Abuse Investigation Includes 25 Deaths

Abdel Rahman remembers an American soldier pointing a gun at his head and groin. You’ve been found guilty of killing our troops and must die, he says the soldier told him. The soldier pulled the trigger. It was a stun gun. The electrical shock jolted through Rahman’s body. He fainted.

Said Salim talks of beatings as being routine. The soldier named “Barrera” was especially dedicated, Salim says, forcing him to the ground and stepping on his back while proclaiming: “I’m an American.”

Muwaffaq Arrawi was in detention for only two weeks. In that time, he says, his American guards rarely untied his hands or raised the heavy hood shrouding his head. They played loud music to prevent the prisoners from sleeping and subjected them to long hours of interrogation, then exhausting exercises, all designed, Arrawi believes, to debilitate their spirits.

The stories told by numerous Iraqi prisoners who have emerged from the U.S.-run jail system here paint a picture of harsh and often abusive treatment as guards and interrogators sought to “soften up” the men and women in their custody. Thousands of prisoners are being held without charges and for indefinite periods in an effort to gain information or simply to punish.

Long before photographs made public last week showed some of the more sadistic forms of treatment at the sprawling Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, Iraqis have complained of what they said was systematic and extensive abuse. And it goes beyond Abu Ghraib to many of the 16 other detention facilities run by the U.S. military or its subcontractors, former detainees and human rights activists say.

Although none of the stories recounted here can be independently verified, they are consistent with a 53-page investigative report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba that found “egregious acts and grave breaches of international” law at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, two of the largest facilities.

Several prisoners interviewed Tuesday bore physical signs of harsh treatment or carried “enemy prisoner of war” cards that showed they had spent time in American detention camps.

Rahman, the 37-year-old Iraqi who recounted the mock execution carried out with a stun gun, said U.S. troops searched his home in a working-class Baghdad neighborhood twice before finally finding him at 2 a.m. on a sultry night last June. Raiding his house with armored vehicles and a helicopter circling, he said, they threw him to the floor, tied his hands behind his back and held a gun to his wife’s head.

He was held for four months in at least three different detention centers -- transferred in one case, he says, so that the U.S. Army could avoid the prying eyes of Red Cross inspectors. Most of his time was spent at the prison at Baghdad’s international airport, where, he said, the soldier pronounced his death sentence and fired electrical shocks into his body.

“I fell like a roll of toilet paper,” said Rahman, recounting how he collapsed in pain. He awoke to find himself in a prison infirmary, hooked up to an IV.

His interrogators apparently suspected him of being a supporter of the armed resistance and repeatedly demanded to know about his associates and their plans. Rahman is an official in the Iraqi Ministry of Trade, and although his sympathies are clearly anti-American, he said, he was not involved in the insurgency.

Rahman first described his treatment in a written complaint submitted to an Iraqi human rights organization last October.

‘Variety’ of Beatings

In the interview Tuesday, he said he was subjected to “every variety” of beating. Sometimes the soldiers would handcuff his right arm across his back to his left leg. Other times one soldier would force him face down on the ground, shoving his knee into his back while another soldier would step a booted foot on his head, he said. The pressure was so great he’d vomit, Rahman recalled.

“I realized they were not as intent on getting information as on humiliating us,” Rahman said.

In the Arab world, humiliation in its myriad forms is among the most egregious of abuses because of the way it strikes at dignity and manhood. For Iraqis, subjugating a man before his wife, using a foot or boot to strike a man, or in any way compromising a man’s sexuality or a woman’s modesty -- these are unforgivable transgressions.

Rahman, who has communicated with dozens of other former prisoners, said he was convinced sexual abuse of male -- and the small number of female -- prisoners occurred. He recounted a meeting that prisoner representatives had with the U.S. commanders of the airport facility in late June or early July when a female detainee complained that women were being raped. The officers scoffed at the claims, Rahman said.

“I am totally destroyed from inside,” he said. “Why does one human being, an American, treat another this way?”

