UK forces taught sexual torture methods

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UK forces taught torture methods
David Leigh
Saturday May 8, 2004
The Guardian

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands.

"There is a reservoir of knowledge about these interrogation techniques which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq. Contractors are bringing in their old friends".

Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan "prolong the shock of capture", he said.

Female guards were used to taunt male prisoners sexually and at British training sessions when female candidates were undergoing resistance training they would be subject to lesbian jibes.

"Most people just laugh that off during mock training exercises, but the whole experience is horrible. Two of my colleagues couldn't cope with the training at the time. One walked out saying 'I've had enough', and the other had a breakdown. It's exceedingly disturbing," said the former Special Boat Squadron officer, who asked that his identity be withheld for security reasons.

Many British and US special forces soldiers learn about the degradation techniques because they are subjected to them to help them resist if captured. They include soldiers from the SAS, SBS, most air pilots, paratroopers and members of pathfinder platoons.

A number of commercial firms which have been supplying interrogators to the US army in Iraq boast of hiring former US special forces soldiers, such as Navy Seals.

"The crucial difference from Iraq is that frontline soldiers who are made to experience R2I techniques themselves develop empathy. They realise the suffering they are causing. But people who haven't undergone this don't realise what they are doing to people. It's a shambles in Iraq".

The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11".

When the interrogation techniques are used on British soldiers for training purposes, they are subject to a strict 48-hour time limit, and a supervisor and a psychologist are always present. It is recognised that in inexperienced hands, prisoners can be plunged into psychosis.

The spectrum of R2I techniques also includes keeping prisoners naked most of the time. This is what the Abu Ghraib photographs show, along with inmates being forced to crawl on a leash; forced to masturbate in front of a female soldier; mimic oral sex with other male prisoners; and form piles of naked, hooded men.

The full battery of methods includes hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners not only of dignity, but of fundamental human needs, such as warmth, water and food.

The US commander in charge of military jails in Iraq, Major General Geoffrey Miller, has confirmed that a battery of 50-odd special "coercive techniques" can be used against enemy detainees. The general, who previously ran the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, said his main role was to extract as much intelligence as possible.

Interrogation experts at Abu Ghraib prison were there to help make the prison staff "more able to garner intelligence as rapidly as possible".

Sleep deprivation and stripping naked were techniques that could now only be authorised at general officer level, he said.

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The at least "official" disinclination of western governments to utilize torture as a means of acquiring information or confession since the enlightenment is a historical anomaly. At one time it was thought that an individual would not give honest answer to interrogation unless they had been subject to, or at least threatened with, torture. What we are seeing is a slow erosion of that standard and a return to a previous and more brutal set of assumptions and standards. Anyone who thinks that this kind of behavior will be limited to the military and only applied to "others" is a fool. Prohibitions against torture, which took a long time to become a standard legal assumption, will disappear equally slowly, by degrees. But they will disappear and what we are seeing is our own future.

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Human rights groups have documented prisoner abuse for 2 yea
Posted on Fri, May. 07, 2004
Human rights groups have documented prisoner abuse for 2 years
By Drew Brown
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Amnesty International sent an open letter to President Bush on Friday calling the abuses at Abu Ghraib a "pattern of brutality and cruelty" that constitutes war crimes and called on the administration to fully investigate the charges so there's "no impunity for anyone found responsible regardless of position or rank."

The organization said its investigators documented "scores of individual cases" of mistreatment at the prison, including beatings, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, the use of hoods and prolonged forced standing or kneeling, which the military refers to as "stress positions."

Combined with interviews of people who've been held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the group said the treatment constituted a pattern of abusing detainees that stretched back more than two years.

Separately, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and seven other human rights organizations sent another open letter to Bush on Friday urging him to take "immediate and decisive action."

"The events at Abu Ghraib now in the headlines are the latest evidence of an interrogation and detention system that appears to be out of control ... and not the isolated misdeeds of a few individuals allegedly acting without authorization," it said.

"The U.S. administration has shown a consistent disregard for the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of law, human rights, and decency," Irene Kahn, Amnesty International's secretary general, said in a printed statement. "This has created a climate in which U.S. soldiers feel they can dehumanize and degrade prisoners with impunity."

Alistair Hodgett, a Washington spokesman for the group, said its researchers began documenting cases at Abu Ghraib last May. In July, the group raised its concerns to the U.S. government and the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. It requested permission to visit coalition-run prisons in Iraq, but was denied. The cases of abuse were compiled from detainees who'd been released from the prison, he said.

Army investigators found abuse at the prison in January, and American officials vowed to stop it. But Hodgett said allegations of abuse continued.

Officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a confidential report to U.S. authorities in Iraq over abuses in American-run prisons there.

According to a statement from ICRC headquarters in Geneva, Red Cross delegates made 29 visits to 14 detention centers in Iraq between March 31 and Oct. 24, 2003.

The delegates toured the facilities, interviewed prisoners, then developed a series of working papers they presented to coalition authorities highlighting "serious concerns" about the treatment of prisoners under the third and fourth Geneva Conventions. The delegates also repeatedly requested corrective action from coalition authorities, the group said.

