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{ An Autopsy of Democracy }

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Countless My Lai Massacres in Iraq


By Dahr Jamail

"05/30/06 "t r u t h o u t" -- The media feeding frenzy around what has been referred to as "Iraq's My Lai" has become frenetic. Focus on US Marines slaughtering at least 20 civilians in Haditha last November is reminiscent of the media spasm around the "scandal" of Abu Ghraib during April and May 2004.

Yet just like Abu Ghraib, while the media spotlight shines squarely on the Haditha massacre, countless atrocities continue daily, conveniently out of the awareness of the general public. Torture did not stop simply because the media finally decided, albeit in horribly belated fashion, to cover the story, and the daily slaughter of Iraqi civilians by US forces and US-backed Iraqi "security" forces had not stopped either.

Earlier this month, I received a news release from Iraq, which read, "On Saturday, May 13th, 2006, at 10:00 p.m., US Forces accompanied by the Iraqi National Guard attacked the houses of Iraqi people in the Al-Latifya district south of Baghdad by an intensive helicopter shelling. This led the families to flee to the Al-Mazar and water canals to protect themselves from the fierce shelling. Then seven helicopters landed to pursue the families who fled … and killed them. The number of victims amounted to more than 25 martyrs. US forces detained another six persons including two women named Israa Ahmed Hasan and Widad Ahmed Hasan, and a child named Huda Hitham Mohammed Hasan, whose father was killed during the shelling."

The report from the Iraqi NGO called The Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI) continued, "The forces didn't stop at this limit. They held an attack on May 15th, 2006, supported also by the Iraqi National Guards. They also attacked the families' houses, and arrested a number of them while others fled. US snipers then used the homes to target more Iraqis. The reason for this crime was due to the downing of a helicopter in an area close to where the forces held their attack."

The US military preferred to report the incident as an offensive where they killed 41 "insurgents," a line effectively parroted by much of the media.

On that same day, MHRI also reported that in the Yarmouk district of Baghdad, US forces raided the home of Essam Fitian al-Rawi. Al-Rawi was killed along with his son Ahmed; then the soldiers reportedly removed the two bodies along with Al-Rawi's nephew, who was detained.

Similarly, in the city of Samara on May 5, MHRI reported, "American soldiers entered the house of Mr. Zidan Khalif Al-Heed after an attack upon American soldiers was launched nearby the house. American soldiers entered this home and killed the family, including the father, mother and daughter who is in the 6th grade, along with their son, who was suffering from mental and physical disabilities."

This same group, MHRI, also estimated that between 4,000 and 6,000 Iraqi civilians were killed during the November 2004 US assault on Fallujah. Numbers which make those from the Haditha massacre pale in comparison.

Instead of reporting incidents such as these, mainstream outlets are referring to the Haditha slaughter as one of a few cases that "present the most serious challenge to US handling of the Iraq war since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal."

Marc Garlasco, of Human Rights Watch, told reporters recently, "What happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder. The Haditha massacre will go down as Iraq's My Lai."

Then there is the daily reality of sectarian and ethnic cleansing in Iraq, which is being carried out by US-backed Iraqi "security" forces. A recent example of this was provided by a representative of the Voice of Freedom Association for Human Rights, another Iraqi NGO which logs ongoing atrocities resulting from the US occupation.

"The representative … visited Fursan Village (Bani Zaid) with the Iraqi Red Crescent Al-Madayin Branch. The village of 60 houses, inhabited by Sunni families, was attacked on February 27, 2006, by groups of men wearing black clothes and driving cars from the Ministry of Interior. Most of the villagers escaped, but eight were caught and immediately executed. One of them was the Imam of the village mosque, Abu Aisha, and another was a 10-year-old boy, Adnan Madab. They were executed inside the room where they were hiding. Many animals (sheep, cows and dogs) were shot by the armed men also. The village mosque and most of the houses were destroyed and burnt."

