Abu Ghraib — did we forget this easily?
Yesterday my friend shared a 13-year-old Reddit post. I wish I’d never opened it. It was about Abu Ghraib, a term that meant nothing to me 24 hours back.
But now, when I hear Abu Ghraib, I hear the screams and imagine the horror of those Iraqi prisoners who were raped and tortured by the US Army.
Imagine you are in an American prison in Iraq. Soldiers there strip your clothes and force you to sleep on the wet floor in the cold desert nights of Iraq. Kid you not, this will be one of the least horrifying things you will be facing in that prison.
Major General Antonio M. Taguba, made a report of crimes committed by US soldiers — which were later obtained by the New Yorker.
According to him, Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; threatening male detainees with rape; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick, was common occurrence in that prison.
So who were these prisoners in the first place? What happened with them? And most importantly, what US government did to punish those human rights violators?
Prisoners in Abu Ghraib
The prisoners in Abu Ghraib were mostly your “common criminals” in war-torn countries. Criminals who had charges of leading operations against the US army (which itself was on their land), along with those who were “arrested” by the US Army randomly on suspicion.
With those “common criminals”, it is said their wives and children were arrested too, often raped in front of them to extract information.
One former guard admitted that he watched his coworkers violently rape multiple female prisoners in front of their husbands to get information.
Even young boys faced molestation, the US army routinely sodomized them. They forced them to perform sexual acts with their family members.
This is important to remember that Gitmo was a high-security facility that housed a number of people who were suspected of terrorism.
While most of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, however, were nonviolent offenders who had been arrested on trumped-up charges. Physical evidence never played a part in these investigations; everything was based on coerced confessions.
What happened with them?
The Abu Ghraib detention camp was huge; it was located on about 110 hectares of land and housed more than 7,000 Iraqi prisoners.
Saad Naif, one of the prisoners, said that the US army confined them like sheep. ‘They hit people. They humiliated people,’ he said.
A special report by Associated Press noted, that ‘even a “forbidden talk” could earn them “prisoner hours bound and stretched out in the sun, and detainees swinging tent poles rise up regularly against their jailers.’
In 2004, CBS aired a “60 minutes” show telling the world about these crimes committed in Iraq.
In the show, several photographs were shown to the world, one of them being of Private England smoking a cigarette and pointing toward a naked prisoner masturbating while having a sandbag on his head.
In another photo, she was seen with Charles Graner. Both are grinning while in front of them lays a pile of seven Iraqi prisoners.
If this was not enough, prisoners were made to stand on boxes and electrocuted if they fell.
Bear in mind that these sadistic tortures were given by the educated and trained United States military.
One of the most disgusting examples of viciousness of those soldiers was that they molested an Iraqi woman in her 70s, she was ridden like a donkey.
Ann Clwyd, one of the investigators, confirmed it. “She was held for bout six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey,” he said.
Read one of the many testimonies from the victims:
I, Nori Samir Gunbar ALYASSERI, As soon as we arrived they put sandbags over our heads and they kept beating us and calling us bad names. After they removed the sandbags they stripped us naked as a newborn baby. Then they ordered us to hold our penisis and stroke it. and this was ONLY IN THE NIGHT (*personal note- I think the night factor made Nori realize that even among these guards and the US forces this kind of thing was not okay). When they made us touch and stroke out penises they started to take photographs of maybe videos as if it were a pornography movie. They treated us like animals, not humans. They kept doing this for a long time. They showed us no mercy. Nothing but cursing and beating. Then they started to write words on our buttocks, which we didn’t know what it means [sic]. After that, they left us for the next two days naked with no clothes, and no mattresses as if we were worse than dogs. And every single night this military comes over and beat us and handcuffed us til the end of his shift at 0400. For three days they served us only a few biscuits and tea. If we had chicken *, he would throw it away.
The first night when they started to pile us started when they stripped us naked. They made us get on our hands and knees and they and they started to pule us one on top of the other. They started to take pictures from the front and the back. (Spontaneous outburst during testimony*** “And if anyone wants to know the details of this, take the negative from the night guard and you will see everything I said was true!”.) The next day the day shift gave us clothes but when the night shift started, the same guard who tortured us earlier came back and took our clothes (again) and left us handcuffed and naked to the bed. At the end of his shift, he uncuffs us and then he punches us in the stomach and hit us in the head and on the face. Then he goes home. I kept thinking what is he going to do to us the next night, this white man with the wire glasses? When I see him I am scared to death. Again, watch the pictures in his belongings. He and the two short female soldiers and the black soldier during those dark nights. When we were naked he ordered us to stroke, acting like we were masturbating. And when we are naked and masturbating our brothers then he would bring another inmate and sit him down on his knees in front of the penis and take a photo which looked like this inmate was putting the penis in his mouth. Before that, I felt someone was [sticking a pen up my penis]. After this they make Hasshun (NFI) stand in front of me and they forced me to slap him on the face. But I refused cause he is my friend. After this they Hashim to hit me, I asked [Hashim] to hit me, so they don’t beat him like they had beaten me. Hashim punched me in my stomach.
There are so many other instances that I did not cover to keep this article short, and there are hundreds of other horror stories that the US government didn’t release fearing public outrage.
But then, what happened to those soldiers? Those sadistic pieces of shit, did they get punishment?
Well, check out what the former president of the US thinks about it:
