AUGUST 2004
A GERMAN TV NEWS SPECIAL
Video footage and interview of witnesses
http://www.traprockpeace.org/iraqi_child_prisoners.htm
"Report Mainz" vom 5. Juli 2004 - [English translation]
German news video
http://www.swr.de/report/archiv/sendungen/040705/02
/04070502.ram
Moderation Fritz Frey:
Reports from Iraq:The scandal of the torture prison of Abu Gharib, oh yes, that was indeed one.
REPORT has stuck to this story and has in the process come across a totally unbelievable suspicion. In Abu Gharib and elsewhere children and youth have been incarcerated and mistreated. Thomas Reutter with a difficult search for clues.
Report:
With tanks coming through the gate. U.S. soldiers storm an apartment building looking for terrorists. Sometimes during such roundups the soldiers also arrest children.
What happens to the children?
About that the military gives no information. We investigate, as it happens, through informants.
One of them, who is knowledgeable about these things, is Sergeant Samuel Provance from U.S. Army Intelligence. For half a year he was stationed in the notorious Abu Ghraib torture-prison. Today, five months later, we meet with Sergeant Provance in Heidelberg. His superiors have strictly forbidden him from reporting to journalists about what he experienced in Abu Ghraib. Yet Provance wants to talk about it nonetheless. Pangs of conscience plague him.
He tells us about one 16-year-old, whom he himself had to lead away.
O-Ton, Samuel Provance, US-Sergeant:
“He was full of fear, very alone. He had the thinnest little arms that I have ever seen. His whole body shook. His wrists were so thin that we could not put handcuffs on him. As soon as I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry for him. The interrogation specialists doused him with water and put him in a truck. Then they drove with him throughout the night, and at that time it was very, very cold. Then they smeared him with mud and showed him to his likewise imprisoned father. With him [the father] they had tried out
other interrogation methods. But they had not succeeded in making him talk. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father had seen his son in that condition, it broke his heart. He wept and promised to tell them what they wanted to know.”
The son however remained in custody, and the 16-year-old was put in with the adults. Yet Provance reported also about a special department, expressly for children. A secret children's wing in the horror prison of Abu Ghraib.
One person, who has seen the children's wing with his own eyes, is the journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz. Our correspondent met him some week ago in Baghdad. The Iraqi TV reporter related how he himself was arrested arbitrarily by the Americans while shooting film and spent 74 days in Abu Ghraib.
O-Ton, Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz, Fernsehreporter:
"There I saw a camp for children. Young, under the age of puberty. In this camp were certainly hundreds of children. Some of them have been released, others are definitely still in there." From his solitary cell in the adults' wing, Suhaib heard a perhaps 12-year-old girl weeping. Later he learned that her brother was on the third floor of the prison. One or two times, says Suhaib, he saw her himself. In the night, according to Suhaib, they were with her in her cell. The girl shrieked out to the other prisoners and called out to her brother.
O-Ton, Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz, Fernsehreporter:
"She was beaten. I heard her call: 'They have undressed me. They have poured water over me."
Daily, says Suhaib, one heard her crying and wimpering. Many of the prisoners wept when they heard her. Suhaib reported also about a sick 15-year-old youth. [They chased him up and down the corridor with heavy water cannisters. translation uncertain] For so long until he collapsed from
exhaustion, says Suhaib. Then they brought in his father, also a prisoner. He had a hood over his head. From shock the youth collapsed once again.
In the so-called "War on Terrorism," the Americans storm Iraqi houses. According to Suhaib, they sometimes in the process seize whole families who appear suspicious to them. Statements from individual witnesses, difficult to confirm.
In the report it reads:
Citation:
"Children, who had been seized in Basra and Kerbala, were routinely put over into an internment facility in Um Qasr.
Internment camp Um Qasr. . Today it is too dangerous for reporters to travel to Um Qasr. The camp, a prison for terrorists and criminals. Precisely here should Americans therefore hold children interned as prisoners of war."The classification of these children as "internees" is alarming, since it contains them for an indefinite time in prison, without contact with their families or expectation of legal proceedings or trial."
