered an apology in Mr. Bush's stead.

"The president is sorry for what occurred and the pain that it has caused," Mr. McClellan said at the daily White House news briefing. "It does not represent what America stands for. America stands for much better than what happened."

White House officials have openly acknowledged that the reports of the abuse of prisoners represent a tremendous problem for the reputation of the United States among Arab and Muslim nations at a time when the administration's efforts to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East are faltering on several fronts.

In taking his case to the people of the region, Mr. Bush sought to make clear that the conduct of the Americans involved was as far removed from American values as it was from Muslim or Arab norms. But he made no attempt to hide his concern that the incident would be used to foment even greater hatred of the United States in a region that has helped to breed Islamic terrorism.

"I think people in the Middle East who want to dislike America will use this as an excuse to remind people about their dislike," he said.

He said he remained committed to his timetable for returning a limited degree of self-governance to Iraqis on June 30. Putting the best face on another challenge he faces in Iraq, he cast the decision to turn to Iraqi armed forces to help quell the insurgency in Falluja as evidence that the United States saw Iraqis as willing and able to help ensure their own security.

Mr. Bush also defended to the Arab audience his decision to back the Israeli government's plan to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank despite objections from the Palestinians, who said the United States had abandoned the principle that a Palestinian state should be created through negotiations. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel subsequently failed to win his party's support for the Gaza policy, leaving its fate in doubt.

More than a year after the fall of Baghdad, Mr. Bush found himself in the remarkable position of having to persuade Iraqis and Arabs generally that Iraq was better off under the American occupation than it had been under Saddam Hussein.

"We're a society that is willing to investigate, fully investigate in this case, what took place in that prison," Mr. Bush told Al Hurra. "That stands in stark contrast to life under Saddam Hussein. His trained torturers were never brought to justice under his regime. There were no investigations about the mistreatment of people."

The combination of embarrassment, regret, anger and dismay inside the United States government was affecting other foreign policy issues, some administration officials said. This was also the view of European and Arab diplomats dealing with the United States on issues in the Middle East in the last few days.

A European diplomat said he believed that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his aides were far more compliant than they had been the week before in working out a joint statement at the United Nations on Tuesday about a future Palestinian state. Diplomats said the Americans had yielded to the Europeans on several issues, including emphasizing the need for Israel to negotiate with Palestinians and not take unilateral actions.


Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

[Donut]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: Donut, the "joke" I referred to was Willow's quip. This thread is proof that it's being taken seriously in America -- a stark contrast to how Iraq was run before.

LOL - I thought you meant it may have been a joke that Bush was to make his broadcast, and that it would be wrong if he did so!!

[Timber Loftis]

NY Times:
May 6, 2004
THE PRESIDENT
Rumsfeld Chastised by President for His Handling of Iraq Scandal
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, May 5 — President Bush on Wednesday chastised his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, for Mr. Rumsfeld's handling of a scandal over the American abuse of Iraqis held at a notorious prison in Baghdad, White House officials said.

The disclosures by the White House officials, under authorization from Mr. Bush, were an extraordinary display of finger-pointing in an administration led by a man who puts a high premium on order and loyalty. The officials said the president had expressed his displeasure to Mr. Rumsfeld in an Oval Office meeting because of Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to tell Mr. Bush about photographs of the abuse, which have enraged the Arab world.

In his interviews on Wednesday with Arab television networks, Mr. Bush said that he learned the graphic details of the abuse case only when they were broadcast last Wednesday on the CBS program "60 Minutes II." It was then, one White House official said, that Mr. Bush also saw the photographs documenting the abuse. "When you see the pictures," the official said, "it takes on a proportion of gravity that would require a much more extreme response than the way it was being handled."

Another White House official said, "The president was not satisfied or happy about the way he was informed about the pictures, and he did talk to Secretary Rumsfeld about it."

The disclosure of the dressing-down of the combative Mr. Rumsfeld was the first time that Mr. Bush has allowed his displeasure with a senior member of his administration to be made public. It also exposed the fault lines in Mr. Bush's inner circle that have deepened with the violence and political chaos in American-occupied Iraq.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who has often been at odds with Mr. Rumsfeld, went so far on Tuesday night as to talk about the prison abuse scandal in the context of the My Lai massacre of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children by American troops, a historical reference that was not in the White House talking points that sought to stem the damage from the scandal.

Mr. Powell, in an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live," brought up My Lai without prompting, saying that he served in Vietnam "after My Lai happened" and that "in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they're still to be deplored."

The scandal comes at a particularly difficult time for the White House, which is struggling for an orderly transfer of power to the Iraqis on June 30 and also engaged in a tight and expensive presidential re-election campaign against Senator John Kerry.

Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, has told one Bush adviser that he believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world, and that one of the dangers of basing a campaign on national security and foreign policy is that events can be beyond the president's control.

Despite the behind-the-scenes criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush insisted that the defense secretary still had his full support. "Of course I've got confidence in the secretary of defense," Mr. Bush said in an interview with Al Hurra, an Arab television network.

Republicans noted a strong public relations aspect to the disclosures about the Oval Office scolding, which made Mr. Rumsfeld the scapegoat in the scandal.

On Monday, Mr. Bush is scheduled to make a rare visit to the Pentagon, where he will meet with Mr. Rumsfeld on the defense secretary's turf, receive a briefing on Iraq and make a public statement.

White House officials said that the visit had been planned before the abuse scandal erupted, but they acknowledged that its timing was opportune for Mr. Bush to make a public show of support for Mr. Rumsfeld after the messy events of Wednesday.

Still, Mr. Rumsfeld faced increasingly restive Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were angry that the defense secretary told them nothing about the photographs, which showed Iraqis stripped of their clothes, piled on top of one another and in positions that appeared to simulate sexual acts, when he briefed them last Wednesday, the same day that "60 Minutes II" broadcast its story.

"No member of the Senate had any clue," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. "This is entirely unacceptable. I think it's a total washout as far as communications, and it has to be rectified."

Democrats were even more caustic. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, stopped just short of calling for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, saying that if the blame went all the way to Mr. Rumsfeld's office, he should step down. "This is a disaster of significant proportions," Mr. Biden said. "It calls for accountability and quickly."

It was unclear Wednesday from interviews with Pentagon officials exactly how much Mr. Rumsfeld knew about the scandal and when.

Pentagon officials said that Mr. Rumsfeld was first notified about the pictures in mid-January, after a soldier turned them over to Army officials, prompting the opening of an investigation. A senior Pentagon official said that Mr. Rumsfeld was told of the allegations of abuse and given a general description of the photographs.

Within weeks, the Pentagon official said, Mr. Rumsfeld told the president about the case. But it is not clear, the official said, whether Mr. Rumsfeld mentioned the photographs or their basic content to Mr. Bush at that point.

Mr. Bush first mentioned the abuse scandal publicly last Friday in the Rose Garden, when he said he shared "deep disgust" about the photographs. That evening, he went to a party at Mr. Rumsfeld's house in the Kalorama section of Washington, where it is not known whether he and his defense secretary talked about the pictures

[Timber Loftis]

LOL - I thought you meant it may have been a joke that Bush was to make his broadcast, and that it would be wrong if he did so!!

Yes, well as a big proponent of showing clarity in your writing, I apologize for having to explain myself.

[Chewbacca]

Link
****************************
Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility

Thursday, May 6, 2004; Page A34


THE HORRIFIC abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable.



The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions. That was not the case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war zone were entitled under the conventions to a formal hearing to determine whether they were prisoners of war or unlawful combatants. No such hearings were held, but then Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that U.S. observance of the convention was now optional. Prisoners, he said, would be treated "for the most part" in "a manner that is reasonably consistent" with the conventions -- which, the secretary breezily suggested, was outdated.

In one important respect, Mr. Rumsfeld was correct: Not only could captured al Qaeda members be legitimately deprived of Geneva Convention guarantees (once the required hearing was held) but such treatment was in many cases necessary to obtain vital intelligence and prevent terrorists from communicating with confederates abroad. But if the United States was to resort to that exceptional practice, Mr. Rumsfeld should have established procedures to ensure that it did so without violating international conventions against torture and that only suspects who truly needed such extraordinary handling were treated that way. Outside controls or independent reviews could have provided such safeguards. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld allowed detainees to be indiscriminately designated as beyond the law -- and made humane treatment dependent on the goodwill of U.S. personnel.

Much of what has happened at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay is shrouded in secrecy. But according to an official Army report, a system was established at the camp under which military guards were expected to "set the conditions" for intelligence investigations. The report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba says the system was later introduced at military facilities at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, even though it violates Army regulations forbidding guards to participate in interrogations.

The Taguba report and others by human rights groups reveal that the detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted that military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the direction of civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside the military chain of command -- not in "exceptional" cases, as Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but systematically. Army guards have held "ghost" prisoners detained by the CIA and even hidden these prisoners from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile, Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The Taguba report says that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them and that no copies were posted in the facility.

The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq might have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier reports of violations. Instead, he publicly dismissed or minimized such accounts. He and his staff ignored detailed reports by respected human rights groups about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, and they refused to provide access to facilities or respond to most questions. In December 2002, two Afghan detainees died in events that were ruled homicides by medical officials; only when the New York Times obtained the story did the Pentagon confirm that an investigation was underway, and no results have yet been announced. Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib did Mr. Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has been virtually nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a dishonorable discharge.

