The torture of prisoners in US custody in Iraq was authorised and routine even after the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light, a US-based rights group says.
Soldiers’ accounts show that detainees routinely faced severe beatings, sleep deprivation and other abuses for much of 2003-2005, Human Rights Watch says.
Soldiers who tried to complain about the abuse were rebuffed or ignored.
But a Pentagon spokesman said 12 reviews had found there was no policy condoning or encouraging abuse.
“The standard of treatment is and always has been humane treatment of detainees in [Department of Defence] custody,” Lt Col Mark Ballesteros told Reuters news agency.
John Sifton, author of the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, said the accounts given to the group by former US soldiers revealed the opposite.
“These accounts rebut US government claims that torture and abuse in Iraq was unauthorised and exceptional – on the contrary, it was condoned and commonly used,” he said.
(Source: BBC News)
Is there anyone left on this planet who still believes the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq was about WMDs or the liberation of the Iraqi people? Certainly not most Americans who are now hugely against Bush’s Iraq slaughter.
Look at the picture above, from three years ago now, and the pictures in this previous post. According to the HRW report, those types of abuse continued up to at least last year.
What would you call an occupying army that carried out these kind of atrocities against civilians? Would you call them “liberators?” I suppose you could, in the same way that the German army liberated the people of occupied France in WWII.
If you’re a British citizen reading this, remember that our government supports these war crimes. Our government and our glorious leader spout slogans about freedom and liberation while innocent Iraqis are disappeared into prisons like Abu Ghraib, never to appear again.
No-one is ever brought to account because, to the grand liberators, Iraqi lives are worthless. Just label the people you kill “insurgents” and then you can literally get away with murder.