US/IRAQ: Despite the shock caused by the Abu Ghraib revelations, there is plenty of evidence that US ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners has not ended, writes Lara Marlowe in Baghdad.
The revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib prison were a turning point in the US's abysmal relations with the people of Iraq. Muslims were forced to eat pork, drink alcohol and perform sex acts in front of guards. Women were stripped before cameras.
Sheikh Omar Rakib, a young Sunni cleric from Baghdad's Yarmook district, met a US army captain after the Abu Ghraib pictures were broadcast on television. The captain begged him not to judge Americans by what he had seen.
"I told him, 'Iraqis do not believe all these pictures, especially those showing naked women', " Sheikh Omar recalls. " 'Because if Iraqis believed them, they would turn the ground under your feet to fire and you would not be able to leave this country. You are crossing the red line of honour. Don't ever expect to shake hands with an Iraqi.' "
So has the abuse stopped? Residents of Mosul call the US detention centre there "the disco" because detainees are tortured to loud music. Abdel Basat Turki, the former Iraqi minister of human rights, who resigned in April in protest over the US bombardment of civilians in Falluja and the Baghdad districts of Sadr City and Shula, is convinced it continues. In May, after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, he received reports of torture at the al-Baghdadi camp, 270 km west of Baghdad. "They were beating and using electricity and hanging people by their hands," Turki says.
The experience of Reuters news agency in Baghdad is illuminating. Three Iraqis working for Reuters were arrested by the 82nd Airborne division when they tried to film a downed US helicopter near Falluja in January. All were beaten, deprived of sleep and taunted and humiliated sexually.
By the time the Reuters camera crew were detained, US officers were already aware of the investigation into abuse at Abu Ghraib.
"Our experience is explosive because it proves that the kind of abuse carried out at Abu Ghraib happened elsewhere, and that the army doesn't investigate claims properly," says Reuters Baghdad bureau chief, Andrew Marshall. In response to vociferous complaints, the army issued a shoddy report clearing the 82nd Airborne of wrong-doing, without attempting to interview the victims.
Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt threatened Marshall, saying that if Reuters "dragged out" their complaints, he would accuse the news agency of "anti-coalition activity" and have their employees re-arrested.
"If they hadn't been working for Reuters, they'd still be in Abu Ghraib now," says Marshall. He too feels certain that abuse of Iraqis continues. "I don't think they're being stacked in naked pyramids anymore, but the fact is that Iraqis are just not being treated as human beings," Marshall says. "We've had money stolen by soldiers. On a weekly basis, we have Iraqi employees detained and manhandled."
Soheib al-Baz was on his way to the scene of an ambush of a US convoy near Samarra last November when three Humvees stopped the Al-Jazeera television correspondent, his driver and cameraman. The three were thrown to the ground, their hands bound with plastic handcuffs behind their backs.
When they arrived at the US base in Samarra, a blond giant walked towards al-Baz with his arms wide open, saying, "Hello Soheib Al-Jazeera" and gave him a bear-hug. Then he pulled a black sack over al-Baz's head. For three days, the 24 year-old journalist was interrogated, beaten, deprived of sleep and toilets.
Al-Baz explained that an ambulance driver told him about the attack on the convoy. "Liar, liar," the Americans kept saying. "Forget your life. Forget your family. You're going to Guantanamo. Some people respect the media. We don't respect anybody!"
Al-Baz was transferred by helicopter to Baghdad Airport, then Abu Ghraib prison, where he was forced to kneel for hours in a cement courtyard. A soldier repeatedly cocked a pistol behind al-Baz's head in mock execution. The television journalist's hands swelled because the handcuffs were too tight, and his wrists bled when the plastic was finally cut.
A magazine photograph on the table in front of us shows a naked prisoner crouching against a cell door as two Alsatian dogs lunge at him. "He was leaning against my cell," says al-Baz. "His name is Mohamed Balandi and he's Iranian. He came to Iraq for the pilgrimage to Najaf and Kerbala, and the Americans accused him of blowing up the UN building."
