WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - Three former members of the Army's
82nd Airborne Division say members of their battalion in Iraq routinely beat
and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the
insurgency and to amuse themselves.
The new allegations, the first involving members of the elite 82nd
Airborne, are contained in a report by Human Rights Watch. The 30-page
report does not identify the troops, but one is Capt. Ian Fishback, who
has presented some of his allegations in letters this month to top aides
of two senior Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John W.
Warner of Virginia, the
chairman, and John McCain of Arizona. Captain Fishback approached
the Senators' offices only after he tried to report the allegations to his
superiors for 17 months, the aides said. The aides also said they found
the captain's accusations credible enough to warrant investigation.
An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said Friday that Captain Fishback's
allegations first came to the Army's attention earlier this month, and
that the Army had opened a criminal investigation into the matter,
focusing on the division's First Brigade, 504th Parachute Infantry. The
Army has begun speaking with Captain Fishback, and is seeking the names of
the two other soldiers.
In separate statements to the human rights organization, Captain
Fishback and two sergeants described systematic abuses of Iraqi prisoners,
including beatings, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, stacking in
human pyramids and sleep deprivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating
base near Falluja. Falluja was the site of the major uprising against the
American-led occupation in April 2004. The report describes the soldiers'
positions in the unit, but not their names.
Interrogators pressed guards to beat up prisoners, and one sergeant
recalled watching a particular interrogator who was a former Special
Forces soldier beating the detainee himself. "He would always say to
us, 'You didn't see anything, right?' " the sergeant said. "And
we would always say, 'No, sergeant.' "
One of the sergeants told Human Rights Watch that he had seen a soldier
break open a chemical light stick and beat the detainees with it.
"That made them glow in the dark, which was real funny, but it burned
their eyes, and their skin was irritated real bad," he said.
A second sergeant, identified as an infantry squad leader and
interviewed twice in August by Human Rights Watch, said, "As far as
abuse goes, I saw hard hitting." He also said he had witnessed how
guards would force the detainees "to physically exert themselves to
the limit."
Some soldiers beat prisoners to vent their frustrations, one sergeant
said, recalling an instance when an off-duty cook showed up at the
detention area and ordered a prisoner to grab a metal pole and bend over.
"He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a
mini-Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat."
Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, one of the sergeants
said, the abuses continued. "We still did it, but we were
careful," he told the human rights group.
"Red
state America doesn't understand what these people are talking about and
doesn't want to."
