WASHINGTON/BAQUBA, Iraq: A military interrogation expert, US Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, told Congress yesterday that he witnessed interrogations of Iraqi detainees that he considers violations of the Geneva Conventions.
One of those interrogations was conducted by a civilian and a contractor employed by his own organization, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which had sent a small team to Iraq in September 2003 to help a special forces task force make its interrogations more effective.
Kleinman told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his two colleagues forcibly stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, shackled him, and left him standing in a dank, six-foot cement cell with orders to the guards that the prisoner was not to move for 12 hours. They could intervene only if he passed out, Kleinman said his two colleagues told the guards.
Had the prisoner passed out, he would have hit his head on a wall, Kleinman said. Kleinman put a stop to the interrogation. The team returned to the United States several days later. “Until their time in Iraq they had never seen a real world interrogation,” he said.
Kleinman also detailed sitting in on another interrogation. An Iraqi prisoner was on his knees in a room painted all black with a light shining in his face. Behind him stood an American guard slapping an iron bar against his palm. After every question the Iraqi answered, his military interrogators slapped him across the face. That had been going on for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, Iraqi forces launched a major hunt for Al-Qaeda gunmen in the restive province of Diyala yesterday after 35 people were killed in an ambush of a police convoy. Wednesday’s attack, which saw the entire patrol wiped out, was one of the deadliest against police in recent months despite massive military crackdowns in the region, one of the most dangerous in Iraq.
The US military also reported that an American soldier was killed in a suicide bombing in the province on Wednesday, but did not give further details. Soldiers backed by commandos are sweeping the area following the ambush, Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim Khalaf said. “We have a major operation under way in the area after Al-Qaeda ambushed the policemen. Army, police commandos and rapid action groups have joined a search for the attackers,” Khalaf told AFP.