The representative had obtained the information when four men who had fled the scene of the massacre returned to provide the details. The other survivors had all left to seek refuge in Baghdad. "The survivors who returned to give the details guided the representative and the Red Crescent personnel to where the bodies had been buried. They [the bodies] were of men, women and one of the village babies."

The director of MHRI, Muhamad T. Al-Deraji, said of this incident, "This situation is a simple part of a larger problem that is orchestrated by the government … the delay in protecting more villagers from this will only increase the number of tragedies."

Arun Gupta, an investigative journalist and editor with the New York Indypendent newspaper of the New York Independent Media Center, has written extensively about US-backed militias and death squads in Iraq. He is also the former editor at the Guardian weekly in New York and writes frequently for Z Magazine and Left Turn.

"The fact is, while I think the militias have, to a degree, spiraled out of US control, it's the US who trains, arms, funds, and supplies all the police and military forces, and gives them critical logistical support," he told me this week. "For instance, there were reports at the beginning of the year that a US army unit caught a "death squad" operating inside the Iraqi Highway Patrol. There were the usual claims that the US has nothing to do with them. It's all a big lie. The American reporters are lazy. If they did just a little digging, there is loads of material out there showing how the US set up the highway patrol, established a special training academy just for them, equipped them, armed them, built all their bases, etc. It's all in government documents, so it's irrefutable. But then they tell the media we have nothing to do with them and they don't even fact check it. In any case, I think the story is significant only insofar as it shows how the US tries to cover up its involvement."

Once again, like Abu Ghraib, a few US soldiers are being investigated about what occurred in Haditha. The "few bad apples" scenario is being repeated in order to obscure the fact that Iraqis are being slaughtered every single day. The "shoot first ask questions later" policy, which has been in effect from nearly the beginning in Iraq, creates trigger-happy American soldiers and US-backed Iraqi death squads who have no respect for the lives of the Iraqi people. Yet, rather than high-ranking members of the Bush administration who give the orders, including Bush himself, being tried for the war crimes they are most certainly guilty of, we have the ceremonial "public hanging" of a few lowly soldiers for their crimes committed on the ground.

In an interview with CNN on May 29th concerning the Haditha massacre, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace commented, "It's going to be a couple more weeks before those investigations are complete, and we should not prejudge the outcome. But we should, in fact, as leaders take on the responsibility to get out and talk to our troops and make sure that they understand that what 99.9 percent of them are doing, which is fighting with honor and courage, is exactly what we expect of them."

This is the same Peter Pace who when asked how things were going in Iraq by Tim Russert on Meet the Press this past March 5th said, "I'd say they're going well. I wouldn't put a great big smiley face on it, but I would say they're going very, very well from everything you look at …"

Things are not "going very, very well" in Iraq. There have been countless My Lai massacres, and we cannot blame 0.1% of the soldiers on the ground in Iraq for killing as many as a quarter of a million Iraqis, when it is the policies of the Bush administration that generated the failed occupation to begin with.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006. He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.


As Stan Goff observed, "The people at Mai Lai got caught. That stuff was happening every single day."

While it might very well be too late, I think this is worth repeating:

Hold On to Your Humanity

An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq

By STAN GOFF
(US Army Retired)



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Sunday, May 21, 2006

How the Pentagon "Supports The Troops"


'Just World News' by Helena Cobban: ER documentary tells some truths about war

"HBO executives say that top Army officials expressed enthusiasm for the documentary in March, but that the Pentagon's support has waned. They believe the military is troubled by the film's unflinching look at the consequences of the war on American soldiers, and that it might diminish public support.

The documentary, shot over 2 1/2 months in mid-2005, contains graphic and disturbing footage of soldiers reeling from their wounds -- in some cases, dying of them -- as Army medical personnel try to save them. The film illustrates the compassion and dedication of the staff of the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. But it also has many gruesome images, such as shots of soldiers' amputated limbs being dumped into trash bags, and pools of blood and viscera being mopped from a busy operating room floor. At one point, an Army chaplain, reciting last rites for a soldier, calls all the violence "senseless."

