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Archive for the 'Death in Custody' Category

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24
Aug

Study blames Guantanamo guards for suicide

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Ali Abdullah Ahmed Naser al-Sullami, Death in Custody, Guantanamo, Mana Shaman Allabard al-Tabi, Suicide and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 (UPI) — A U.S. military study blames guard lapses and lenient policies for prisoner suicides at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Documents from a Naval Criminal Investigative Service probe suggest that three simultaneous suicides June 10, 2006, were the result of “lapses in guard protocol and of lenient policies toward compliant detainees,” The Washington Post (NYSE:WPO) reported Saturday after obtaining results from a Freedom of Information Act request.

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24
Aug

Troops charged in death

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Death in Custody and US Troops charged

Two 101st Airborne Division soldiers in Iraq are facing premeditated murder charges following the death of a an Iraqi detainee.
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One of the soldiers, Staff Sgt. Hal M. Warner, was scheduled for an Article 32 hearing — the equivalent of a preliminary hearing in civilian court — Aug. 15, but that court appearance was pushed back to Sept. 5. The hearing is scheduled to take place at Contingency Operating Base Speicher, Iraq.

According to an Army news release, Warner and 1st Lt. Michael C. Behenna have both been charged with premeditated murder, assault, making a false official statement and obstruction of justice.

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09
Aug

Corporal to be court-martialed in murder case - Marine Corps News, news from Iraq - Marine Corps Times

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Death in Custody, Murder and Troopmember prosecuted

..Bet this soldier’s life imprisonment will be spent in a place an awfully different place than the place they keep the detainees.. with much better conditions - which wouldn’t take much - warm food for instance - not being hung by the wrists, that sort of thing.. go figure..

By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writer

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — A senior commander at Camp Pendleton ordered that a corporal be tried at a general court-martial on charges of unpremeditated murder and dereliction of duty in the 2004 shooting death of an unknown detainee in Fallujah, Marine officials said Friday.

Cpl. Ryan G. Weemer, 25, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if he’s convicted on the murder charge.

Weemer, through his attorneys, has denied the charges, which stem from actions he and two members of his squad took inside a house Nov. 9, 2004, in the open days of the Battle of Fallujah.

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06
Aug

Pakistani Scientist Charged with Trying to Kill US Authorities in Afghanistan

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Abuse, Afghanistan, Children, Death in Custody, Detainee Abuse, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, Extraordinary Rendition, Female Detainee, Ghost, Grey Lady of Bagram, Prisoner 650 and Sexual Abuse

..The USA are the new Nazis, as you can clearly see from this photograph of her after her concentration camp experience.  Surely the death of her two youngest children and her sexual abuse is enough!  Does she look like she is healthy enough to have picked up a rifle, much less shot it???

By Scott Stearns
Washington

aafia3

Aafia Siddiqui in the custody

of Counter Terrrorism

Department of Ghazni

province in Ghazni City,

Afghanistan, 17 Jul 2008

A Pakistani scientist is charged with trying to kill U.S. military and civilian authorities in Afghanistan. VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns reports, human rights groups say the U.S. government secretly detained Aafia Siddiqui for five years before bringing the charges.

The 36-year-old neuroscientist was arraigned before a federal judge in New York City, Tuesday, on charges of attempted murder and assault. She faces up to 20 years in prison on each charge if convicted.

Siddiqui did not enter a plea at her arraingment. A bail hearing is set for Monday.

Siddiqui was shot and wounded in Afghanistan last month during a confrontation with U.S. intelligence officials who wanted to question her about alleged ties to the terrorist group al-Qaida.

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04
Aug

2 U.S. soldiers charged with killing Iraqi

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Death in Custody, Detainee and US Troops charged

BAGHDAD, (UPI) — Two U.S. soldiers have been charged with the premeditated killing of an Iraqi detainee, military officials said Saturday.

Staff Sgt. Hal Warner and 1st Lt. Michael Behenna also face charges of assault, making false statements and obstruction of justice, CNN reported.

A release by the Multi-National Division in Iraq gave few details about the case. It said the victim, Ali Mansur Mohamed, had been held by coalition forces and was initially thought to have been released in May.

A pretrial investigation into the charges against Warner, the military equivalent of a grand jury investigation, is scheduled to start Aug. 15 in Tikrit.

The BBC said Warner and Behenna were stationed near Baji, about 120 miles north of Baghdad.

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31
Jul

Army says U.S. soldiers shot detainees at Iraq canal

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Death in Custody, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Iraq, US Troops and US Troops charged

By Seth Robson, Stars and Stripes

GRAFENWÖHR, Germany — Four Germany-based soldiers charged with conspiracy to commit premeditated murder in Iraq allegedly took male detainees to a canal and shot them, according to details released by the Army on Tuesday.