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Inspector Kay warned U.S. officials of Iraqi prisoner abuse
Inspector says he warned U.S. officials of Iraqi prisoner abuse
By BOB GIBSON
Media General News Service
Thursday, May 6, 2004

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- David Kay, the man who led the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, says he repeatedly told people about problems with the interrogation of prisoners, but the military ignored him.

"I was there and I kept saying the interrogation process is broken. The prison process is broken. And no one wanted to deal with it," Kay said. "It was too, too distasteful. This is a known problem, and the military refuses to deal with it."

Kay said in an interview Tuesday after speaking at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs that the abuse of Iraqi inmates at an American-run prison west of Baghdad is a disaster for the United States.

Anything less than severe action, which he described as a "hanging," against a two- or three-star general in charge means "in the Middle East, they are always going to believe we did it as part of a sanctioned process," Kay said.

"I am terribly worried that if we only charge the seven or 15 reservists who were involved and condemn the contractors who were involved and maybe the one-star reserve general who was in charge of this overall military prison unit, I think we will have done a horrible mistake," Kay said.

"Who's responsible for their behavior? Or are they scot-free?" Kay asked. He said that contract employees could be charged by a federal prosecutor with "violating a normative international law" but cannot be touched by the military that hired them because "the only sanction the military has against them is removal."

"I can't tell you how revolted I am," he said, yet Iraqis are far more revolted at the photos broadcast worldwide the past week showing U.S. soldiers smiling and giving thumbs-up signs while naked prisoners were forced to assume humiliating positions.

In his speech at the Miller Center, Kay defended the decision to go to war in Iraq even though no one has been able to find weapons of mass destruction, which had been the main reason given for going to war. Kay also said he never saw any evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. terror network.

Kay, who previously worked in Iraq as the United Nations' chief nuclear weapons inspector, said that when American troops forced Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq was "within six to 12 months of their first nuclear weapon."

Years after Iraq was defeated in the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein secretly decided in the mid-'90s to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, mostly chemical stockpiles, because they were too easy to find and could be rebuilt after world sanctions lapsed, Kay said.

Saddam kept up a policy of deception against weapons inspectors because he feared that the Iraqi people and his own army might overthrow him if they were not convinced he still had the weapons, Kay said. Every Iraqi general who has been interrogated was convinced the weapons were still in Iraq but had not seen them for years, he said.

American intelligence agencies remained fooled because Iraqis who wanted Saddam toppled kept feeding them false stories about his hidden stockpiles of chemical and other weapons, Kay said.

"They told us about weapons in order to get us to invade Iraq," he said. "They moved U.S. policy, and we didn't catch it."

The United States needs to massively rebuild human intelligence sources after too long a period of over-reliance on technology, Kay stressed. "As a nation, we've got to get serious about understanding the threats" and the conditions that build and foster terrorism, he said.

All the major western intelligence services were fooled about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in the past three years, he said. "Around the world in the intelligence services, there was a shocking uniformity. ... Everyone was drinking from the same polluted pool and drawing the same wrong conclusions."
-----------------------------

Bob Gibson is a staff writer for the Charlottesville Daily Progress.

This story can be found at: http://www.morningnewsonline.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=FMN/MGArticle/FMN_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031775300094&path=!news

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Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
May 7, 2004
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
By REUTERS

ANTIOCH, California (Reuters) - Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.

``It is a common thing to abuse prisoners,'' said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, of the Army National Guard's 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. ``I saw beatings all the time.

``A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression,'' he said. Sindar and the other military policemen, who have returned to California from Iraq, spoke in interviews with Reuters.

U.S. treatment of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib has stirred wide international condemnation after the publication of photos in recent days showing Americans sexually humiliating prisoners. Six soldiers in Iraq have been charged in the case and President Bush apologized publicly on Thursday.

Although public attention has focused on the dehumanizing photos, some members of the 870th MP unit say the faces in those images were not the only ones engaged in cruel behavior.

``It was not just these six people,'' said Sindar, the group's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons specialist. ``Yes, the beatings happen, yes, all the time.''

An officer in their group was reprimanded last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, Sindar told Reuters. Sindar and fellow military policeman Ramon Leal said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as ``camel jockey' or slogans such as ``I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail.''

Leal said one female soldier in his unit fired off a slingshot into a crowd of prisoners. Sindar, who was familiar with the incident, said one person was injured.

Another group of soldiers knocked a 14-year-old boy to the ground as he arrived at the prison and then twisted his arm, Sindar and Leal said.

``The soldiers were laughing at him,'' said Leal. ``I saw the other soldiers that would take out their frustrations on the prisoners.''

Until earlier this year prisoners would arrive at Abu Ghraib with broken bones, suggesting they had been roughed up, he said. But the practice ended in January or February, as practices at the prison were coming under increased internal scrutiny.

Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.

``We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression,'' said another of the military policemen, Spc. Dave Bischel. ``It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed.''

The Californians' remarks were unusual, as U.S. soldiers have been reluctant to speak out in public on the issue.

Some say investigators went out of their way to keep the allegations under wraps. When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.

``That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard,'' Leal said.

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UK forces taught sexual torture methods

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