On Monday Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman said that the secretary had not read Mr. Taguba's report, which was completed in early March. Yesterday Mr. Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he still hadn't finished reading it, and he repeated his view that the Geneva Conventions "did not precisely apply" but were only "basic rules" for handling prisoners. His message remains the same: that the United States need not be bound by international law and that the crimes Mr. Taguba reported are not, for him, a priority. That attitude has undermined the American military's observance of basic human rights and damaged this country's ability to prevail in the war on terrorism.

[Memnoch]

Here's an interview, apparently with one of the Iraqis who was photographed:


From the Sydney Morning Herald - original article from the Los Angeles Times

Original article HERE

Shame at the front line
May 7, 2004

A victim of the sexual abuse waged by the US military against Iraqi prisoners tells how his life has been ruined. Tracy Wilkinson writes.

His pictures have been flashed around the world. Naked and hooded, Hayder Sabbar Abd has been subjected to unspeakable abuse at the hands of American prison guards and has unwittingly become the focus of one of the largest scandals to hit the United States military in a generation.

"I never thought American people could do something of this nature," Sabbar says, after detailing the torture and forced simulated sodomy that he says his US guards imposed upon him.

Sabbar, 36, comes from a Shiite family with a long history of opposition to the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein. He bears a dent-like scar on his right cheek: a Saddam lieutenant sliced him eight years ago as punishment for his cousin's attempt to assassinate the dictator's son Uday.

Sabbar cheered when the US Army marched through his home town of Nasiriyah just over a year ago. He quickly shed his Iraqi army uniform ("I spent most of my military career deserting") and looked hopefully to a new, free future. That he should become Exhibit A in the case against US abuse of Iraqis is one of the many painful ironies of this story.

It was when the nightshift came on duty that terrible things happened to Sabbar and six other Iraqis in solitary confinement cells at the Abu Ghraib prison during a brief period last year.

By night, the US guards would strip the detainees naked, cuff their arms at odd angles to bedposts or doorjambs, and deny the men food, Sabbar says. By day, another crew gave them clothes, medical attention, two meals and fresh blankets.

The sexual abuse happened once. As the photographs attest and Sabbar recounted, he and the other men were forced to pose in the nude, masturbate, simulate sodomy and endure beatings and ridicule - all while one female soldier snapped away with a camera; Sabbar estimates the soldier took 60 photos.

The actions by members of the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade has exposed a wider pattern of mistreatment, human rights violations and breaches of international law throughout the US-run wartime prison system in Iraq. The scandal has shaken the US military to its core, reverberated through Washington and enraged the Arab world.

The abuse so graphically captured in the infamous photographs was, at least for Sabbar, an isolated case; he says he was otherwise treated well in nearly nine months of imprisonment. Yet one night of sadistic behaviour - designed, it seems, more to punish than to extract intelligence - has opened a floodgate exposing more widespread abuse.

Sabbar, married with five children, and Hashim Muhsin, another of the men in the photographs, agreed to talk to reporters about their ordeal despite the great shame attached in Iraq to being photographed nude and in compromising positions, especially with women.

In the photograph of the hooded Iraqis forming a human pyramid, Sabbar says, he was on the ground, left-hand position. In another photograph, he is the hooded man whose genitalia is being pointed to by a cigarette-chomping female soldier giving the thumbs-up sign.



He can identify himself because he remembers the positions they forced him into, and occasionally they lifted his hood, which enabled him to memorise the scene.

How Sabbar got to that point was a sad, hapless journey. He says he hired a car to go to Baghdad to retrieve ID papers that would help him collect a salary. But the driver had no documents proving he owned the car, and when they passed through a US checkpoint near Baghdad last July, they were stopped. Authorities were cracking down on stolen cars, and Sabbar and the driver were arrested.

Sabbar says he was never suspected of insurgent activities, and it seems he was regarded more as a common criminal. He was never hooded and rarely shackled, treatment reserved for so-called political prisoners or anyone who might be remotely related to anti-American resistance.

In Abu Ghraib, where Sabbar ended up after months in other prisons, ethnic tensions were apparently strong but ignored by US custodians. Sabbar and six other Iraqis, all Shiite, fought with another prisoner, a member of a prominent Sunni family and the son of a leading official from Saddam's Baathist party which allegedly massacred hundreds of Shiites and dumped them in mass graves.

Sabbar and the other Shiite prisoners believed the Sunni son, who spoke good English, was granted favoured status with the prison commandant. When the Shiite prisoners made fun of him and fought with him last November, it was the Shiites who were to be punished. Sabbar and the six were pulled from the larger prison population. A small cadre of guards shoved bags over their heads, grabbed them in choke-holds and dragged them 400 metres to the solitary confinement cells, places where Saddam's men once tortured and executed thousands.

