Americans follow Saddam’s traditions of torturing prisoners

CBS TV Channel broadcast the photos of the US soldiers humiliating Iraqis in Abu-Garaib prison.
Iraqi prisoners were forced to make oral sex and fight each other, they were beaten by Americans who made pictures of all this. Smiling Americans are in these photos as well.

The prisoner on the photo has electric wires attached to his genitals – he was probably tortured with electric power. On another photo a dog is attacking a prisoner. A dead body of a fiercely beaten Iraqi is on the next photo. However, the most shocking images will remain unknown to public: a prisoner testifies that the male soldier working as a translator, raped the Iraqi while his female fellow-soldier was watching the scene and making pictures – there are no these photos in CBS “collection”.
The US Army Command established an investigation task force which is studying the several dozens of photos and is investigating the case. According to the investigators, there are no doubts in the prison wards’ guilt. 17 soldiers and officers were dismissed, charges were brought to the six of them. US authorities forbade broadcasting the photos, but CBS did it without permission.

Currently the name of only one torturer is known – sergeant Chip Frederic who had worked as a prison warder back in the USA and came to Iraq on a contract basis. He tried to find excuses for his conduct, but they did not sound convincing enough,

"I was a good prison warder, and later was trusted with conducting interrogations. The criminals quickly admitted their guilt to us – in several hours”.

”Yes, I saw people being beaten. Sometimes we had to use force to make prisoners cooperate, this was allowed by the rules. We studied several most common Arabic phrases, but they did not want to listen to us, and sometimes we had to push a prisoner a little bit”.

The statement of the sergeant’s lawyer is much more interesting,

“The feeling of having power, the belief that he was assisting CIA and did a good thing, excited the young man from a small town in Virginia… Good fellows do such things to help people and for the sake of justice, this is very important for them”.

The sergeant and his fellow-warders claim that they had no idea of the Geneva Convention. Chip Frederic uses this as excuse for himself stating that he was not informed how to treat prisoners of war. However, no prisoner or human being can ever be treated this way, whoever this person is.

The investigators accuse the prison administration. But it is not clear who is to be blamed here – several persons or the entire system. This is one of the key questions to be clarified during the investigation.

Commander of the military operations in Iraq General Marc Kimmit was shocked with the photos. Here are exerts from his statement, “We are all terrified with soldiers… We understand that our soldiers can also be imprisoned, and now we cannot expect that they will be treated with respect... One should remember that the wrongdoers are not the entire US Army. One should not make judgments about the all 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq, basing on the wrongdoers’ conduct”.

The general confessed that some similar incidents had already taken place in Iraq.

During Saddam Hussein’s rule Abu-Garaib was the most terrible place in Iraq. Few prisoners were lucky to leave the prison alive, there were terrible stories about tortures and executions of prisoners there. Americans claimed that they came to Iraq to stop Saddam’s brutal dictatorship, but became not much better than Saddam.

Maya Peredonova