'Shame on the Americans'

2004-05-01 21:57

Baghdad, Iraq - A member of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council demanded on Saturday that Iraqi authorities investigate reports that American guards abused inmates in the very prison where Saddam Hussein's regime tortured its opponents.

The scandal broadened after Britain's Daily Mirror published new photographs of a hooded Iraqi prisoner who reportedly was beaten by British troops. The newspaper's front-page picture showed a soldier apparently urinating on the prisoner.

Also on Saturday, The New Yorker magazine said it had obtained a US Army report that Iraqi detainees were subjected to "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Sodomised with a light

Those abuses included threats of rape and the pouring of liquid from chemical lights on detainees, said the internal report by Major General Antonio Taguba. Detainees were beaten with a broom handle and one was sodomised with "a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick," the report said, according to the magazine's May 10 issue.

The pictures have not been widely published by Iraqi newspapers, but many Iraqis have seen them on Arabic satellite television stations.

"After what we saw, all Iraqis will attack the Americans now," said Abdulilah Mohammed, 55, a Baghdad street vendor.

Some photos, aired first on CBS' 60 Minutes II showed two US soldiers standing near the prisoners, clowning for the camera. Another showed a hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his hands. CBS said the prisoner was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted, although the wires were not connected to a power supply.

"The Governing Council should investigate this because it is the legitimate authority responsible of protecting the Iraqis," Governing Council member Sondul Chapouk said. "During Saddam's time we rejected such acts and after the liberation we still reject them."

Another council member, Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, said the perpetrators must be punished "as war criminals" because "the dignity of an Iraqi citizen is no less than the dignity of an American".

The Daily Mirror report quoted soldiers as saying the unarmed captive shown in its photograph had been threatened with execution during eight hours of abuse, and was left bleeding and vomiting. They said the captive was then driven away and dumped from the back of a moving vehicle, and it was not known whether he survived.

Even those Iraqis who have been most supportive of the American effort here have been quick to speak out against the brutality at Abu Ghraib.

Governing Council member Mahmoud Othman, a member of the pro-US Kurdish minority, warned the allegations had harmed the image of the US military in Iraq.

"The Saddam era was full of executions and torture and we want the new Iraq clean of such images," he said.

Another council member, former judge Dara Nor al-Din, described the pictures as a "shame on the Americans."

- AP