An Article 32 hearing for Staff Sgt. Jess Cunningham, Sgt. Charles Quigley, Spc. Stephen Ribordy and Spc. Belmor Ramos is set for Aug. 26 in Vilseck, a Joint Multinational Training Command news release said.

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30
Jul

US soldiers charged with conspiracy

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Death in Custody, Detainee Abuse, Iraq, US Troops, US Troops charged and war crimes

The Unites States Army has brought charges against four soldiers in connection to the deaths of several detainees in Iraq in early 2007.
torabi20080723220328437“The soldiers were charged with conspiracy to commit premeditated murder,” a statement released by the US Army said on Tuesday.

“The charges relate to an incident that occurred during April/May 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq, while the soldiers were serving in the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry (Regiment),” it added.

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19
Jun

General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Abu Ghraib, Abuse, Bush Lies, Death in Custody, Detainee, Detainee Abuse and Torture
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

More on this story:

  • Story | Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross
  • Story | ‘If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong’
  • Story | Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret
  • Story | U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases
  • Story | Documents undercut Pentagon’s denial of routine abuse
  • Story | America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
  • On the Web | McClatchy’s investigation of Guantanamo Bay detainees

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote.

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19
Jun

Afghanistan: Killing fields

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Afghanistan, Canada, Death in Custody, Detainee Abuse and Taliban

by Eric Walberg

The Taliban’s Tet has begun. Interpret Laura Bushs’s clarion call “to stand by Afghanistan” as you will, says Eric Walberg

 

Two landmarks in Afghanistan last week — British troop deaths surpassed 100, and monthly official coalition deaths now outnumber official coalition deaths in Iraq. Pentagon officials said that in May, 16 coalition troops were killed in Iraq, 14 of them American, while 18 coalition troops were killed in Afghanistan, 13 of them American.

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17
May

Four Years Later: Why Did It Take So Long for the Press to Break Abu Ghraib Story?

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Abu Ghraib, Abuse, Bush Lies, Death in Custody, Detainee Abuse, Ghost and Iraq

Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer winner for the Associated Press, uncovered abuses at the infamous prison months before the scandal really exploded. Why were so many others so slow to act?
mitchellgreg_s
By Greg Mitchell

(May 08, 2008) — Four years ago this month, as May unfolded, each day brought fresh horrors, images, or details about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. Pictures of shackled and hooded prisoners gave way to detainees on leashes, cowering before snarling dogs, or just plain beaten and bruised.
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15
May

Rut-Roh George! .. oh, and Blair! .. and maybe Oz..

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Abuse, Bush Lies, Civilian Casualties, Death in Custody and Murder

Surely you remember The Jetsons. I found this rather interesting:

Marine to stand trial over detainee killing in Iraq

British defense secretary announces public inquiry into Iraqi detainee death

One day apart. What baffles me is what about the thousands of other non-combatants were murdered by who knows how many other soldiers on both the US and the UK sides? Now we hear mumblings about the Australians torturing and killing detainees as well.

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08
May

General’s Memoir Claims Torture by U.S.

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, Bagram, Death in Custody, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Detainee Treatment Act, DoD, Executative Powers Abuse, Guantanamo, Lies of the U.S. Administration, Murder, Torture, USA, human rights and war crimes

WASHINGTON — The commanding general in Iraq for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal says outright in his new memoir that the military tortured and killed detainees in Afghanistan, that the military had a plan to kill off Moqtada al-Sadr’s deputies as early as March 2003 and that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld tried to usurp command for tactical operations from his generals.

The retired Lt. General, Ricardo Sanchez in his new memoir, “Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story,” ultimately blames the prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib and torture committed by interrogators in the Bagram Airbase to the president’s policy to designate al Qaeda detainees as combatants in the new war for whom the Geneva Conventions would not comply.

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01
May

Detainee dies at U.S. Army prison in Iraq

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: Camp Cropper, Death in Custody, Detainee and Iraq

Note from the FD editor: I normally do not comment on news articles. I cannot let this one go by. First, this article if from early April. I do some fairly exhaustive searches to find news to post here, yet I missed it. I didn’t see it on other detainee sites either. In any case, I hope you believe me when I say that the statement “died from injuries apparently sustained during an assault by other prisoners” is extremely suspicious. I doubt very much that problems like this exist between detainees. They have enough to deal with simply from the guards and interrogators.

camp-cropper1BAGHDAD (AP) — A detainee at a U. S. Army prison has died from injuries apparently sustained during an assault by other prisoners, the military said Friday.

The detainee — whose name, age and nationality were not given — was pronounced dead at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq Thursday by an attending physician, a brief statement said.

An investigation is pending to determine whether the apparent assault was the cause of death, it said. Afterward, the detainee’s family will receive the remains.