Soldiers pulled al-Baz's wrists through the bars and handcuffed them outside the door, he says. "They tried to get the dogs to bite my fingers. My hands were scored with claw marks."
The man held on a leash by Private Lynndie England in the now famous photograph lost his mind, al-Baz says. "When they arrested him, he was OK. . . From torture he became crazy. They left him naked all the time. They'd tell him to jump like a rabbit, with his hands and feet bound."
Al-Baz spent 74 days in US custody. For the first 35 days he was not allowed to wash. The shower, when it finally came, was like torture: ice cold, at 4 a.m. in mid-winter. As is standard practice, the military never returned al-Baz's money, identity papers or satellite telephone. But he kept the orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuit he wore when the Americans dumped him on the Ramadi highway at the end of January.
A report by the International Red Cross published in May estimated that between 70 and 90 per cent of the thousands of Iraqis detained by the US were arrested in error.
Sheikh Abdel Karim al-Anizi knows why 40 US soldiers came to his home in the middle of the night last November. "In all my sermons, I speak against the occupation and say they have destroyed the country," he says. He was nonetheless shocked to be thrown to the ground in his nightshirt and beaten in front of his family.
In the Humvee on the way to the destroyed "palace of four heads" where he was first interrogated, Sheikh Abdel Karim, who has suffered four heart attacks and had just undergone a hernia operation, complained he was suffocating because of the sack over his head. "You're talking. That proves you can breathe," was the reply.
Arab interpreters play the villain's role in most accounts by former prisoners of US forces. "Tell us what you know about the resistance within 30 seconds," the Iraqi interpreter ordered Sheikh Abdel Karim between blows. "He wears an Arab headdress and has a big stomach. I talked to other sheikhs who've been imprisoned, and they all had the same tormentor."
The interpreter/interrogator beat al-Anizi so badly that the sutures from his hernia operation split open and he collapsed with chest pains. After a visit to a US-run hospital, the sheikh was held for a week at a former headquarters of Saddam's secret police in Khazimiya. He slept on bare concrete, without a blanket, and had to urinate into a plastic bottle.
A US sergeant ordered him to shout, "I love Bush!" As punishment for his refusal, the sheikh was forced to clean all 22 cells in the interrogation centre.
Abel Karim Hassan (45) was a third-year medical student when Saddam's secret police arrested him because his best friend's father was a member of the outlawed Dawa party. "Under Saddam it was arbitrary arrest, and under the Americans it's still arbitrary arrest," he says. Hassan was tortured for three months before being taken to Abu Ghraib, where he spent ten years in a crowded cell, without ever seeing sunlight.
To hear Hassan's account of being hung by a hook from the ceiling while electrodes were placed on his ears, chest and genitals, you might think that abuse by US forces was a lesser evil. Hassan says it's the same. "The Iraqis never used dogs to attack us. The mokhabarat raped women, but the Americans surpass them in sexual perversion."
Abdel Basat Turki went to the former US administrator Paul Bremer last December to complain about robberies by soldiers, tanks crushing civilian cars and brutal house searches. In one instance in Mosul, a soldier threw a grenade into a room and slammed the door. A woman and two children inside were killed. The owner of the house was shot dead. The US army then realised it had got the wrong house.
Bremer "didn't want to listen", says Turki. US brutality continues, the former minister insists, citing the case of Mizhir Hussein, the 48-year-old owner of a mechanics shop who was shot dead at the wheel of his car in al-Dulu'iya in May, at the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Hussein got caught in a US convoy, received contradictory signals from two US soldiers and advanced slowly in his BMW. His daughter, 18, sat beside him in the front seat, holding Hussein's niece, 2, on her lap. His 12- year-old son sat in the back seat. The soldiers removed Hussein's body and the wounded children from the car, then flattened it with an armoured vehicle.
After his resignation, Turki wrote to President Bush. "I told him that excessive force and the failure to respect Iraqis was killing all hope of democracy in Iraq and the region," he says. By way of response, he received an email from an underling at the White House. Turki laughs bitterly. "It said they would study my letter."