More Torture Discovered in Iraqi Jails

Posted on Apr 24, 2006

From The Washington Post

A U.S.-Iraqi inspection team photographed men being held at an Interior Ministry detention center in Baghdad Feb. 16.

U.S. inspectors are not removing from Iraqi jails prisoners who show signs of being tortured by Iraqi jailers—as the U.S. has pledged to do.

This is progress—of a sort. Now, instead of torturing the prisoners ourselves, we’re turning a blind eye to Iraqi-on-Iraqi torture.

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Washington Post:

BAGHDAD—Last Nov. 13, U.S. soldiers found 173 incarcerated men, some of them emaciated and showing signs of torture, in a secret bunker in an Interior Ministry compound in central Baghdad. The soldiers immediately transferred the men to a separate detention facility to protect them from further abuse, the U.S. military reported.

Since then, there have been at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq’s Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry. Two sources involved with the inspections, one Iraqi official and one U.S. official, said abuse of prisoners was found at all the sites visited through February. U.S. military authorities confirmed that signs of severe abuse were observed at two of the detention centers.

But U.S. troops have not responded by removing all the detainees, as they did in November. Instead, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, only a handful of the most severely abused detainees at a single site were removed for medical treatment. Prisoners at two other sites were removed to alleviate overcrowding. U.S. and Iraqi authorities left the rest where they were.

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