Files suggest US troops tried to hide abuses
End The War
WASHINGTON -- A former Iraqi detainee told Army investigators that a US
soldier forced him to sign a statement that he had not been abused even
though American interrogators in September 2003 had dislocated his
arms, beaten his leg with a bat, crushed his nose, and put an unloaded
gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, according to newly released
internal military documents.
In addition, a sergeant at a military camp in southern Afghanistan told
an Army investigator in July 2004 that his unit erased a series of
digital photographs showing guards beating detainees and aiming guns at
hooded prisoners. The sergeant said the pictures were deleted after
photos from the Abu Ghraib prison appeared in the media, out of the
unit's fear that the pictures could spark a second wave of scandal.
The disclosures provide the first evidence that in both the Iraq and
Afghanistan theaters of war, soldiers involved in alleged abuse
incidents may have sought to suppress evidence of their actions,
muddying any inquiry into how pervasive the abuse of detainees was.
Other documents released yesterday also suggest that while the military
has said it is investigating all allegations of abuse, it is also
closing many of the investigations on the grounds that no conclusion
can be reached.
''These raise the question of how many other allegations of abuse were
buried in the same way," said Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the
American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed a Freedom of
Information Act request seeking government documents on detainee
abuses. ''That's very troubling because we already think that abuse was
pervasive, but maybe there is a whole layer of abuse that we haven't
seen."
Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman, released a fact
sheet about the documents and a statement saying, ''The Army remains
committed to addressing identified problems in detainee operations and
to communicating the progress to the public."
The newly disclosed abuse allegations were among 988 pages of Army
Criminal Investigation Division files released yesterday by the ACLU,
which is making the documents public when it obtains them from various
federal agencies.
In addition to indicating two examples of evidence of abuse that
allegedly was suppressed, the documents also indicated that military
investigators often closed cases quickly on the grounds that they did
not have enough evidence to prove or refute the claims, Jaffer said.
''What we do see here is more evidence of a pattern in which the
government failed to aggressively investigate credible allegations of
abuse," he said.
The files released yesterday cover eight separate Army investigations
in detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the one in
which the Iraqi detainee was forced to sign a statement saying he was
not abused -- in exchange for his freedom -- and the sergeant in
Afghanistan who said soldiers wiped out digital pictures of abuse.