... The network screened the film in mid-March for senior Army officials, including Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey, and received an enthusiastic response, said Richard Plepler, HBO's executive vice president.

... Thereafter, Plepler said, the Army's support began to evaporate. The network's offer to co-sponsor a screening of the film this week at Fort Campbell, Ky., the home of the 86th, was turned down by the Pentagon without explanation. The Army wasn't an official sponsor of Monday's screening, and none of the service's highest-ranking officers or senior medical personnel attended, despite HBO's invitation.
. . . . . . . .
"


Reminds me of when one of the TV news networks did a feature on the 2000 dead U.S. troops (just the dead, mind you -- not the 18,000 or so additional U.S. casualties) -- basically putting a human face on each of them, and dedicating their hour-long show to mourning the soldiers' loss. Sounds pretty patriotic, right? Pretty propagandistic, even -- depending on your point of view (obviously no U.S. news organization is doing any special hour-long features showing pictures of all the 100,000+ Iraqis killed in an attempt to honor, mourn, and humanize them -- go figure).

And yet, what was the reaction of 99% of the right-wingers and war-mongers who are constantly braying and spitting "Support Our Troops! Support Our Troops!"? That's right -- they were adamantly opposed to the broadcast. They stripped themselves naked for the world to see, revealing their true nature: they don't give a rat's ass about the troops. The phrase is not even a euphemism, it's a sick Orwellian lie. "Support The Troops" -- if it means anything at all -- means simply "Fuck The Troops; Support The War". (Otherwise, of course, you're a coward or a traitor, or both, and should be hung or burned at the stake for your treason -- just like John Kerry and Max Cleland and John Murtha and Gore Vidal and Chalmers Johnson and probably Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Stockwell and Daniel Ellsberg and Howard Zinn and Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and even Collin Powell and Stan Goff and etc. etc. etc. etc. . . . . . . . .)

Everyone -- whether you're in favor of the war, against it, or somewhere in the middle -- NEEDS to see the reality of the war, on a constant basis. Those who support the war are of course far more responsible, and deserve to see images of the reality of the war every single hour of every single day. (And if you need that explained to you, you're either an infant or a sociopath.) But those who definitely, really, REALLY need to see it -- every single MINUTE, if possible -- are those responsible for the war. And when those people do not want the truth to be seen, you know they're nothing but corrupt lying spineless cowards who spit on the troops every single day -- while laughing at all of you war-supporters out there, at your gullibility, at your perfect ignorance, at your persistant masochism and self-delusion. . . .

Anyway.

I don't have HBO, so I couldn't watch this documentary. (**Note: in the previews, they're quick to point out that "It's not pro-war. It's not anti-war" . . . Because, you know, "fair and balanced" means that you're not allowed to be opposed to war -- you have to just not take a side one way or another. If you're opposed to the senseless murder of a couple hundred thousand people, then obviously you're just being "political" -- which, also, is inherently evil. [You're supposed to hate politics, remember?] Similarly, you can't show a documentary which asserts that "serial killers are bad" -- because others might have a different opinion. If you did that, you would be "partisan." You have to show both sides -- "well, Gary, some might say that killing lots of people needlessly is wrong. But our panel of experts disagrees. -- Now, these people out here on the street protesting mass murder -- who are they? Are they Hippies? Communists? Media Whores? Lazy Wellfare layabouts with nothing better to do? Do they even know what they're protesting? Are they simply America-Haters? -- Well, Jim, that seems to be the case . . .)

Anyway.

Who has a torrent file of "Baghdad ER"? Please link to it in the comments. I would appreciate it.

