Army Finds Evidence of Homicides

The Army has concluded that 27 of the detainees who have died in U.S. custody in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002 were the victims of homicide or suspected homicide, military officials said in a report released Friday.

The number is higher than Pentagon officials have previously acknowledged, and it indicates that criminal acts caused a significant portion of the dozens of prisoner deaths that occurred in U.S. custody.

The report by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command is the first detailed accounting of detainee death cases the military has investigated in those countries.

Most of the incidents cited in the report had previously come to light. Three death cases cited in the documents occurred after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq revealed serious abuses in the military detention system and prompted several high-level investigations of the U.S. military’s prison system worldwide.

The 27 confirmed or suspected homicides occurred during 24 incidents, 17 of them in Iraq and seven in Afghanistan. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, known as the CID, has determined that homicides occurred in 16 of the incidents and is continuing to investigate the other eight incidents.

Thus far, the Army has found sufficient evidence to support charges against 21 soldiers in 11 incidents that include murder, negligent homicide and assault. The five other completed investigations involve personnel from the Navy, other government agencies and foreign forces.

“We are equally determined to get to the truth, wherever the evidence may lead us and regardless of how long it takes,” CID spokesman Chris Grey said in a statement.

Soon after the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light, Pentagon officials said that the prisoner abuse problem was confined to a few low-level soldiers. Although subsequent investigations have concluded that senior Pentagon officials were not directly responsible for the abuses, documentary evidence that has emerged over the last year has shown that the scope of the abuse was far wider than the Pentagon first alleged.

The homicides documented in the CID report included the January 2003 shooting of an Afghan detainee by a special forces soldier after he attempted to stand up while he was being questioned; the shooting by a soldier of an Iraqi prisoner who approached the perimeter wire of a forward operations base detention camp in September 2003; and the alleged execution of a wounded prisoner by an Army sergeant after a firefight near Mosul, Iraq, in November 2004.

The report cites one incident that occurred in October 2004, in which a sergeant first class with the Army’s 1st Infantry Division allegedly shot a handcuffed detainee during a raid in Balad, Iraq. The soldier has been charged with premeditated murder, maltreatment and assault.

Investigators also said that he lied about the circumstances surrounding the detainee’s death.

The CID report is dated March 23 and stamped “For Immediate Release,” yet Army officials did not publicly release it until Friday afternoon.

The American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawsuit over the detainee abuse has forced the Pentagon to release thousands of pages of documents, said in a news release Friday that the Pentagon was trying to bury the report by releasing it on the day before a holiday weekend.

About half of the 24 incidents occurred inside U.S. detention facilities; the rest occurred during firefights, raids or other events.

Five of the investigations focused on non-Army personnel, and the Army has referred them to other agencies, such as the Naval Criminal Investigation Service and the Department of Justice, for further investigation.

The Army on Friday also released more than 1,200 pages of documents detailing abuses by members of a military intelligence battalion at a base near Mosul in late 2003.

Members of the 311th Mili- tary Intelligence Battalion, part of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, forced detainees to perform deep knee bends for hours at a time and threw cold water on the prisoners -- acts that one military investigator said amounted to “physical torture of the detainees,” according to a military investigative document.

The documents also detail an incident in which an Iraqi who was not given a medical screening when he was detained in December 2003 later died of a heart attack in his cell.

All detainees now are given a full medical examination upon being taken into custody, an Army spokesman said.

“The Army’s a learning organization,” said Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin.

“If we’ve had some shortfalls, we try to correct them. We’ve learned how to do that process now.”