AP's Hanley Reported on Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Last Fall

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By: E&P Staff In a column this morning, Michael Getler, ombudsman for The Washington Post, charged that for months, his paper had been "slow off the mark" to cover reports of prison abuse in Iraq. Clearly, The Post was not alone. One reason is that most newspapers failed to carry, or elaborate on, reports of abuses last fall written by The Associated Press' Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Charles J. Hanley, who has covered the Iraq conflict for much of the past year.

In a new article distributed by AP this past weekend, Hanley observed, "Detailed allegations of psychological abuse, deprivation, beatings and deaths at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq were met by public silence from the U.S. Army last October -- six months before shocking photographs stirred world outrage and demands for action ... These early accounts by freed prisoners, reported by The Associated Press last fall, told of detainees punished by hours lying bound in the sun; being attacked by dogs; being deprived of sufficient water; spending days with hoods over their heads ...

"They spoke repeatedly of being humiliated by American guards. None mentioned the sexual humiliation seen in recently released photos, but Arab culture might keep an Iraqi from describing such mistreatment. In contrast to suggestions that the photos indicate isolated abuse by a few, these Iraqis told of widespread practices in several camps that would violate the Geneva Conventions and other human rights standards. ...

"On Oct. 18, AP posed specific questions about the reported abuses to the U.S. military command in Baghdad and the 800th Military Police Brigade, which was in charge of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities. The MP unit drafted responses, AP later learned, but the Baghdad command did not release them. No explanation was given. The AP report, published Nov. 1, cited a statement to Arab television by the MP commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, that prisoners were treated humanely.

"Meantime, between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib facility, numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees," according to the report of a later Army investigation.

"The half-dozen ex-prisoners interviewed by AP in October were freed without charges after spending months in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and the Baghdad airport's Camp Cropper.

"Some Americans were humane, they said, but many were not. 'They don't have morals. They don't respect old or young. They humiliate everybody,' said Naif, 31, a Baghdad resident like the others and one of three brothers confined."

Another Abu Ghraib prisoner told Hanley last fall: "They used to hit people and turn dogs loose on them." A third prisoner said at the time: " I saw four die in our camp."

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