{ See also: "Baghdad ER" brings Iraqi horrors to US audience }



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Thursday, May 18, 2006

We need a new 'Church Committee'


It's not bad enough that we've got a known torturer and Death Squad supporter heading the National Intelligence, now we have to have this schmuck Hayden heading the CIA?? I'll say it again: these bastards simply have no shame. They would just as soon wipe their arses with the Constitution as read it.

This whole thing is so absurd, I can't even comprehend what's going on. I've caught bits and pieces of Senate hearings and Hayden's confirmation hearing, etc., and it just seems like we've truly gone down some kind of rabbit hole. The gall that it takes to appoint this guy the head the CIA in the midst of this scandal -- the term "Imperial Hubris" doesn't cover it. Republicans are never concerned (I should say almost never -- I have more respect for Arlen Specter every day . . .) with damning truths that are revealed about illegal and unconstitutional activities; they are only concerned that the truth came out -- concerned about the leaks, about the fact that people found out what's being done to them. If collecting our phone records is no big deal, then 1.) why are they doing it and 2.) why was it kept secret, lied about and covered up, and 3.) why are they upset that it's now been exposed -- while in the same breath saying "the American people support it"? How the fuck did they know "we" supported it if they didn't tell us about it? I honestly can't fathom it -- where are the "conservatives"? Where are all the people so concerned about "activists judges" -- the people who (supposedly) hold the Constitution as sacrosanct?

I guess there are one or two. I happened to catch Joe Scarborough the other day, and was surprised by his outrage (which came through a lot more on TV) :

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12756832/

(Of course, making a statement like "Now, for liberals who‘ve long been going against almost all of these issues to defend privacy, the news has to be disturbing" pretty much relegates everything he has to say as garbage, for me and I can't believe he expects to be taken seriously -- but then when you follow the NSA spying story with important stuff like Oprah and American Idol, you know you're getting serious journalism. But that's another matter . . .

It's bad enough that we've got secret courts like the FISA court in the first place -- which are completely unconstitutional, but perhaps a reasonable balance between liberty and security that most of us could live with. When they're deliberately circumventing the secret court which is known to basically rubber stamp warrant requests, you know what they're doing is massive, and massively illegal. Even if they're not wiretapping everyone's phone right now, there's no doubt in my mind that they would -- the law means absolutely nothing to these psychopaths.

Caught this on DemocracyNow! also: "New Internet Legislation Would Force ISPs To Track Customers' Online Activities"

But this one's even more disturbing (though no longer surprising, I suppose) : "Government Begins Tracking Phone Calls of Journalists"

As far as the Hayden nomination to head the CIA, as far as I'm concerned he's already disqualified because he's lied about the surveillance program to the public, and is on record as being completely clueless about the 4th Amendment:

"JONATHAN LANDAY: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue. And that has to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures.

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Actually, the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. That's what it says.

JONATHAN LANDAY: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

JONATHAN LANDAY: But does it not say probable --

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: No.

JONATHAN LANDAY: The court standard, the legal standard --

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

JONATHAN LANDAY: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, “We reasonably believe.” And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say “We reasonably believe.” You have to go to the FISA court or the Attorney General has to go to the FISA court and say, “We have probable cause.” And so what many people believe, and I would like you to respond to this, is that what you have actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of “reasonably believe” in place of “probable cause,” because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief. You have to show a probable cause. Can you respond to that, please?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Sure. I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order, alright? The Attorney General has averred to the lawfulness of the order. Just to be very clear, okay -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees at the National Security Agency is familiar with, it's the fourth, alright? And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. So, what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer and don't want to become one -- but what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is reasonable. And we believe -- I am convinced that we're lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.

AMY GOODMAN: The Deputy Director of National Intelligence, former head of the National Security Agency, Michael Hayden, being questioned yesterday at the National Press Club. That last reporter, after Jim Bamford asked his question, was Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, editor and publisher pointing out, well, this is the Fourth Amendment: the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. . . . . . . .
"


[ source: Former NSA Head Gen. Hayden Grilled by Journalists on NSA Eavesdropping on U.S. Citizens

audio clip here: http://cadaverpolitik.com/audio/Hayden-NSA-spying-probable-cause.mp3

"Well, gee, the Attorney General said it was legal to torture people, therefore it's legal." That's their logic.

