How to ensure terrorism continues for decades:Abu Ghraib:...

How to ensure terrorism continues for decades:


Abu Ghraib: inmates raped, ridden like animals, and forced to eat pork
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington, Justin Huggler in Baghdad and Leonard Doyle
22 May 2004


The abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison continued yesterday with the publication of fresh pictures and sworn statements that detailed a teenage boy being raped, prisoners being ridden like animals and other Iraqis being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol in contravention of their religion. For the first time video footage of some of the abuse was also broadcast, a development likely to increase the political impact of the scandal.

The new details caused fresh outrage around the Arab world and further rocked the Bush administration ­ already floundering after a week in which US forces killed dozens of guests at a wedding party in Iraq after mistaking them for insurgents. The latest pictures and allegations ­ chronicling more calculated attempts to humiliate Muslim prisoners ­ have only added to the suspicion that they were part of a policy formulated at a high level of authority.

Even though the existence of the images was known ­ indeed, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have seen many of the images already ­ their publication put further pressure on Washington as it prepares to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi administration at the end of June.

Partly in preparation for that handover, a bus full of Iraqi prisoners left Abu Ghraib outside Baghdad yesterday as the US sought to reduce the numbers being held in the jail. But the new pictures and statements overshadowed the release.

In one statement, a prisoner tells how he witnessed a US army translator raping an Iraqi boy, aged somewhere between 15 and 18.

Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, prisoner number 151108, says a female soldier took photographs of the rape. Sheets had been hung to block the prisoners' view, but Mr Hilas says he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to see what was going on. "The kid was hurting very bad," his statement reads.

The statements were published in The Washington Post, accompanied by images that will haunt America. One shows an Iraqi completely naked, his arms outstretched, his back to the camera. His body is smeared with a thick brown substance that looks like excrement. It is caked around the back of his head.

Yet it is not simply these images and details that are so shocking, but the overwhelming evidence suggesting that, far from being an isolated episode involving a "few bad apples" from Appalachia, as the administration claims, this abuse was part of a systematic, gloves-off approach to dealing with suspected "terrorists" in the post-9/11 world.