IRAQ: An Iraqi detainee alleged he was beaten and stamped on so hard by a US interrogator in civilian clothes that his shoulder was dislocated, his nose broken and his leg fractured.
Medical reports confirmed the assault. But the prisoner recanted his statement and his complaint was not acted upon, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The detainee later claimed he was threatened with indefinite internment if he did not retract his allegation.
This is one of several new instances of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan uncovered by the ACLU in its quest for military documentation. Other files reviewed by the Associated Press revealed that an Iraqi, whose ice-packed corpse was photographed with grinning US soldiers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, died under CIA interrogation while hung in a grotesque position - suspended by his wrists with his hands cuffed behind his back.
The US military had ruled the death of the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, in November 2003, a homicide, without disclosing details. A US army guard, Sgt Jeffery Frost, told investigators he was surprised al-Jamadi's arms "didn't pop out of their sockets", and as the guards released the handcuffs and lowered al-Jamadi, blood gushed from his mouth "as if a faucet had been turned on".
The AP reportedly got the documents from lawyers for naval personnel charged with the crime who want to show CIA involvement.
The European Court of Human Rights found Turkey guilty of torture in 1996 in a similar case of "Palestinian hanging", so called for its alleged use by Israel in the Palestinian territories. Other cases highlighted in recent days revealed a system of harsh treatment of prisoners in US custody in several countries.
On September 26th, 2002, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born citizen of Canada arrested in New York when changing airplanes, was shackled and deported to Syria, under a secret US programme known as "extraordinary rendition" exposed by the New Yorker. Interrogators in Syria, regularly condemned by the US for the use of torture, treated Arar brutally for a year. He confessed under torture but the Syrians concluded he had no links to terrorism and he was returned to Canada without any charge being made.
Australian Mamdouh Habib, a terror suspect released from US custody in Guantanamo Bay, claimed this week that American interrogators beat him and stubbed out cigarettes on his chest, and a female interrogator smeared what appeared to be her menstrual blood on his face to humiliate him. Because of the torture, Habib said he falsely confessed to training al-Qaeda hijackers.
The ACLU documents reveal that after the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, "trophy" photographs of masked soldiers pointing their weapons at the heads of detainees in Afghanistan were destroyed. A platoon of military police assigned to Fort Drum, New York, took so many pictures that a soldier planned to catalogue them onto separate CD-ROMs, one for fellow soldiers including a dead Afghan man and one for families that would have left him out.
Eight soldiers were demoted and had to forfeit pay after the pictures were found in June 2004 in a US base in Afghanistan.
The army documents also say that US soldiers in Iraq videotaped a beating they gave last spring to an Iraqi man who had been accused of rape.