The only way the legality of this is going to receive a serious hearing is if there are some serious law suits and the case goes up to the Supreme Court.

So far, there's one by the ACLU, and a class action law suit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It's a start . . .


—ungeziefer




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Marines killed Iraqi civilians 'in cold blood'


Marines killed Iraqi civilians 'in cold blood': US lawmaker - Yahoo! News

"It's much worse than reported in Time magazine." -- John Murtha

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US lawmaker and former Marine colonel accused US Marines of killing innocent Iraqi civilians after a Marine comrade had been killed by a roadside bomb.

ADVERTISEMENT

"Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," John Murtha told reporters. The November 19 incident occurred in Haditha, Iraq.

"There was no firefight" that led to the shootings at close range, the Vietnam war veteran said, denying early official accounts, which said that a roadside bomb had killed the Iraqis.

"There were no (roadside bombs) that killed these innocent people," he said.

Time magazine reported the shootings on March 27, based on an Iraqi human rights group and locals, who said that 15 unarmed Iraqis died, including women and children, when Marines barged into their home throwing grenades and shooting.

. . . . . . . .


The original TIME article is here: "Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?"



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Iraq Coalition Casualties


Iraq Coalition Casualties

It's disturbing to even just glance at the daily reports for one month (or rather half a month).

It does make one wonder, though, why those evil journalists don't report all the great news from Iraq. Personally, I went there for Spring Break and am pleased to report that I had a grand old time, and everything's going quite swimmingly. Thanks for asking. Might take an entire summer holiday there, I think.



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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Costs of war to top $320 billion


"
The Senate will likely pass another emergency spending bill the president has requested, sending the price far higher than any original estimates.

James Rosen, Star Tribune


WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate this week is expected to pass an emergency spending bill providing $71 billion for military costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushing total Iraq war costs to at least $320 billion and generating calls for a more transparent handling of those costs.

This will be the fourth emergency spending measure President Bush has sought from Congress. While the Iraq spending bills have gained huge majorities from lawmakers, Republicans are beginning to join Democrats in criticizing the use of emergency funding bills to pay for the war, a practice that keeps the costs from adding to the normal federal budget.

"The whole idea of this [as] supplemental is something the American people should reject," said Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican. "We have been in a war now going into the fourth year. We should have the money for funding this war as part of the regular budget. It should not be an emergency supplemental."

The Bush administration defends the practice on the grounds of the unpredictable nature of spending on the war.

The war certainly has cost more than the administration originally hoped.

When Lawrence Lindsey, then President Bush's top economic adviser, said in September 2002 that war in Iraq might cost the United States as much as $200 billion, other top aides rebuked him and Bush fired him three months later.

Lindsey's projection was indeed way off the mark -- on the low side.

Soaring costs driven by the harsh Iraqi climate's wear and tear on tanks, trucks and helicopters have more than tripled U.S. spending on equipment -- from $7.2 billion in 2003 to $24.4 billion this year -- according to a new report by the bipartisan Congressional Research Service.

The Iraq campaign's total cost is still well behind the $549 billion price tag for the decade-long war in Vietnam, after adjusting for inflation. But the government's rate of spending on Iraq has outpaced the average spending rate in Vietnam, passing $8 billion a month.

. . . . . . . .
"


—ungeziefer




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Tuesday, May 02, 2006

The Raw Story | New Army documents reveal US knew of and approved torture before Abu Ghraib scandal


Documents Reveal US approved torture before Abu Ghraib scandal

By Raw Story


05/02/06 "Raw Story" -- -- New Army documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union today reveal that Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez ordered interrogators to "go to the outer limits" to get information from detainees. The documents also show that senior government officials were aware of abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.
"When our leaders allow and even encourage abuse at the 'outer limits', America suffers," said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. "A nation that works to bring freedom and liberty to other parts of the world shouldn't stomach brutality and inhumanity within its ranks. This abuse of power was engineered and accepted at the highest levels of our government."