"From the voices, it seemed there were lots of soldiers," Muhsin told Al-Jazeera satellite television.

After beating them for a while, the soldiers ordered the men, through their interpreter, to take off their clothes. Sabbar sustained a broken jaw.

"We refused," Sabbar says. "It's against our morals and we told them that. They said you'd better take your clothes off or you will be beaten. Still, we refused."

And so one of the soldiers, apparently the ringleader, took a knife and cut off the men's clothing. The soldiers poured cold water on the Iraqis and continued to slam their heads against the wall.

After about two hours of beatings, and writing on the detainees' bodies with marking pens, the soldiers forced the Iraqis to pile, naked and hooded, on top of each other in human pyramids. Still naked, Sabbar was also made to straddle one of the other prisoner's shoulders.

All the while, the soldier Sabbar knew as "Miss Maya" snapped pictures. Sabbar says he could discern the flash of the camera through the bag on his head.

Sabbar was then taken aside, and his captors pulled off his hood. He was made to face one of the women soldiers and ordered to masturbate. She was squeezing her breasts and laughing at him. He protested, saying he could not perform what he was asked. They pummelled him some more.

Finally, he went through the motions, hoping it would satisfy their demand. "I was in such a state, shaking and beaten, I just couldn't do it," he says.

They put the hood back on and ordered him to masturbate again. He sensed a person's head was near his groin and thought for a moment it was the woman. They ripped off his hood and he saw that the face being pushed towards his groin was that of one of the other Iraqi prisoners. "Everyone was laughing," he says.

Towards the end, the soldiers grabbed Sabbar and the others by the scruff of their necks, as though they were animals. "Bark like a dog!" ordered the ringleader, whom Sabbar identified as "Joiner" or "Junior".

A 53-page report by a US army general into prison mismanagement echoes many of these recounted abuses.

Still naked, still hooded, the men were put in small cells stripped of bedding and washed down with cold water.

A soldier who came on duty in the morning provided clothes, soap, blankets and other necessities. But that night, "Joiner" and the others returned, took the items and stripped the men again.

That continued for three nights, and for another 10 nights, the men were denied food. (They were fed by the day crew.) Twenty-five days later, they were released from solitary confinement and back into the general prison population.

None of this extreme treatment had anything to do with interrogations but was purely punishment. Sabbar says he was never asked anything.

Some of the officers who have sought to explain the Abu Ghraib abuses have said it was necessary to "soften up" potential terrorist suspects or others who might have information on the Iraqi insurgency. But that was not the case with Sabbar.

Sabbar, who was eventually acquitted, was released last month and interviewed by US military investigators who included his testimony in the official report looking into prison abuses. He says his life is ruined because of the stigma attached to what he underwent. But he does not blame the US as a whole.

"What this group of soldiers did to me is not the whole picture," he says. "They did not deserve to come to Iraq representing America. They have disfigured the image of the US Army."

Los Angeles Times


[ 05-07-2004, 11:01 AM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

[Skunk]

And now it turns out that the US administration was informed of the abuses AND TOOK NO ACTION FOR NINE MONTHS until the photos were leaked to the press!


US knew of Iraq abuse: Red Cross

TIMES NEWS NETWORK & AGENCIES[ FRIDAY, MAY 07, 2004 11:57:24 PM ]

DELHI/GENEVA: Amidst the rising chorus of voices demanding the scalp of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld for having tolerated - and presumably sanctioned - the torture of prisoners in Iraq, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has waded in to deliver what could well be a fatal blow.

A leaked ICRC report, confirmed as genuine by officials from the humanitarian agency on Friday, contradicts a central claim of the Bush administration: that the prison violence was individual and not systemic, and was stopped as soon as reports first came in about it.

At a press conference in Geneva on Friday afternoon, a senior ICRC official revealed that the Red Cross had "repeatedly requested the US authorities to take corrective action" to stop the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad but that its advice went unheeded for well over nine months.

It was only in January 2004 that the US army suspended Janis Karpinski, commander of Abu Ghraib, and asked a senior general to look into the ICRC's findings.

The ICRC made 29 visits to 14 detention centres across Iraq between March and October 2003, including the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and collected evidence of abuse which "went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" American forces.

"Our findings do not allow us to conclude that what we were dealing with at Abu Ghraib were isolated acts of individual members of coalition forces. What we have described is a pattern and a broad system," said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations.

In the case of captives suspected of "security offences" or of having a "high intelligence value", the ICRC said the US authorities were guilty of "systematic ill-treatment" during interrogation.
Times of India, 7th May 2004