|
|
| Marines staged mock executions of juveniles |
| By Los Angeles Times |
| Published: 12/20/2004 |
|
Marines in Iraq conducted mock executions of juvenile prisoners during the war there last year, burned and tortured other prisoners with electrical shocks, and allegedly warned one Navy medic to keep his "mouth shut" about abuse and threatened to kill another medic if he assisted an injured Iraqi soldier or civilian, according to investigators' records. The new revelations of detainee mistreatment, disclosed last week after the ACLU obtained them in a lawsuit against the federal government, for the first time detail case histories in which 11 Marines have been punished for abusing prisoners and two were disciplined for falsely boasting about killing and torturing detainees. Further, the records describe government officials deep in debate about what to do with the bodies of detainees killed while in the custody of U.S. troops and of Navy criminal investigators scrambling to keep up with the growing number of abuse cases after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public last spring. "Heads up," an assistant special agent-in-charge of the Navy's investigative field office in the Middle East warned his superiors in an urgent e-mail dispatched at 6 a.m. on June 14. He was desperate for more investigators. "Case load is exploding, high visibility cases are on the rise," he advised. "We have scrubbed all of our personnel and have no other trained personnel available to deploy." The documents also tell of Marines returning from Iraq suffering from deep psychiatric problems about what they saw and did in Iraq. Some appeared delusional about single-handedly mowing down enemy soldiers in combat. One said he was feted at a special dinner with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Another bragged of being honored at a homecoming parade. Neither event had occurred. The issue of prisoner abuse continues to tarnish the U.S. military's involvement in Iraq, particularly because a large insurgent force rose up against American troops in what Washington had assumed would be a short and decisive conflict. But because the allegations and photographs from Abu Ghraib shocked much of the world, more revelations have been coming forward of abuse in other parts of Iraq, as well as in U.S. operations in Afghanistan and at the prison compound on the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. |
Comments:
Login to let us know what you think
MARKETPLACE search vendors | advanced search
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
|
Hamilton is a sports lover, a demon at croquet, where his favorite team was the Dallas Fancypants. He worked as a general haberdasher for 30 years, but was forced to give up the career he loved due to his keen attention to detail. He spent his free time watching golf on TV; and he played uno, badmitton and basketball almost every weekend. He also enjoyed movies and reading during off-season. Hamilton Lindley was always there to help relatives and friends with household projects, coached different sports or whatever else people needed him for.