Alleged Beatings to Be Investigated

The U.S. Southern Command on Friday ordered an investigation into recent allegations that military guards at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility boasted of routinely beating prisoners.

Army Gen. John Craddock, commander of the Southcom military headquarters here that oversees U.S. operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, said an Army colonel would lead the inquiry.

The investigation was prompted by a Marine sergeant’s report that Guantanamo guards had bragged to her about beating prisoners.

A paralegal with a Canadian prisoner’s military defense team, Marine Sgt. Heather Cerveny, testified in a sworn statement that off-duty guards she met on Sept. 23 at the base told her they regularly beat detainees and that superiors knew about it and made no attempt to stop them.

Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey filed the complaint to the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office last week, attaching Cerveny’s statement that her conversations with the guards at a Naval base club gave her the impression “that striking detainees was a common practice.”

Vokey served as the U.S. military’s designated defense counsel for Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr, one of 10 Guantanamo prisoners formally charged with war crimes out of the 800 who have been brought to the detention site. Khadr turned 20 last month, but was only 15 when he was arrested in Afghanistan by U.S. forces in 2002.

“We feel this is powerful evidence that abuse at Guantanamo Bay continues,” said Army Capt. J.J. Merriam, Vokey’s partner on the Khadr defense team. “The report by Sgt. Cerveny has the same characteristics as other reports of abuse down there. It’s part of a system of dehumanizing these guys.”

A one-star general was appointed to lead a previous investigation into detainee abuse at the offshore military prison -- a 2005 inquiry into reports of mistreatment and humiliation disclosed in leaked FBI reports to the Pentagon. All but a few of those earlier incidents were deemed by investigators to be within accepted military interrogation procedures.

The Bush administration recently forbade some of the more controversial interrogation techniques that had been used against suspected terrorists, like sexual humiliation, the use of dogs and “water boarding” -- using water to make a restrained prisoner fear he is drowning.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June deemed the president’s plans to hold war crimes tribunals unconstitutional, but Congress has passed a new plan for trying Guantanamo prisoners, and President Bush is said to be poised to sign it into law.

Merriam said defense attorneys and human rights advocates were concerned about the congressional bill to reestablish military commissions because they said it would probably preclude authorities from finding out about abuse allegations.

“That bill the president is going to sign is going to make it forever impossible to raise issues like this because of its habeas-stripping provision,” the Army lawyer said. The legislation stipulates that suspects in the war on terrorism have no right to appeal their imprisonment to U.S. civilian courts through writs of habeas corpus.

There are now 437 detainees at Guantanamo, after the release this week of 17 men -- 16 Afghans and one Iranian.

The announcement of the investigation into mistreatment of the detainees followed renewed condemnation of the prison in Britain and Afghanistan.

At a news conference in Kabul, some of the recently released prisoners described nightmare ordeals after their arrests.

“We were put in isolated rooms. We were often deprived of sleep, given mental torture or kept in a cold room,” 20-year-old Habibul Rehman told the Agence France-Presse news agency in Kabul.

“You must be assured that all those sitting here and most of those still in Cuba -- none of them have done anything to deserve” being sent to Guantanamo, said Sayed Mohammad Ali Shah, a doctor and elected member of the Afghan loya jirga national political council.

“None of them have been criminals, but because of wrong reports based on tribal, ethnic, religious and political reasons, were given to Americans. They, without any investigation, arrested people and put them in jail,” Shah said.

In London on Thursday, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett condemned the Guantanamo practice of indefinitely confining war-on-terrorism suspects without charges or legal recourse as “unacceptable in terms of human rights” and “ineffective in terms of counterterrorism.”

Calling for the closure of Guantanamo’s prison and interrogation operations, Beckett said, “It’s widely argued now that the existence of the camp is as much a radicalizing and discrediting influence as it is a safeguard for security.”

Britain is one of Washington’s most important allies in the Iraq war, and the Afghan government, which organized the news conference for the freed men, has also been largely supportive of U.S.-led anti-terrorist operations that have brought thousands of troops and fleets of military hardware to that country.

carol.williams@latimes.com