My God...What Have We Done?
From Britian,..link
Revealed: grim world of new Iraqi torture camps
Secret torture chambers, the brutal interrogation of prisoners, murders by paramilitaries with links to powerful ministries... Foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont in Baghdad uncovers a grim trail of abuse carried out by forces loyal to the new Iraqi government
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer
The video camera pans across Hassan an-Ni'ami's body as it is washed in the mosque for burial. In life he was a slender, good-looking man, usually dressed in a dark robe and white turban, Imam at a mosque in Baghdad's Adhimiya district and a senior official of the Muslim Clerics Association.
When I first interviewed him a year ago he was suspected of contacts with the insurgency. Certainly he supported resistance to US forces.
More recently, an-Ni'ami had dropped out of sight. Then, a little over a month ago, relatives say, paramilitary police commandos from 'Rapid Intrusion' found him at a family home in the Sha'ab neighbourhood of northern Baghdad. His capture was reported on television as that of a senior 'terrorist commander'. Twelve hours later his body turned up in the morgue.
What happened to him in his 24 hours in captivity was written across his body in chapters of pain, recorded by the camera. There are police-issue handcuffs still attached to one wrist, from which he was hanged long enough to cause his hands and wrists to swell. There are burn marks on his chest, as if someone has placed something very hot near his right nipple and moved it around.
A little lower are a series of horizontal welts, wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that look like cigarette burns.
An arm appears to have been broken and one of the higher vertebrae is pushed inwards. There is a cluster of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of his left knee. At some stage an-Ni'ami seems to have been efficiently knee-capped. It was not done with a gun - the exit wounds are identical in size to the entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet. Instead it appears to have been done with something like a drill.
What actually killed him however were the bullets fired into his chest at close range, probably by someone standing over him as he lay on the ground. The last two hit him in the head.
The gruesome detail is important. Hanging by the arms in cuffs, scorching of the body with something like an iron and knee-capping are claimed to be increasingly prevalent in the new Iraq. Now evidence is emerging that appears to substantiate those claims. Not only Iraqis make the allegations. International officials describe the methods in disgusted but hushed tones, laying them at the door of the increasingly unaccountable forces attached to Iraq's Ministry of the Interior.
The only question that remains is the level of the co-ordination of the abuse: whether Iraq is stumbling towards a policy of institutionalised torture or whether these are incidents carried out by rogue elements.
--Wonder do seven bad apples grow on Iraqi apple trees?--
Six months ago, Human Rights Watch (HRW) laid out a catalogue of alleged abuses being applied to those suspected of terrorism in Iraq and called for an independent complaints body in Iraq.
But as the insurgency has grown hotter, so too, it appears, have been the methods employed in the dirty counter-insurgency war.
To add to HRW's allegations of beatings, electric shocks, arbitrary arrest, forced confessions and detention without trial, The Observer can add its own charges These include the most brutal kinds of torture, with methods resurrected from the time of Saddam; of increasingly widespread extra-judicial executions; and of the existence of a 'ghost' network of detention facilities - in parallel with those officially acknowledged - that exist beyond all accountability to international human rights monitors, NGOs and even human rights officials of the new Iraqi government.
What is most shocking is that it is done under the noses of US and UK officials, some of whom admit that they are aware of the abuses being perpetrated by units who are diverting international funding to their dirty war.
Hassan an-Ni'ami may well have been a terrorist. Or he may have had knowledge of that terrorism. Or he may have been someone who objected too loudly to foreign troops being in Iraq. We will never know. He had no opportunity to defend himself, no lawyer, no trial. His interrogation and killing were a breach of international law.
And it is not only the case of an-Ni'ami but others too, all arrested by units of the Ministry of the Interior, many of whom were tortured and subsequently killed. Post-mortem images show a dozen or so farmers from the insurgent hotbed of Medayeen who were apparently seized by police as they slept in one of Baghdad's markets and whose bodies were discovered on a rubbish dump in shallow graves to the north of the city. Like an-Ni'ami, their bodies also bore the marks of extensive torture before execution, most with a bullet to the head.
The face of the first body is blackened by strangulation or asphyxiation. Another has bruises to his forehead where he was been hit repeatedly with something heavy. Yet another, his hands still tied with cord, has been punched in the eye and had his ankle fractured. Yet another shows signs of burning similar to an-Ni'ami's. The last two have identical puncture wounds, fist-width apart, suggesting the use of a spiked knuckle-duster.
Then there is Tahar Mohammed Suleiman al-Mashhadani, seized from the Abu Ghraib neighbourhood from early prayers outside a mosque with a number of other men, again by paramilitary police from Rapid Intrusion. When his body was found by family members in the morgue - 20 days after his arrest - he had been tortured almost beyond recognition.
These are not isolated cases. For what is extraordinary is the sense of impunity with which the torture, intimidation
and murder is taking
place. It is not just in Baghdad. In the majority Shia south, far from the worst ravages of the insurgency, there are also emerging reports consistent with the abuses in the capital.
Continues, if you can stomache it.
