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Abuse routine, says Red Cross
10/05/2004 13:43 - (SA)
Geneva - The Red Cross saw US military intelligence officers routinely mistreating prisoners under interrogation during a visit to Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison last October, according to a report by the agency disclosed on Monday.
US President George Bush said the mistreatment "was the wrongdoing of a few", but the report by the International Committee of the Red Cross backs up with detail the neutral agency's contention that US prisoner abuse was broad and part of a system, "not individual acts".
"ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators," said the confidential report.
The delegates saw how detainees were kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness", the report said. It said it found evidence supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation.
Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the abuse prisoners alleged, it said.
The 24-page document, confirmed by the ICRC as authentic after it was published by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, said the abuses were primarily during the interrogation stage by military intelligence.
Once the detainees were moved to regular prison facilities the abuses typically stopped, it said.
The report cites abuses - some "tantamount to torture" - including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution".
"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from person who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value."'
Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations, said last Friday that the report had been given to US officials last February, but that it only summarised what the agency had been telling US officials in detail between March and November 2003, "either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions".
Kraehenbuehl said the abuse of prisoners represented more than isolated acts, and that the problems were not limited to the Abu Ghraib prison.
"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he said.
The report described how male prisoners were forced to parade around in women's underwear.
It said that information obtained "suggested the use of ill-treatment against persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces.
- AP
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