Salim, the man who remembered his main tormenter as “Barerra,” was captured by U.S. troops as he attempted to leave the country in the early days of the invasion last year. He said he was transferred from one detention center to another, first at a remote location in the desert and ending up at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.

“He would start by hitting with his hand,” Salim said, referring to the guard. “You can’t respond. Guns are pointed at you, and your hands are tied behind your back.”

His interrogators demanded to know his relationship with high-ranking officials of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party or the location of Republican Guard units or fedayeen militias.

Salim is a Somali who said he had been studying in Iraq since 1993. He said he was one of 120 people from other Arabic-speaking or Islamic countries who were detained along with several thousand Iraqis at Camp Bucca.

Most of what he considered abuse was psychological, he said, including being required to remain silent for days on end or risk another beating.

But the most chilling memory involved two Syrian prisoners whom he said the guards took away one night. The Syrians returned in the wee hours the next morning, barely able to walk. They refused to talk about what happened to them, Salim recalled.

Only when a Muslim cleric counseled them did they finally say they had been sodomized by the guards, he said.

Salim was released March 7.

Hooded, Handcuffed

Days earlier, Arrawi said, he was seized in a midnight raid on his Baghdad home along with his father, three brothers and a brother-in-law. The U.S. forces crashed through the wrought-iron gate on his driveway, through the plaque that says, “There is no God but the one God, Allah,” then placed an explosive in the family’s front door to get inside.

The soldiers rounded up the men of the family, handcuffing each one and placing a hood over his head. They piled all six men into the back of a Humvee, one on top of the other. They were not allowed to talk, Arrawi, a lawyer, recalled.

In the raid, a soldier landed his rifle butt just above Arrawi’s left eye, he said. It required stitches and his eyes were black and blue for days. He and his father, Sammi, have puncture marks on their wrists where they say the cuffs cut into the flesh for the duration of their detention.

Sammi Arrawi was a brigadier general in Hussein’s army. He turned against Hussein in 1989, criticizing the Iraq-Iran war, and ended up in prison for 13 months, he said. He has papers indicating that he was vetted early in the occupation by U.S. authorities and not seen as a threat.

In the days after their arrest, father and sons were held in the airport detention center. The only times the hoods were lifted were during grueling interrogation sessions or mealtimes. Their hands were never unbound. The younger Arrawi said his questioners accused him first of having killed U.S. troops, then of having aided and abetted those who did the killing, then of knowing who was directing those who did the killing. After two weeks, they let him go.

His father was held for only a few days. But in that time, he said, the American guards forced him to stand, hooded, on one leg with his arms extended straight up for hours on end.

“It was hard for me with my bad back,” Sammi Arrawi, 56, said in his living room, with his son and a grandson by his side. “I fainted. I fell and the soldier kicked me for having fallen. Then he put a second bag on my head.

“It’s psychological warfare,” he continued. “They want to humiliate you and exhaust you to the biggest degree.”

Every time the men started to go to sleep at night, on the hard prison floor with a single blanket, the soldiers would blast American rap music to keep them awake, the Arrawi men said. Their toilet was a hole in an open-air yard.

The only sympathetic officer, they said, was a medic. But he was reprimanded by a superior officer for attending to the prisoners. “Don’t bother,” the officer told the medic, the Arrawis said. “They’re all animals.”

The other three Arrawi sons were transferred to Abu Ghraib, where they are being held. Their brother-in-law was freed.

Rahman, meanwhile, was released last October. He was part of a group of 45 Iraqis whom the Americans deposited on a street in central Baghdad.

They emerged from the bus that carried them, scruffy with long beards and filthy clothing. To this day, Rahman says he is not sure why he was freed.

He quickly began to denounce his abuse, but few listened. The publication of the notorious Abu Ghraib photos and the scandal that has followed has given him and Iraqi human rights activists new impetus for pursuing their cause.

“At first I was not able to speak as easily,” Rahman said. “I feel more free now. It is a good opportunity.”