by chiggerbit » Sat Feb 18, 2006 2:13 pm
Abu is just one big mindfuck. The military should just post a banner across its gates saying, "And you thought Saddam was bad?" I wonder how many of these women who were detained, basically as hostages, because of suspicions that their husbands were involved in the resistance became victims of the system.<br><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32147">www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32147</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>".....Documents obtained the American Civil Liberties Union and the testimony of former detainees and a U.S. general suggest that most of the female detainees over the past two years were being held because of family ties to suspected insurgents. <br><br>Nancy Youssef of Knight-Ridder reported on Jan. 28 that a woman who had been detained at Baghdad International Airport in September 2004 said she found that all eight women in her cell had been detained only because their husbands or fathers were suspected of being in the insurgency. <br><br>A memo by a civilian intelligence officer who participated in a raid on the house of suspect near Baghdad in May 2004 recalled that units carrying out the operation were told that, if the wife of the suspect was present, she should be "detained and held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender". <br><br>Former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was the military police commander at Abu Ghraib Prison when the abuse story broke, told the Associated Press that she knew of "perhaps 15 or 20 cases" of detention of wives of suspects in 2003, and that it was the practice for "higher value detainees".<br><br>As the Christian Science Monitor's Dan Murphy observed, Iraqis generally assume that U.S. prisons still abuse female detainees, regardless of changes that may have been made in U.S. policy on their treatment. <br><br>Iraqi memories of the abuses of women in Abu Ghraib remain an open wound. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>A letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib in December 2003 told of multiple rapes of prisoners and of several women who had become pregnant. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>The "Taguba report" on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses said photographs shot by U.S. guards at the prison included images of both male and female prisoners stripped naked, a male guard in a pose of having sex with a female detainee and naked male and female detainees forcibly arranged in various sexual positions." <br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>