Two sergeants and a captain in one of the U.S. Army's most decorated combat units have come forward with accounts of routine, systematic and often severe beatings committed against detainees at a base near Fallujah from 2003 through 2004.Why is a cook having any contact at all with prisoners - let alone swinging a baseball bat at (at least) one of them?! The article goes on to describe how the Captain "said he had made persistent efforts over 17 months to raise concerns about the abuses and obtain clearer rules about the treatment of detainees but was consistently told by higher-ups to ignore abuses and to 'consider your career'." Their testimony completes belies "the Bush administration [claim] that only a handful of poorly trained reservists were responsible" for prisoner abuse.
According to their testimony, featured in a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), beatings and other forms of torture were often either ordered or approved by superior officers and took place on virtually a daily basis. The soldiers, all of whom had also been deployed to Afghanistan before coming to Iraq, testified that the same techniques were used in both countries.
The beatings were so severe that they resulted in broken bones 'every other week' at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury, where detainees would ordinarily be held for three or four days before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. In one case, an Army cook broke the leg of a detainee with a metal baseball bat, according to one of the sergeants quoted in the report, entitled Leadership Failure.
It is a sad state of affairs when Republic Congressional Leaders feel they have to pass "legislation that would require the Pentagon to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual in its treatment of all detainees."
Sadder still, and shameful, is the fact that "their effort has so far been frustrated by opposition from the George W. Bush administration, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, who has personally lobbied against the provision, and the Republican leadership in Congress."
Here's the truly disgusting part:
Suspected insurgents, according to the testimonies, were called PUCs, for "Persons Under Control," to distinguish them from prisoners of war, or POWs, a practice that first began in Afghanistan after the Pentagon announced that it did not consider detainees captured there subject to the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions for POWs.These people are human beings. They may be "enemies" of the US, but they are still human beings. Denying them the rights of the Geneva Conventions is inhumane. Ask John McCain how important respecting the Conventions is - how, when we abide by them, they save the lives of American Prisoners of War. He knows; that's why he's doing the right thing, sponsoring legislation that should be a no brainer. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have long maintained that prisoner abuse was the work of a few rogue individuals. Attorney General Gonzales conveniently failed to recall drafting the documentation that led to Bush rejecting Geneva Conventions for "enemy combatants" or "PUCs," arbitrary terms for arbitrarily differentiating among POWs. This report makes it clear that they created the atmosphere in which all such abuse took place, with a wink and a smile.
PUCs were held in tents at FOB Mercury that were surrounded by concertina wire and were routinely subjected to abusive techniques that included "smoking", which was normally ordered by Military Intelligence before interrogations and involved 12 to 24 hours of stress positions, sleep or liquid deprivation, and physical exercises sometimes to the point of unconsciousness, and "f**king", which referred to beating or torturing detainees severely.
Front-line and other soldiers were invited to take part in both practices, according to the report, while, if the detainees were injured as a result of the abuse, a physicians' assistant would administer an analgesic and sign off on a report stating that the injury took place during capture.
The beatings and other abuses served mainly to relieve stress, according to the three soldiers. "On their day off people would show up all the time," said one sergeant. "Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport."
The soldiers blamed the abuses in large part on the failure of civilian and military leaders to clarify what was and was not permitted, particularly in light of the administration's position that the Geneva Convention, in which the unit had been trained, did not apply to detainees captured in Afghanistan.
"We knew where the Geneva Conventions drew the line, but then you get that confusion when the (Secretary of Defense) and the president make that statement," said the captain. After the invasion of Iraq, "none of the unit policies changed. Iraq was cast as part of the war on terror, not a separate entity in and of itself but a part of a larger war."
"Leadership failed to provide clear guidance so we just developed it," said one of the sergeants. "They wanted intel (intelligence). As long as no PUCs came up dead it happened. We heard rumours of PUCs dying so we were careful. We kept it to broken arms and legs and shit (like that)."
When breaking bones and beating people nearly to death becomes a sport condoned and encouraged by Bush and his administration, it is clearly time to step back and ask again what our purpose in Iraq really is and whether our actions are truly helping or sorely hurting that purpose. If our goal is to piss off the Muslim world, add fuel to the raging insurgency, and feed a generation of Anti-American hate while pretending to occupy some moral high ground, then I'd say the President can proudly declare: "Mission Accomplished."
*emphasis mine
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