WASHINGTON, 16 December 2004 — Concerned over mounting reports of alleged prisoner abuse at US military bases and detention facilities overseas, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in June under the Freedom of Information Act demanding the release of information about detainees held at these centers.
Since June more reports on the abuse of detainees held in Iraq and Afghanistan have aired. The ACLU insists there is growing evidence that the abuse of detainees was not “aberrational but systemic, and that senior officials either approved of the abuse or were deliberately indifferent to it.”
Now, newly released US Navy documents portray a series of abuse cases stretching beyond Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison where photos surfaced this year of US troops forcing prisoners — often naked — to pose in humiliating positionsThe US Navy files, released Tuesday, document a crush of abuse allegations, most from the early months of the US occupation of Iraq, including US Marines forcing Iraqi juveniles to kneel while troops discharge a weapon in a mock execution and the use of an electric shock on a prisoner.The approximately 10,000 files include investigation reports from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and witness interviews.
All names have been blacked out in the documents, which were released after a federal court ordered the government to comply with a Freedom of Information Act petition filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and other organizations.
“This kind of widespread abuse could not have taken place without a leadership failure of the highest order,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.
Documents released this week by the ACLU reveal that a special operations task force in Iraq sought to silence Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who observed abusive interrogations and that the Department of Defense adopted questionable interrogation techniques at Guantanamo over FBI objections. “The more the government is forced to reveal, the more we learn that individuals in US custody, many of whom have not been accused of wrongdoing, were tortured and abused,” Romero told reporters. “These documents tell a damning story of sanctioned government abuse — a story that the government has tried to hide and may well come back to haunt our own troops captured in Iraq.”
The release of these documents follows a federal court order that directed the Defense Department and other government agencies to comply with a year-old request under the Freedome of Information Act filed by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The documents released by the ACLU are online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia. These and other documents were released by the ACLU one day after the Associated Press reported on a detailed letter from FBI counter-terrorism expert Thomas Harrington to Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder describing “highly aggressive” interrogations and mistreatment of terror suspects at Guantanamo as far back as 2002. The AP also reported on the Harrington e-mail indicating a rift between DOD and the FBI over interrogation methods. Senator Jeff Bingaman, D-New Mexico, has joined the choir of concerned. In a recent letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he expressed “deep concern” on the treatment of detainees being held by the United States government in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“Recent reports indicate that not only were detainees mishandled and interrogated in a manner inconsistent with the Geneva Conventions, but that subsequent internal reports of abuse appear to have been suppressed... While the abuse of detainees is unacceptable under any circumstance, reports of the suppression of evidence regarding abuse are extremely disturbing,” wrote Sen. Bingaman.
