Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres
The Guardian reports (March 6th): The Pentagon sent a US
veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian
police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres
to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst
acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent
into full-scale civil war.
The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the
Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human
rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that
Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after
a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.
Iraqi Prisons: New Torture Methods. Innocent, but Sentenced
to Death
BRussells Tribunal reports (March 2nd): The Iraqi Ministry
of Justice has installed electronic systems that send high frequencies and
ultrasound waves which affect the human central nervous system. Without a
defense lawyer an officer of Tareq Al Hashemi’s security team is sentenced to
death for crimes he didn’t commit, but forced to confess after severe torture.
Torture taint hangs over Iraq death sentences
Al-Jazeera reports (March 5th): For three years,
Nadiha Hilal has begun each day waiting to hear if she's become a widow.
Hilal's husband has been awaiting execution since he was sentenced to death in
2009, along with 10 other people in a case that illustrates Iraq's deeply
troubled criminal justice system.
International human rights groups said they believe 3,000
Iraqis have been sentenced to death since 2005, when capital punishment was
reinstated. The figure gives Iraq one of the highest rates of death sentences
in the world.
The day after he was arrested, Hilal said police came for
her. "They put blank papers in front of him and told him to either sign it
or they were going to put me in the women's prison and even arrest his
daughters," she told Al Jazeera in an interview on the outskirts of
Fallujah, about 70 kilometres west of the capital Baghdad.
In a room next to her husband, Hilal said she could hear him
screaming as he was tortured. "They pulled out his fingernails, then they
used electricity on him," said Hilal.
Iraqi prisoners with gunshot wounds received no pain relief,
public inquiry hears
The Guardian reports (March 7th): British
military doctors failed to give any pain relief to Iraqi insurgents with
gunshot wounds – although they did check their pulses and breathing before they
were sent for interrogation, a public inquiry into allegations of murder and
the abuse of unarmed prisoners by UK forces heard.
One man who had three bullet wounds and several shrapnel
wounds to his right leg and foot says he told an army doctor that he was
"in agony", but his detention record showed that he received no
analgesics. He later needed surgery.
Iraqis captured by UK troops 'were told they had been taken
to Abu Ghraib'
The Guardian reports 9|March 6th): Iraqis
captured by British troops were told they had been taken to the notorious Abu
Ghraib prison, used by Saddam Hussein and after the invasion by US forces, and
said recordings of screams as though someone was being tortured were played to
scare them, a public inquiry into allegations of murder and abuse of unarmed
prisoners by UK forces heard on.
The prisoners alleged they were abused and humiliated after
they were taken from a camp north of Basra to a British detention centre at
Shaibah further south, Jonathan Acton Davis QC, counsel to the al-Sweady
inquiry, said.
Iraqis' death certificates recorded signs of severe
mutilation, inquiry hears
The Guardian reports (March 4th): A public
inquiry into allegations that British troops murdered up to 20 unarmed
prisoners and tortured five others following a fierce battle with Iraqi
insurgents has opened in London with evidence that some of their death
certificates recorded what were described as signs of severe mutilation.
Several of the deceased were said to bear signs of torture
after their corpses were handed back to their families by British personnel at
Camp Abu Naji, while the Iraqi death certificates recorded that one man's penis
had been removed and two bodies were missing eyes, the inquiry was told.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/04/iraqis-death-certificates-mutilation-inquiry
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