In a statement to investigators, obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Private Lyndie England said "everyone in the company from the commander down" knew what was going on at Abu Ghraib.
Lynndie England is now infamous; she's become the face of these abuses. One of the many images that has defined this prison scandal shows her standing above a beaten Iraqi man who is curled up on the floor opposite her. The Iraqi man is wearing a leash; she holds the other end.
It has been documented by many scholars and psychologists and historians who have studied mass movements, war, and the characteristics of war that abuses such as these we are seeing happen because the perpetrators of these abuses come to see their victims as less than human, like animals. The image of the Iraqi man leashed like a dog validates this point.
In a New York Times column on Friday, Bob Herbert interviewed the 28 year-old Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia who is being tried for failing to return to duty after his troops' furlough. Meija added his testament about how war changes a soldier's perspective about the people they are sent to liberate. His sentiments echo those of the Vietnam war:
All you really want to do in such an environment, said Sergeant Mejia, is "get out of there alive." So soldiers will do things under that kind of extreme stress that they wouldn't do otherwise.
"You just sort of try to block out the fact that they're human beings and see them as enemies," he said. "You call them hajis, you know? You do all the things that make it easier to deal with killing them and mistreating them."
Like the SS troops who brutalized the Jews as part of fulfilling the grand scheme of the Nazi party, a vision created by Heydrich and Hitler, known as the Final Solution, these American soldiers, contract workers, and their commanding officers have likewise (though I admit to a much lesser degree in numbers) brutalized Iraqi men, women, and children in order to fulfill Donald Rumsfield's intelligence-gathering scheme known as Copper Green.
Private England revealed more extremely disturbing details about the abuses she was witnessed and carried out. As reported by Mark Sage of the PA News in New York, consider the following:
[England] said guards forced detainees to crawl on their hands and knees on broken glass, threw a heavy ball at handcuffed prisoners and forced male detainees to wear women’s ’maxi pads’.
She said one soldier would "personally stitch up detainees if the wounds weren’t too bad".
"He would take pictures of his work," she added.
After slamming one Iraqi against a wall, the soldier stitched the inmates lip.
Although England implicated more senior soldiers in the scandal, she told investigators that much of the abuse was "basically us fooling around".
"We thought it looked funny, so pictures were taken," she said.
But she added: "Personnel from MI [military intelligence] and OGA [Other Government Agency, or CIA] would tell us to keep it up, that we were doing a good job." She said there were many other abuses, but "I can’t remember all of them".
She added: "We did what we were told."
....
[An] Iraqi was taken to a shower room and shackled to a wall by the CIA....he was interrogated [there] and eventually died.
It was not until his hood was removed, after he died, that the extent of his head injuries was known....
Specialist Jason Kenner told investigators: "He wasn’t dead at first.
"We didn’t know how much he was injured. He went into the showers for interrogation, and about an hour later he died on them.
"I was sent to find out what was going on. Later that day, they decided to put him on ice.
"After he passed, the sandbag was removed and I saw that he was severely beaten on his face."
Scott Higham and Joe Stephens of The Washington Post obtained the statements of 13 detainees who said they were "savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib during the holy month of Ramadan." These statements paint "the most detailed picture yet of what took place on the cellblock."
These statements were "taken in Baghdad between Jan. 16 and Jan. 21" and span 65 pages.
Consider the following revelations:
....prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets.
....they were pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor....sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers.
"They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees," said Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, detainee No. 13077. "And we had to bark like a dog, and if we didn't do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything."
....
...Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik, detainee No. 151362: "They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and makes me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks."
.....
Most of the detainees said in the statements that they were stripped upon their arrival to Tier 1A, forced to wear women's underwear, and repeatedly humiliated in front of one another and American soldiers. They also described beatings and threats of death and sexual assault if they did not cooperate with U.S. interrogators.
....
[Kasim Mehaddi] Hilas witnessed an Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures.
.....
Another detainee told military investigators that American soldiers sodomized and beat him. The detainee, whose name is being withheld by The Post because he is an alleged victim of a sexual assault, said he was kept naked for five days when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib and was forced to kneel for four hours with a hood over his head. He said he was beaten so badly one day that the hood flew off his head. "The police was telling me to crawl in Arabic, so I crawled on my stomach and the police were spitting on me when I was crawling, and hitting me on my back, my head and my feet," he said in his sworn statement.
One day, the detainee said, American soldiers held him down and spread his legs as another soldier prepared to open his pants. "I started screaming," he said. A soldier stepped on his head, he said, and someone broke a phosphoric light and spilled the chemicals on him.
"I was glowing and they were laughing," he said.
The detainee said the soldiers eventually brought him to a room and sodomized him with a nightstick. "They were taking pictures of me during all these instances," he told the investigators.
.....
Al-Sheik said he was arrested on Oct. 7, and brought to Abu Ghraib, where he was put in a tent for one night. The next day, he was transferred to the "hard site," the two-story building that held about 200 prisoners and contained Tiers 1A and 1B.
He said a bag was put over his head and he was made to strip. He said American soldiers started to taunt him.
"Do you pray to Allah?" one asked. "I said yes. They said, '[Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.' One of them said, 'You are not getting out of here health[y], you are getting out of here handicapped. And he said to me, 'Are you married?' I said, 'Yes.' They said, 'If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.' One of them said, 'But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.' "
He said the soldiers told him that if he cooperated with interrogators they would release him in time for Ramadan. He said he did, but still was not released. He said one soldier continued to abuse him by striking his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. "Because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion," he said. "They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive."
The detainee said the soldiers handcuffed him to a bed.
"Do you believe in anything?" he said the soldier asked. "I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, "But I believe in torture and I will torture you.' "
I know many Americans feel we are justified in torturing Iraqis. I've heard from a few of them. But I want you to know they are wrong. Donald Rumsfield, George Bush, and their cohorts in this deplorable war on Iraq are wrong.
These acts have turned America into the evil that we teach our children is unacceptable. These acts have made a mockery of the precepts of any religion and the ethics of secularism. This is not who I am. This is not who my family is. This is not who my neighbors are. This is not who my friends are. I'd like to believe that this is not what America is.
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