NEW YORK, 25 September 2005 — Soldiers in the US Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division vented their frustration by systematically torturing Iraqi detainees from 2003 into 2004, hitting them with baseball bats and dousing them with chemicals, a US rights group alleges in a new report.
The Human Rights Watch report, issued Friday, was compiled from interviews with a captain and two sergeants who served in a battalion of the 82nd Airborne that was stationed at a military base called Mercury near Fallujah.
The soldiers said the abuse took place almost daily and often came under orders. Anything short of causing an inmate’s death was allowed, they said.
The residents of Fallujah, 65 km west of Baghdad, nicknamed soldiers at the nearby base “the Murderous Maniacs,” New York-based Human Rights Watch said. “The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor.”
It said soldiers in the 82nd Airborne deprived detainees of sleep, food and water, subjected them to extreme heat and cold, stacked prisoners in human pyramids, kicked them in the face, and put chemicals on exposed skin and eyes.
One of the sergeants allegedly told the group that military intelligence personnel, eager for information, often instructed soldiers to “smoke” detainees — called Persons Under Control or PUCs — during questioning, the report said. “Smoking” prisoners meant physically abusing them until they lost consciousness.
But the motive was not always to gain intelligence, one sergeant was quoted as saying. “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,” he reportedly said.
“One day (another sergeant) shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini-Louisville Slugger, a metal bat.”
The soldier said anything short of death was acceptable.
“As long as no PUCs came up dead, it happened,” he said. “We kept it to broken arms and legs.”
The timing of some of the alleged tortures coincided with the prisoner abuse by American forces at Abu Ghraib near Baghdad in 2003. “These soldiers’ firsthand accounts provide further evidence contradicting claims that abuse of detainees by US forces was isolated or spontaneous,” the report said. The US military has opened 400 investigations of prisoner abuse allegations, and 230 soldiers have been court-martialed or faced nonjudicial punishment or other administrative action.
The soldiers quoted in the report expressed much confusion about what types of treatment were allowed under the Geneva Conventions, which bar mistreatment of prisoners of war or civilian detainees. They said senior officers provided little guidance.
Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. John Skinner criticized the report as a predictable effort to try to “advance an agenda through the use of distortions and errors in fact.” Skinner said the military has investigated all credible allegations of detainee abuse and “looked at all aspects of detention operations under a microscope.”
