Former prisoners still feeling effects of U.S. abuse, report says
AMMAN, Jordan — Four years after his release from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Ali al-Qaisi says he has nightmares and insomnia. He blames those conditions on injuries — physical and psychological — he says he suffered at the hands of his American captors.
The Iraqi was among 11 former prisoners examined by doctors and mental health professionals with Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that says it is trying to determine whether the claims of abuse could be corroborated by physical evidence.
The resulting report says that former detainees in U.S. military jails in Iraq and Guantanamo suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and injuries that can be traced to their imprisonment.
“I had dogs sniffing and barking at me. I had women captors kicking me in the crotch and male soldiers (sodomizing) me … causing internal bleeding and wounds that bother me to this day,” al-Qaisi told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday.
“Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred,” said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who tested six of the 11 detainees.
“It’s a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was.”
All the prisoners were freed without charge, either innocent or not valuable enough to the military to hold.
June 22nd, 2008 | Category: Abu Ghraib, Abuse, Detainee Abuse, DoD, Iraq, Torture
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