Among the documents released today by the ACLU is a May 19, 2004 Defense Intelligence Agency document implicating Sanchez in potentially abusive interrogation techniques. In the document, an officer in charge of a team of interrogators stated that there was a 35-page order spelling out the rules of engagement that interrogators were supposed to follow, and that they were encouraged to "go to the outer limits to get information from the detainees by people who wanted the information." When asked to whom the officer was referring, the officer answered "LTG Sanchez." The officer stated that the expectation coming from "Headquarters" was to break the detainees.

The ACLU also released an Information Paper entitled "Allegations of Detainee Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan" dated April 2, 2004, two weeks before the world saw the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The paper outlined the status of 62 investigations of detainee abuse and detainee deaths. Cases include assaults, punching, kicking and beatings, mock executions, sexual assault of a female detainee, threatening to kill an Iraqi child to "send a message to other Iraqis," stripping detainees, beating them and shocking them with a blasting device, throwing rocks at handcuffed Iraqi children, choking detainees with knots of their scarves and interrogations at gunpoint.

The ACLU said the document makes clear that while President Bush and other officials assured the world that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of "a few bad apples," the government knew that abuse was happening in numerous facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 62 cases being investigated at the time, at least 26 involved detainee deaths. Some of the cases had already gone through a court-martial proceeding. The abuses went beyond Abu Ghraib, and touched Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other detention centers in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Tikrit, as well as Orgun-E in Afghanistan.

"These documents are further proof that the abuse of detainees was widespread and systemic, and not aberrational," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. "We know that senior officials endorsed this abuse, but these officials have yet to be held accountable."

Last week, the government authenticated that two videos released by the Palm Beach Post in March 2005 were videos that the government was withholding from the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act request. The videos are part of a set that has come to be known as the "Ramadi Madness" videos and were made by members of the West Palm Beach-based Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry Regiment. The two scenes the government authenticated are called "See Haj Run" and "Blood Clot." They depict scenes of urban battle and persons being captured and detained by U.S. forces.

Among the more than 9,000 pages of Defense Department documents made public by the ACLU today are several investigations detailing cruel and degrading treatment and killings. The investigations include:

• An investigation into the death of a detainee at Forward Operating Base Rifles near Al Asad, Iraq established probable cause to believe that several soldiers assaulted a detainee and committed negligent homicide, and conspired to cover up the death. The detainee died when a soldier lifted him up from the floor by placing a baton under his chin, fracturing his hyoid bone. It appears that the soldiers received written letters of reprimand and counseling. The full document is online here.

• A heavily redacted e-mail dated May 25, 2004 shows that a presumed officer or civilian government official was told of three reports of abuse of detainees described as "probably true/valid." One detainee was "in such poor physical shape from obvious beatings that [name redacted] asked the MP's to note his condition before he proceeded with interrogation." Another detainee was "in such bad shape ... that he was laying down in his own feces." These cases seem to have occurred in Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper. The full document is online here.

• An investigation shows a doctor cleared a detainee for further interrogations, despite claims he had been beaten and shocked with a taser. The medic confirmed that the detainee's injuries were consistent with his allegations, stating, "Everything he described he had on his body." Yet, the medic cleared him for further interrogation, giving him Tylenol for the pain. There is no indication that the medic reported this abuse. The full document is online here.


Today's documents come in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released detailing the torture and abuse of detainees. The ACLU recently launched a new powerful search engine for the public to access the documents at www.aclu.org/torturefoiasearch. The search engine allows people to uncover details about abuse that may not have been reported in the media, said the ACLU.

The FOIA lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Amrit Singh, Jameel Jaffer and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
"



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