Pervasive Abuse Alleged by Freed Detainees, Red Cross

BAGHDAD —  It begins with a blast at the front gate in the middle of the night. Troops pound their way into the home. Males are rounded up. They disappear into a chaotic system of U.S.-run jails and prison camps and emerge months later, sometimes battered and often never knowing of what crime they are accused.

That has been the experience of many of the nearly 40,000 Iraqis who have been detained and released by U.S. forces occupying Iraq for more than a year.

As much of the world focuses on Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, dozens of detainees and their families, along with scathing reports from international human rights groups, describe mistreatment at detention centers under U.S. control from Basra and Umm al Qasr in the south to Tikrit and Mosul in northern Iraq.

Even as the White House continues to argue that photographed abuse at Abu Ghraib was an isolated case, interviews with detainees and human rights reports demonstrate that abuse in various forms was systemwide.

“They just don’t know how to handle us properly,” said Ghazwan Alusi, 26, a car dealer held in two prisons for four months late last year. He described being transported from one detention center to another 600 miles away, hogtied by the arms and legs to other prisoners in the back of an uncovered truck.

“We were treated worse than animals,” he said.

Much of the treatment alleged by freed Iraqi prisoners does not constitute torture. Not everyone was subjected to the aggressive interrogation techniques, from sleep deprivation to threats and beatings, that now are banned. And it remains to be seen whether any other detention facilities were as bad as cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib, where sexual torture was employed.

But Iraqis say even the routine treatment is humiliating and unjust, especially for the vast majority of those rounded up in sweeps by U.S. troops, who cast an ever-wider net, sometimes with faulty intelligence. The detainees were often denied access to lawyers and seldom charged with a crime.

Sheik Abdul Sattar, 71, was watching television with his wife of 50 years in the early morning of April 25 when he heard the sound of machine-gun fire, he said. Afraid that a grandchild had found the family Kalashnikov, he shouted out, “What’s going on?” and started to hoist himself off the sofa.

As he looked up, he saw a U.S. soldier towering over him and heard him shout: “Put your hands up!”

Sattar watched the soldiers throw his grown sons to the floor, handcuff them with plastic “flexicuffs” and pull hoods over their heads. A moment later, it was Sattar’s turn. He was pushed flat on his face, he said, a bag was pulled over his head and his hands were tightly cuffed behind his back. An ill man who walked with difficulty, he was dragged on the ground, suffering bruises and a twisted ankle.

Hours later, the hood was taken off and Sattar found himself in the total darkness of a closet so narrow that he could only stand. It was almost a day before he saw light again, he said, emanating from an electric bulb in a small, wood-frame cell.

The details of Sattar’s arrest are similar to those of thousands of Iraqis detained by U.S.-led occupation forces, according to a February report by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The report alleges that the abuses were part of a pattern at detention centers across Iraq. The Red Cross lists a dozen methods used, including three that involve sexual abuse.

Throughout the first months of the occupation, detainees frequently made an initial and indefinite stop at Baghdad’s international airport and its Camp Cropper, which housed a military intelligence section charged with running interrogations and screening new detainees.

Alusi, the car dealer, said he was picked up by a U.S. patrol on May 16, 2003, for a curfew violation. He was taken to a nearby school and told that he would be freed at dawn.

But in the morning, soldiers put a bag on his head, bound his hands and bundled him off to the airport, he said. He and 300 to 400 other detainees were corralled in a dusty patch of desert surrounded by concertina wire.

Alusi was jailed alongside Sadun Hamadi, the 75-year-old former speaker of the Iraqi National Assembly, who lay on a single blanket in a sweltering tent, using his shoes as a pillow.

Alusi said he offered to bring water to the respected statesman, but the guards required Hamadi to get it himself. In his underwear, before all to see, Hamadi crossed the sand to retrieve a bit of water.

“Oh my God,” Alusi recalled thinking to himself. “If they do this to him, a man of his position, what is in store for the rest of us?”

According to the Red Cross, those who potentially could provide useful information at the airport were singled out for aggressive questioning. It “was part of the military intelligence process to hold a [detainee] naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a prolonged period, to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion ... to secure their cooperation.”

