Monitoring Desk
BAGHDAD: April 22 will mark the 17th anniversary of the US’ capture of the Abu Ghraib prison west of the Iraqi capital that went on to bear witness to unchecked murderous and sadistic torture by American forces under Washington’s tutelage.
A torture chamber under ex-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the facility retained its function throughout the American control from 2003 to 2006, when it held many thousands of people, including as many as 3,800 detainees at the height of the scandal.
However, only a year after its capture, primetime international broadcasts and wide-circulation reportages began to reveal that its new tenants were outdoing the former Iraqi dictator’s atrocities there by far. The revisited bestiality this time ran the gamut of inhumanity, from torture —featuring physical and sexual abuse as well as rape and sodomy — all the way up to murder.
Discovery of damning photos showing troops abusing inmates on a CD-ROM led to an investigation into the case and far-reaching coverage, including one by CBS News’ “60 Minutes II” in 2004, a report by The New Yorker in the same year, and a 2006 reportage by Austra-lian television network SBS’s program “Dateline.”
The very first year of the American control over the prison witnessed the death of one detainee, while the rest of the atrocities were grave enough to secure even the then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s description as “blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.” These included punching, slapping, and kicking detainees, forcing them into embarrassing conditions and recording them, keeping them naked, other instances of sexual abuse as grave as rape, unleashing guard dogs onto them, and taking photographs of dead detainees.
In May 2004, the US Justice Department announced that it was looking into three suspicious deaths of detainees, two in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and the involvement of the US spy agency CIA and contractors in the deaths.
Eleven US forces were convicted of crimes relating to the goings-on in the prison in 2003. They were mostly given several-months-long prison sentences during legal procedures that took as long as eight years. The convicts included only one officer, who was eventually cleared of all wrongdoing, and had the conviction and reprimand removed from his record. (PRESS TV)
