The Torture Files

More disturbing were occasional accounts of torture. Among other testimonies was that of 39-year-old Khreisan Khalis Aballey, whose brother was shot and killed when coalition troops raided their home last April, and who was detained, along with his 80-year-old father, after that raid. “During his interrogation,” the Amnesty memo alleges, “he was made to stand or kneel facing a wall for seven-and-a-half days, hooded, and handcuffed tightly with plastic strips. At the same time a bright light was placed next to his hood and distorted music was playing the whole time. During all this period he was deprived of sleep.”

Another Amnesty informant, a Saudi national named Abdallah Khudhran al-Shamran, alleged that after his arrest in April he “was subjected to beatings and electric shocks. Other torture methods reported included being suspended from his legs and having his penis tied. He also reported sleep deprivation through constant loud music.”

The Amnesty memorandum recounted the case of Radi Nu’ma, who was arrested by the British Royal Military Police in May and died in custody the day of his arrest. British soldiers allegedly gave his family a letter stating, “Radi Nu’ma suffered a heart attack while we were asking him questions about his son. We took him to the military hospital. For further information, go to the hospital.”

British authorities have promised to investigate the case of Radi Nu’ma, as well as the death of Baha al-Maliki in Basra. They have been somewhat more forthcoming about acknowledging the possibility of abuses than the coalition’s U.S. command. Though coalition officials responded in December to other sections of Amnesty’s July memorandum, Nicole Choueiry, an Amnesty spokesperson, said, “Nowhere in the reply is there any mention of the allegations of torture or the use of excessive force.” Since the memo’s release, she added, “We have continuously been receiving allegations of torture.”

If Amnesty International’s allegations have been publicized widely in the European press, the American media have largely been silent on the issue. Former Green Party candidate Medea Benjamin, who visited Iraq in December with the group Occupation Watch, speculates, “It’s beyond the comfort zone of the media to even be talking about U.S. torture of detainees.”

Occupation Watch is one of several groups continuing to interview former detainees (Amnesty left Iraq last August for security reasons) and has also collected allegations of beatings and the use of electric shock in interrogation. In an e-mail, Dahr Jamail, an Occupation Watch associate in Iraq, recounted the case of Sadiq Zoman Abrahim, a 55-year-old man who was detained by U.S. troops during an August home raid in Kirkuk. His family learned, Jamail reports, that he had been transferred to a detention center at the Tikrit airport. They eventually found him at a hospital in Tikrit, where, Jamail says, he had been dropped by American soldiers. “The doctors at the hospital in Tikrit,” Jamail writes, “after performing diagnostic tests, informed the family that Mr. Abrahim had suffered massive head trauma, electrocution, and other bruises on his arms . . . The family was told that he was in an unrecoverable state and would be in a coma for the rest of his life.”

Christian PeaceMaker Teams (CPT), another U.S.-based peace group, has been aiding the families of detainees and collecting testimony from former detainees since last May. After several requests for help from Iraqis with relatives in custody, says Gene Stoltzfus, a CPT spokesman, “We decided to take on a few cases and see if we could work our way through the system, meaning could we get confirmation that they existed, could we locate them, why were they there, just basic questions.” They were able to successfully locate detainees in less than half of the cases they took on, Stoltzfus says, though the situation has improved somewhat since. The group now focuses most of its resources on detention issues.

One CPT report describes the home raids in which many Iraqis are detained. Coalition troops, it says, “storm houses in the middle of the night where families with small children live in the same manner that they storm military facilities. They often break through the front gate with armored vehicles or explosives and break through the doors and/or windows of the house with their weapons aimed at anything that moves. Sometimes they come in shooting.” Iraqis are frequently injured and sometimes killed in these raids, and allegations that soldiers confiscate money and property are common. “The Iraqis say there’s no difference between the Americans and Saddam,” Stoltzfus says. “This is what used to happen, and this is what’s still going on.”

CPT has produced a statistical summary of 72 of the detention cases it has handled. In not one of them was the detainee allowed legal representation, tried or convicted for a crime, and in no case did coalition authorities on their own initiative inform relatives of a detainee’s whereabouts. In 10 cases, the detainees reported abuse ranging from beatings and electrocution to deprivation of food and water.

In one particularly bizarre case, CPT recorded the testimony of a man named Abd al-Rahman, a former employee of the Ministry of Agriculture. His home was raided three times last June. He was not there the first two times, but alleges that soldiers took money and