Documents Provide More Details on Prisoner Abuse Allegations

Government documents made public Thursday provide fresh details about allegations of abuse by guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other detention facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The alleged incidents include a female prisoner who was sexually humiliated by U.S. military intelligence officers and a male inmate who was shot at to force him to cooperate.

The documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under court order, include an internal FBI memo from May indicating that bureau employees based at Abu Ghraib had witnessed a number of troubling incidents, but “did not believe [that what they saw] rose to the level of misconduct or mistreatment.”

The materials also describe the deaths of three Abu Ghraib prisoners, all reportedly of heart attacks, within days of each other in August 2003, just weeks before the incidents of photographed abuse occurred at the prison.

Eight U.S. soldiers have been charged with crimes in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Three of them have pleaded guilty, including Staff Sgt. Ivan L. “Chip” Frederick II, the highest-ranking officer to be implicated, who was sentenced Thursday to eight years in prison.

The latest documents were released after a federal court directed the Defense Department and other government agencies to comply with the ACLU’s request under the Freedom of Information Act for more details about alleged prisoner torture and abuse since the Bush administration’s war on terror began following the September 2001 attacks on the U.S.

“After more than a year of stonewalling, the government has finally released some documents, though many are heavily redacted,” said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney. “Unfortunately, the government continues to withhold records that would show who was ultimately responsible for the systemic abuse of detainees.”

A preliminary review by The Times of some of the newly released material showed one case in which three U.S. soldiers were each ordered detained for a month, fined up to $750 and reduced in rank for an incident in October 2003 in which a female Iraqi prisoner was partially stripped, abused and threatened with more physical harm.

The woman told Army investigators that she was in her cell at the Salhyat Prison in Baghdad when three military interrogators escorted her down the cellblock to an abandoned cell. While one of the soldiers “stayed outside the cell and acted as a lookout,” the woman said, another held her hands behind her back while the third soldier “forcefully kissed” her.

She said she then was taken downstairs and they showed her a “naked Iraqi man” and told her that if she did not do what they said, they would take her “clothes off and make her look like the Iraqi man.”

The ACLU said it planned to release more material today. It also provided capsule descriptions of other incidents.

One report cited the alleged abuse of an Iraqi citizen last December by a military policeman who “threatened to shoot” the man, and then fired a shot into the ground next to him. The ACLU summary said there was probable cause to believe that the unnamed Army specialist “butt-stroked” the prisoner in the back of the head and face.

The ACLU said another document described a detainee who “was beaten on hands, feet, and chest while detained at Kandahar and Peshawar detainee facilities” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It does not say when the alleged incident occurred.

Another document summarized the results of an internal FBI inquiry in which 14 FBI agents who were based at Abu Ghraib from October to December 2003 were questioned about whether they had witnessed any detainee abuse. That is when the photographed abuse occurred, which led to the criminal charges against the eight soldiers.

An FBI agent reported seeing a prisoner “being subjected to sleep deprivation” by being chained to a railing and having a military policeman “lightly slap the detainee on his back.” The prisoner had a green nylon sand bag over his head and was “draped in a shower curtain.”

Agents saw multiple cases of “detainees who were ordered to strip and then placed in isolation with no clothes.”

But the agents did not consider that procedure extraordinary, with one saying it was “no different from the searching procedures he had observed used by guards in U.S. jails.”

*

Times staff writer Mark Mazzetti contributed to this report.