HINTS OF IRAQ ABUSE IN DECEMBER

I should have seen this com­ing. In December, in a report for the Chicago Tribune, I noted how mem­ber of the 800th Military Police brigade — the same unit now impli­cated in the Abu Ghraib tor­ture scan­dal — were using electricity-​​spewing taser guns on its pris­on­ers. Why? Because Saddam’s thugs employed sim­i­lar tac­tics to enforce their will.

“The pre­vi­ous regime used batons to beat the pop­u­lace, and elec­tri­cal tor­ture devices on dis­si­dents. Thus judi­cious use and con­trol of the riot baton and intro­duc­tion of the TASER has intim­i­dated the for­mer mem­bers of the regime, and saved sol­diers and civil­ians lives,” reads a per­sonal report, cir­cu­lat­ing through the Defense Department, from recently retired Lt. Col. Wesley “Bo” Barbour, now a con­tract employee for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command…
The taser’s value as a par­tic­u­larly fero­cious behavior-​​modification tool became clear at a prisoner-​​of-​​war camp hold­ing “high-​​value detainees cur­rently depicted in the ‘deck of cards’” — the list of the 55 most wanted lead­ers of Saddam Hussein’s gov­ern­ment.
Members of the 800th Military Police Brigade had to use lethal force sev­eral times to quell pris­oner upris­ings, the report says. But such rebel­lions report­edly came to an end after a mil­i­tary police offi­cer demon­strated the taser’s power–more than 50,000 volts of elec­tric­ity, enough to cause mus­cles to fail after a shock of a few sec­onds.
“Holy shit! That was the expres­sion” when the pris­on­ers saw the taser demon­stra­tion, said Sergeant Major Charles Slider, with the Military Police School based out of Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. He was part of Barbour’s team in Iraq. “They moved away, they got it in line. It was a sig­nif­i­cant event for them.”

Now, we know that this wasn’t the only time American guards used elec­tric­ity — or the threat of it, at least — to enforce their will on pris­on­ers.
“One Iraqi man,” the L.A. Times notes, “had a slur writ­ten on his skin in English. Another was directed by Americans to stand on a box with his head cov­ered and wires attached to his hands. He was informed that if he fell off the box, he would be elec­tro­cuted.“
THERE’S MORE: TalkLeft says that “there have been hints, reports, inves­ti­ga­tion and hear­ings into abuse of Iraqi POW’s all along.” Back in May of ’03, the blog passed along word of pos­si­ble abuse by British sol­diers.
AND MORE: The L.A. Times pub­lishes excerpts from a secret Army report detail­ing “sys­temic” abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Maybe now that the report’s seg­ments are online, Defene Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will actu­ally bother to read it.
“Appearing on three Sunday talk shows,” the New York Times notes, “General Myers insisted that the instances of mis­treat­ment were not wide­spread and were the actions of ‘just a hand­ful’ of sol­diers who had unfairly tainted all American forces in Iraq. But when pressed, he acknowl­edged that he had not yet read a clas­si­fied, 53-​​page Army report com­pleted in February by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba…
“A spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that the sec­re­tary had not been briefed on General Taguba’s report either.”

May 1st, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.