Revealed: grim world of new Iraqi torture camps
Secret torture chambers, the brutal interrogation of prisoners, murders by paramilitaries with links to powerful ministries... Foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont in Baghdad uncovers a grim trail of abuse carried out by forces loyal to the new Iraqi government
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer
The video camera pans across Hassan an-Ni'ami's body as it is washed in the mosque for burial. In life he was a slender, good-looking man, usually dressed in a dark robe and white turban, Imam at a mosque in Baghdad's Adhimiya district and a senior official of the Muslim Clerics Association.
When I first interviewed him a year ago he was suspected of contacts with the insurgency. Certainly he supported resistance to US forces.
More recently, an-Ni'ami had dropped out of sight. Then, a little over a month ago, relatives say, paramilitary police commandos from 'Rapid Intrusion' found him at a family home in the Sha'ab neighbourhood of northern Baghdad. His capture was reported on television as that of a senior 'terrorist commander'. Twelve hours later his body turned up in the morgue.
What happened to him in his 24 hours in captivity was written across his body in chapters of pain, recorded by the camera. There are police-issue handcuffs still attached to one wrist, from which he was hanged long enough to cause his hands and wrists to swell. There are burn marks on his chest, as if someone has placed something very hot near his right nipple and moved it around.
A little lower are a series of horizontal welts, wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that look like cigarette burns.
An arm appears to have been broken and one of the higher vertebrae is pushed inwards. There is a cluster of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of his left knee. At some stage an-Ni'ami seems to have been efficiently knee-capped. It was not done with a gun - the exit wounds are identical in size to the entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet. Instead it appears to have been done with something like a drill.
What actually killed him however were the bullets fired into his chest at close range, probably by someone standing over him as he lay on the ground. The last two hit him in the head.
The gruesome detail is important. Hanging by the arms in cuffs, scorching of the body with something like an iron and knee-capping are claimed to be increasingly prevalent in the new Iraq. Now evidence is emerging that appears to substantiate those claims. Not only Iraqis make the allegations. International officials describe the methods in disgusted but hushed tones, laying them at the door of the increasingly unaccountable forces attached to Iraq's Ministry of the Interior.
The only question that remains is the level of the co-ordination of the abuse: whether Iraq is stumbling towards a policy of institutionalised torture or whether these are incidents carried out by rogue elements.
--Wonder do seven bad apples grow on Iraqi apple trees?--
Six months ago, Human Rights Watch (HRW) laid out a catalogue of alleged abuses being applied to those suspected of terrorism in Iraq and called for an independent complaints body in Iraq.
But as the insurgency has grown hotter, so too, it appears, have been the methods employed in the dirty counter-insurgency war.
To add to HRW's allegations of beatings, electric shocks, arbitrary arrest, forced confessions and detention without trial, The Observer can add its own charges These include the most brutal kinds of torture, with methods resurrected from the time of Saddam; of increasingly widespread extra-judicial executions; and of the existence of a 'ghost' network of detention facilities - in parallel with those officially acknowledged - that exist beyond all accountability to international human rights monitors, NGOs and even human rights officials of the new Iraqi government.
What is most shocking is that it is done under the noses of US and UK officials, some of whom admit that they are aware of the abuses being perpetrated by units who are diverting international funding to their dirty war.
Hassan an-Ni'ami may well have been a terrorist. Or he may have had knowledge of that terrorism. Or he may have been someone who objected too loudly to foreign troops being in Iraq. We will never know. He had no opportunity to defend himself, no lawyer, no trial. His interrogation and killing were a breach of international law.
And it is not only the case of an-Ni'ami but others too, all arrested by units of the Ministry of the Interior, many of whom were tortured and subsequently killed. Post-mortem images show a dozen or so farmers from the insurgent hotbed of Medayeen who were apparently seized by police as they slept in one of Baghdad's markets and whose bodies were discovered on a rubbish dump in shallow graves to the north of the city. Like an-Ni'ami, their bodies also bore the marks of extensive torture before execution, most with a bullet to the head.
The face of the first body is blackened by strangulation or asphyxiation. Another has bruises to his forehead where he was been hit repeatedly with something heavy. Yet another, his hands still tied with cord, has been punched in the eye and had his ankle fractured. Yet another shows signs of burning similar to an-Ni'ami's. The last two have identical puncture wounds, fist-width apart, suggesting the use of a spiked knuckle-duster.
Then there is Tahar Mohammed Suleiman al-Mashhadani, seized from the Abu Ghraib neighbourhood from early prayers outside a mosque with a number of other men, again by paramilitary police from Rapid Intrusion. When his body was found by family members in the morgue - 20 days after his arrest - he had been tortured almost beyond recognition.
These are not isolated cases. For what is extraordinary is the sense of impunity with which the torture, intimidation
and murder is taking
place. It is not just in Baghdad. In the majority Shia south, far from the worst ravages of the insurgency, there are also emerging reports consistent with the abuses in the capital.
Continues, if you can stomache it.
posted by Christy at 11:46 PM
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