US military spokesman Major General Douglas Stone acknowledged last year that the image of the US military had sustained a hammer blow from the scandal. Over the past years, we have made great effort to correct our past mistakes.
On the outskirts of the capital some 25 kilometres 15 miles from the city centre, the 10 square kilometre four square mile Abu Ghraib prison complex was originally built by British companies in the s. Under Saddam's regime, the jail became notorious as a centre for torture and execution with an estimated 4, detainees losing their lives there.
Daily newsletter Receive essential international news every morning. Take international news everywhere with you! Download the France 24 app. The content you requested does not exist or is not available anymore.
Some had been excused after exercising their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far away from the courtroom. Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude? In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C. In a letter written in January, he said:. I questioned some of the things that I saw.
MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.
Last fall, General Sanchez ordered Ryder to review the prison system in Iraq and recommend ways to improve it. It also discussed serious concerns about the tension between the missions of the military police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted to interrogate them. Army regulations limit intelligence activity by the M.
But something had gone wrong at Abu Ghraib. There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M. Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached a crisis point. Taguba, in his report, was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general. Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M. Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.
We were told that they had different rules. They answer every question. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee of Titan, a civilian contractor. General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors.
He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M. The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders.
Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M. There were gross differences, Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the number officially recorded.
A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released.
Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment. General Sanchez also authorized an investigation into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian interrogators.
The scandal debilitated U. The prison had already carried a malevolent tint in the eyes of Iraqis before the U. Under Saddam Hussein it became a symbol of his totalitarian rule. Political prisoners, mostly from the persecuted Shia majority, were routinely executed in the hundreds during his decades-long rule of the country.
When U. In the end, anyone suspected of being a spy wound up inside its walls. Anyone who possessed a Thuraya satellite phone, foreigners, Islamists, Kurds, all found themselves a threat to the government and hauled off to Abu Ghraib. There was talk about having it razed. After the prisoner-abuse scandal leaked in , U. President George W. Bush said he wanted Abu Ghraib destroyed. Jamie Tarabay lived and worked in Iraq between and during which time she reported on conditions inside Abu Ghraib, visiting the prison complex in Sorry, your comment was not saved due to a technical problem.
Please try again later or using a different browser. Clinton, Sanders spar over specifics in Iowa.
0コメント