Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners 'Was Sport'

The Army said it had opened an investigation into one soldier’s allegations that he witnessed and heard about widespread prisoner abuse, including torture and a beating with a baseball bat, while serving at a base in Iraq.

Nice. That’s like letting Shell investigate the environmental impacts of oil extraction, or the Bush Administration investigate the response failure for Hurricane Katrina. Oh wait…

NEW YORK – Soldiers in the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division vented their frustration by systematically torturing Iraqi detainees from 2003 into 2004, hitting them with baseball bats and dousing them with chemicals, a U.S. rights group alleges in a new report.

The Human Rights Watch report, issued last week, was compiled from interviews with a captain and two sergeants who served in a battalion of the 82nd Airborne that was stationed at a military base called Mercury near Fallujah, the insurgent stronghold retaken by U.S. forces last year.

The soldiers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the abuse took place almost daily and often came under orders. Anything short of causing an inmate’s death was allowed, they said.

‘Murderous Maniacs‘

The residents of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, nicknamed soldiers at the nearby base “the Murderous Maniacs,” New York-based Human Rights Watch said. “The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor.”

It said soldiers in the 82nd Airborne deprived detainees of sleep, food and water, subjected them to extreme heat and cold, stacked prisoners in human pyramids, kicked them in the face, and put chemicals on exposed skin and eyes.

One of the sergeants allegedly told the group that military intelligence personnel…

Posted by ShiftShapers
Welcome to (A)utonomous Resistance, GNN’s exclusive one-stop infoshop for radical resources and information. This blog primarily serves as a vehicle with which to bring greater exposure to repressed and marginalized voices and ideas. Much of what I post here...

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