Over this up to now unpublished report UNICEF does not yet want to say anything. [Their reason is that] Their own workers in Iraq should not be put in danger. Seeking more information, we turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose helpers inspected Um Qasr, Abu Ghraib and other places of detention. And after intensive conversations came a further confirmation and even statistics.
O-Ton, Florian Westphal, Internationales Komitee vom Roten Kreuz:
"We have recorded a total of 107 children between January and May of this year in the course of 19 visits to 6 different detention places. And it must be emphasized that these are detention places that are controlled by coalition troops."In the internment camp Um Qasr and also in Abu Ghraib the Red Cross recorded minors as prisoners. Two international organizations confirmed to us independently of each other that the occupation troops are holding Iraqi children prisoner. Yet we have not received any information directly from the prisons. Even UNICEF was not allowed to visit the child prison in Baghdad.
Zitat:
"In July 2003 UNICEF applied for a visit to this detention facility, but access was refused."
 Wolfowitz in Iraq in July 2003 when he also visited Abu Ghraib Prison.  |
Since December, according to UNICEF, there have been no
independent observers in the children's prison. To
be sure, the U.S. Army opened the scandal-prison Abu
Ghraib for a tour for journalists. Yet the
reporters were presented with a for-show facility. Child
prisoners were not shown to the press.
We hold fast to this: four sources confirm independently
of one another, that occupation troops are holding
children as prisoners. Two witnesses even report
instances of maltreatment. The human rights
organization Amnesty International is outraged over the
reports of Iraqi child prisoners. Barbara Lochbihler of
Amnesty International, Germany, calls for follow-up
action.
O-Ton, Barbara Lochbihler,
Generalsekret?rin amnesty
international:
"The U.S. government has to respond to this report,
it must give concrete information about how old the
children are, the grounds on which they have been
detained, and under what circumstances they were
incarcerated. And here we do not know the names of the
children or how many children are there. That is
scandalous."
Concluding moderation by Fritz Frey:
Self-evidently, we have confronted the responsible
authorities with our research. The British Defense
Ministry responded: Children and youth are not being held
prisoner by British troops. We are still waiting
for an answer from the American Pentagon.
Links:
www2.amnesty.de
www.icrc.org
www.unicef.de
Berichte der Menschenrechtsorganisation Amnesty
International zu Irak
http://www2.amnesty.de
Report of the Human Rights Organization Amnesty
Internation in Iraq.
Internationales Komitee vom Roten Kreuz
http://www.icrc.org
International Committee of the Red Cross.
Das Kinderhilfswerk der Vereinten Nationen UNICEF
http://www.unicef.de
Children's Relief Organization of the United Nations
UNICEF
Exclusive translation for Traprock
Peace Center by Richard
Gawthrop. Thanks to Paul Amrod, who saw this on German TV
and brought it to our attention. Traprock Peace
Center
http://www.traprockpeace.org
Thanks to Ragged Robin.
MORE FROM SEYMOUR HERSH................?
'Secret film shows Iraq prisoners sodomised'
After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon's custody more horrific than anything made public so far. "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse," Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse.
Hersh gave a speech last week to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it. The speech was first reported in a New York Sun story last week, which was in turn posted on Jim Romenesko's media blog, and now EdCone.com and other blogs are linking to the video. We transcribed the critical section here (it starts at about 1:31:00 into the ACLU video.) At the start of the transcript here, you can see how Hersh was struggling over what he should say:
"Debating about it, ummm ... Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."
"It's impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai I was very troubled like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we're dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will. You know there's enough out there, they can't (Applause). .... So it's going to be an interesting election year."
Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong's blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: "[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened."
So, there are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn't he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists -- will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? -- and what is being done about it?