As the hot summer dragged on, Alusi and other inmates protested. Some became violent.

About 1,200 were transferred to Camp Bucca, another detention facility in the southern port town of Umm al Qasr. Alusi and the others were loaded into the backs of metal-paneled trucks. Each prisoner was cuffed to the next, at both the arms and legs, bouncing painfully over the rutted back roads on the 600-mile journey, their heads slamming against the sides of the trucks.

At one point, an American soldier bumped his head and was evacuated by helicopter. But the prisoners, Alusi said, were swooning and retching from the heat, with little water and no relief. He claimed that several prisoners died, but that could not be confirmed.

Alusi said conditions were better at Camp Bucca. But the camp gets mixed reviews from human rights groups.

The Red Cross said intimidation and the threat of attack -- such as aiming a rifle at a prisoner’s head -- was used during interrogation at Camp Bucca, but beatings and hoodings were far less common than in other detention centers. Guards regarded their charges with hostility and “general contempt,” the Red Cross said.

The Christian Peacemakers Team, a U.S.-based advocacy group, documented 72 cases of abuse at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq between May 31 and Dec. 20. It reported its findings to L. Paul Bremer III, the occupation’s top civilian official, in a letter dated Jan. 9 and to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of military forces, in a letter a day earlier.

Privately, the Red Cross began notifying occupation officials of abuse last year, and Amnesty International raised the alarm publicly last summer. The Los Angeles Times wrote about allegations of prisoner abuse as far back as July, as did other media sources.

Abu Ghraib figures prominently in the reports, but so do the other facilities. In its findings, the Red Cross also singles out seven smaller jails in Baghdad for allegations of abusive treatment.

One of them, the Salhiyye jail, is where Suad Mirza spent four of the six months she was in detention. Mirza was arrested in mid-July, and her two sons, Hussein and Ali, 2 1/2 weeks before that. Hussein, a high school senior, was studying for final exams when American soldiers burst into the Mirza home. Ali, 22, a university student, had just returned from a trip to Jordan.

Mirza understands that her husband’s close relationship with ousted dictator Saddam Hussein would have focused scrutiny on her family. A Kurd, Sabegh Mirza was a Hussein bodyguard for two decades. But Suad Mirza said her husband was forced out of government a dozen years ago. He suffered a series of strokes and has been a bed-ridden paraplegic for about five years.

“I swear to God, maybe my husband and I knew Saddam. But my son [Hussein]? He was 6 when my husband left the regime,” she said. From the time she arrived at the jail, she was questioned regularly by an American officer she described as tall and fit with blondish hair and blue eyes, accompanied by an Iraqi interrogator.

Mirza is the rare woman who has come forward and talked about her imprisonment -- most are too ashamed or terrified. Mirza said she was not physically abused. But her interrogators repeatedly threatened her family in an effort to extract information. They threatened to have her daughters raped and her house looted, she said. They jailed her, initially, in a crowded cell with common male criminals who she believed were on drugs.

“This woman is a terrorist,” she said she overheard the U.S. officer telling the Iraqi. “Treat her in the worst possible way.”

Most of the questioning centered on whether she knew anything about the insurgency and on a crate of pistols -- her husband’s collection, she said -- found in her house during last year’s raid.

She eventually was released without being charged. Her older son, Ali, remains at Abu Ghraib, and Hussein, 18, is at Camp Bucca.

“The Iraqi people are angry, primarily because so many people are being detained arbitrarily. It’s a harsh and inhumane detention,” said Thamer Sultan, a tribal leader from the largely anti-American town of Tikrit. Now, with the Abu Ghraib scandal revealed, he said, “anger over the mistreatment is just an extension of that already pervasive anger. It only adds to the outrage.”

Sultan, whose son, nephew and cousin are or have been detained, is a former army general who had a falling out with Saddam Hussein several years ago and now is a consultant to the occupation authority in the Tikrit region. His son, Omar, was held for a month and beaten by military police in December, he said, even though the young man was pointing out arms caches and providing other intelligence.

When Sultan complained about his son’s beating to Bremer’s representative in Tikrit, he was told that such treatment at the hands of U.S. soldiers was impossible.

“The bruises and marks were visible,” Sultan said.