It was disgusting [View All]

[JoFerret]

http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/World/abu_ghraib_prisoner_040503-1.html

Freed prisoners recount horrors
....

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=46249

Day and night lost meaning shortly after Muwafaq Sami Abbas, a lawyer by training, arrived at Baghdad airport for an unexpected stay. In March, he was seized from his bed by US troops, he said, along with the rest of the men in his house, and taken to a prison on the airport grounds.

The black sack on his head was removed only briefly during the next nine days of interrogation, conducted by US officials. He was forced to do knee bends until he collapsed, he recalled, and black marks still ring his wrists from the pinch of plastic handcuffs.

Rest was made impossible by loudspeakers blaring, the Beastie Boys’ rap anthem . The forced exercise was even harder for his 57-year-old father, a former Army general who held a signed certificate from the US occupation authority vouching for his ‘‘high level of cooperation and assistance’’ in the days after the war. Father and son are now free but Abbas’ three brothers are still inside Abu Ghraib prison, he said.




‘‘The savagery the Americans have practiced against the Iraqis, well, now we have seen it, touched it and felt it,’’ Abbas said. ‘‘These types of actions will grow more hostile forces against the coalition, and this is the reason for the resistance.’’ The photographs of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners have reinforced the long-held view here that the US occupation is intent on humiliating the Iraqi people.

Former prisoners say lengthy interrogation sessions, employing sleep deprivation, severe isolation, fear and humiliation, and physical duress, were regular features of their daily regimen and remain so for the estimated 2,500 to 7,000 people inside the jails. The system comprises 16 prisons, four of which hold prisoners accused of being part of the anti-occupation insurgency. But there are countless other holding cells on US bases, many once used by former president Saddam Hussein’s government, where young Iraqis spend their first fearful hours in captivity. ‘‘We have to get to the bottom of it,’’ coalition spokesman Daniel Senor said on CNN’s Late Edition.

Abdullah Mohammed Abdulrazzaq, 19, was held for six months in several prisons around Iraq. ‘‘How can we not hate the Americans after the treatment we have received,’’ he said.

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