(Update: A reader brought to our attention that the rape of boys at Abu Ghraib has been mentioned in some news accounts of the prisoner abuse evidence. The Telegraph and other news organizations described "a videotape, apparently made by US personnel, is said to show Iraqi guards raping young boys." The Guardian reported "formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator.")
salon.com-- Geraldine Sealey
Norway protests child abuse in Iraq
Aftenposten, Norway | July 7 2004
Norwegian authorities reacted with shock and disgust Tuesday to a documentary on German TV that American soldiers allegedly have been holding children in prisons in Iraq, and abusing them as well. The Norwegians joined the Red Cross and Amnesty International in calling for an immediate end to the abuse, and release of the underage prisoners, some of whom are as young as 12 years.
In one case, a girl around age 15 was said to have been shoved up against a wall by a group of male soldiers who proceeded to manhandle her. They then started ripping off her clothes, and she was half-naked before military police broke in.
In another case, a boy aged 15 or 16 was stripped naked and sprayed with water before being placed in an open truck and driven around in the cold night air last winter. He then was covered with mud.
"These types of attacks are absolutely unacceptable," said a spokesman for Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik. "They violate international law and are morally indefensible."
Odd Jostein Sæter of the prime minister's office told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) Tuesday that Norwegian officials will react "both politically and diplomatically" to their US counterparts.
Neither the imprisonment nor abuse of children "can be tolerated," Sæter said.
"We will take this up in a very sharp and direct way and make concrete demands," he said on national radio, adding that such practices "damage the struggle for democracy and human rights in Iraq."
Norwegian authorities plan to review other reports of the abuse by both Amnesty International and Red Cross in detail.
The head of Amnesty International in Norway said Tuesday that Norway should not continue its military cooperation with the US after the reports of child "torture" were revealed.
Most of the more than 100 minors still believed to be held in American-controlled prisons in Iraq were taken into custody after US forces raided their homes.
children and female detainees in
israel:REPORTS FROM THE PALESTINE
RAPPROCHMENT CENTRE
http://www.imemc.org/headlines/2004/July/week3/071704/6%
____________________________________________________________________
1) 6 Detainees spent more than 25 years in Jail Amin Abu
Warda - PNN
Translated by; Saed Bannoura, IMEMC, June 2004
Detainees
According to data collected by the Prisoners Friends
Association, six Palestinian detainees have been in
detention for more than 25 years, 11 have been detained
since more than 20 years in addition to 297 detainees who
are detained since more ten years. According to the data
collected by the PFA, the number of detainees before Oslo
agreement was 419, while the number of detainees now-a-
days is 7400 detainees, meanwhile in the official records
of the PFA the number of detainees is 6066 detainees.
Children:
Among the detainees 463 who are under the age of
eighteen, 22 of them are in administrative detention
without trial, 38 are sick, 302 under going
investigation, and 139 who have been sentenced.
Female Detainees:
The total number of female detainees is 98, 3 of them
were arrested before Al-Aqsa Intifada which started at
the end of September 2000, 28 detainees who have been
sentenced, 67 currently under going investigation, 3 in
administrative detention, 22 of the female are mothers,
two gave birth in detention after being arrested while
pregnant.
Types of sentencing:
The total number of detainees who were sent to court and
sentenced in 1973, 392 received live terms including 279
who were sentenced before the Intifada, 309 detainees are
sentenced to term which are more than 15 and less than
50, 142 detainees are sentenced for 10-15 years, in
addition to 1135 detainees in administrative detention,
and 3058 detainees in detention and interrogation
centers.
Methods of Torture:
. 98% were beaten and clubbed.
. 86% were places in fridges.
. 87% were forced to stand for very long periods while
raising there hands and spreading their legs.
. 92% were not allowed to sleep for long periods.
In addition to other methods of torture and abuse used
against them, such as forcing them to strip, conducting
provocative body searches and clubbing the detainees if
they refuse to strip or rejecting the naked body search.
Health condition of the detainees:
- There are 145 detainees who have different diseases and
were arrested before 2000.
- 825 detainees arrested after the Intifada and suffer
from chronic diseases, in addition to a number of
detainees who were arrested after sustaining gunshot
injury and were denied from proper medical treatment.
- Two detainees are paralyzed and the rest are suffering
from different diseases.