Oh. My. God.

(Some = ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY THREE)

Some Detainees Found

in Baghdad Tortured

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 15, 2005
CBS News

(AP) Iraqi and U.S. officials disclosed Tuesday that more than 170 malnourished Iraqi detainees had been found in a weekend raid at an Interior Ministry detention center and that some appeared to have been tortured.

U.S. and Iraqi forces discovered the inmates when they went into the facility suspecting that individuals there may have been mistreated, the Pentagon said.

A Sunni politician said the prisoners were Sunni Arabs and accused the Shiite-led government of long ignoring the abuse.

Coalition forces "found things that concerned them," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. He did not say when the inmates were found, but U.S. troops took control of the Interior Ministry building on Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said Iraqi authorities were investigating what happened and that the detainees had been moved to a better location and given medical care.

"I was informed that there were 173 detainees held at an Interior Ministry prison and they appear to be malnourished. There is also some talk that they were subjected to some kind of torture," al-Jaafari told reporters.

Amnesty International welcomed al-Jaafari's decision to order an investigation but urged him to expand the probe to include all allegations of torture. Amnesty also asked him to make the results public.

In Washington, State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said the administration found the reports troubling.

"We don't practice torture. And we don't believe that others should practice torture," he said.

"So when there are cases of people being accused of torture, we take that seriously; we view it with concern. And we think that there should be an investigation and those who are responsible should be held accountable."

The first public hint of the allegations came Monday when Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, the Interior Ministry's undersecretary for security, said an investigation would be opened into unspecified allegations that ministry officers tortured suspects detained in connection with the country's insurgency.

The prime minister did not say where the prison was located, but Kamal said it was in the basement of a building in Baghdad's neighborhood of Jadriyah.

Kamal said one of the detainees suffered from polio while others had different wounds on their bodies.

"They were mistreated and you know what happens in prison," he said refusing to give further details how they were tortured. "There were some cases in the past but this was a big problem. We will try to make sure that such acts are not repeated in the future."

He said the detainees were held at this basement because the Justice Ministry had no place to keep them until they were referred for trial.

"This is the problem. There are no other places to keep those terrorists in," he said.

The head of the country's largest Sunni political party said he had personally spoken to al-Jaafari and other government officials about torture at Interior Ministry detention centers, including the one where the detainees were found.

But, he said, the government routinely dismissed his complaints, calling the prisoners "former regime elements."

"According to our knowledge, regrettably, all the detainees were Sunnis," Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, told The Associated Press. "In order to search for a terrorist, they used to detain hundreds of innocent people and torture them brutally."

Most insurgents are Sunni Arabs, who were dominant under Saddam Hussein's regime but lost power after his ouster.

The Interior Ministry is controlled by Shiites. Sunni leaders have accused Shiite-dominated security forces of detaining, torturing and killing hundreds of Sunnis simply because of their religious affiliation.

The U.S. Embassy issued a statement late Tuesday saying that both Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had discussed the case "at the highest levels" of the Iraqi government.

"We agree with Iraq's leaders that the mistreatment of detainees is a serious matter and totally unacceptable," the statement said.

The Pentagon spokesman said the discovery at the facility "was clearly something that was concerning, and was appropriately looked into by the Iraqi forces with the support of the coalition."

He said it was not a U.S. military-run facility and that he does not believe the American military was involved in the investigation.

Amnesty International also said it had recently received information of four people who were tortured while detained by Iraqi security forces.

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