In Iraq, the U. S. Army oversees thousands of prisoners at Camp Cropper near Baghdad airport, Camp Bucca in the southern desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

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01
May

Crossing the line

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Bush Lies, Death in Custody, Detainee Abuse, Iraq, Politics and Torture

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris casts light on the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib
By Carl Kozlowski
abughraIf a picture is worth a thousand words, then whole volumes of disgust and dismay were generated by the horrifying photos that emerged from the US military prison in Iraq known as Abu Ghraib. A former torture center for deposed and now deceased dictator Saddam Hussein, the gigantic compound was the scene of unspeakable atrocities and murders during that notorious despot’s regime.

When American forces stormed through Baghdad, chasing Hussein from power, the world believed that places like Abu Ghraib would cease to exist under the seemingly benevolent reign of the US. Yet, inexplicably, we carried on as if we were part of Hussein’s Republican Guard and continued the very same practices we swore we’d protect the Iraqi people from.

Justice seemed to prevail, however, as the world media expressed righteous indignation over the images and the military tribunal system appeared to swing into quick action. Within three years of the revelations, a creepy-looking female soldier named Lynndie England who starred in many of the most harrowing photos has already been tried, done time for her involvement and been cast into the world stripped of her military honors.
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26
Apr

Interrogating Abu Ghraib

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Abu Ghraib, Death in Custody, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Female Detainee, Iraq, Lies of the U.S. Administration, Murder, Torture, human rights and war crimes
Errol Morris

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Tony Diaz, a former military-police sergeant who served at Abu Ghraib, stares into Errol Morris’ camera and speaks in baffled tones about being called into a shower room at that notorious Baghdad prison where CIA interrogators were beating an Iraqi detainee to death. Diaz says he did not participate in the man’s interrogation and did not beat him; he was ordered to hold the man up and help secure his arms, and he followed those orders. While he was doing that, drops of blood fell from the detainee’s battered face onto Diaz’s uniform, and that troubled him. He hadn’t done anything wrong, he told Morris, yet the blood made him feel responsible.

I don’t mean to demonize Tony Diaz. Virtually alone among the interviewees in Morris’ new film “Standard Operating Procedure,” an artful, meditative investigation of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs and the circumstances that produced them, Diaz seems to be wrestling with his conscience, after his own bewildered and evasive fashion. (Morris has also co-authored a book of the same title with New Yorker staff writer and Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, to be published next month.)

Everybody else who was there, from former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the M.P.’s at Abu Ghraib, down to the specialists and privates who took the fall for the abuses committed there — including Megan Ambuhl, Sabrina Harman and Abu Ghraib poster-child Lynndie England — enthusiastically points fingers and passes the buck: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did it; I fell in love with the wrong guy; there were black-hat government agents I couldn’t control; I was just following orders.

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19
Apr

ACLU Sues Pentagon To Uncover Records Of Deaths At Guantánamo

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: ACLU, Death in Custody, Guantanamo and Lies of the U.S. Administration

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 519-7829 or 549-2666; media@aclu.org

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit today to force the Department of Defense to release all records relating to deaths, suicide attempts and homicide attempts at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay since 2002. The ACLU’s lawsuit follows a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for those documents, including records relating to four specific detainee deaths that the government categorized as suicides. To date, the Defense Department has failed to comply with the ACLU’s FOIA request.

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19
Apr

US interrogators abused Afghan detainees at Gardez: ACLU

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Afghanistan, Death in Custody, Detainee, Detainee Abuse and Gardez

Jaime Jansen at 8:02 AM ET

Photo source or description

[JURIST] US military interrogators allegedly abused Afghan detainees in 2003 at the Gardez Detention Facility [Globalsecurity.org backgrounder] in southeastern Afghanistan, according to Pentagon documents [text; press release] released Wednesday under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [text] request by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [advocacy website]. The documents indicate that eight Afghan detainees complained of abuse by interrogators, and that a 2006 review by the Army Criminal Investigation Command [official website] determined interrogators found misconduct that did not rise to the level of abuse. The review also concluded that the alleged abuse did not cause the 2003 death of Jamal Nasser, who died in custody. In the documents, some interrogators admitted using techniques they learned in a course designed to expose them to the conditions they may face if captured by foreign forces. AP has more.

The ACLU has opened several FOIA lawsuits [ACLU materials] trying to obtain information about alleged detainee abuse at US military bases for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Last month, the ACLU filed a lawsuit [complaint, PDF; JURIST report] seeking to compel the US government to release unredacted transcripts of military hearings conducted at Guantanamo Bay in early 2007 for 14 “high-value” prisoners [DNI profiles, PDF] during which the prisoners allegedly described torture and abuse sustained during detention in CIA secret prisons [JURIST report].

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18
Apr

Bush’s henchman ordered up legal fig leaf to justify torture

By Dazeylin 0 Comments
Categories: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", Afghanistan, Bagram, Civilian Casualties, Death in Custody, Detainee, Detainee Abuse, Interrogators, Lies of the U.S. Administration, Torture, human rights and war crimes

Tribune Editorial

mpataxitothedarksideposterb

I resisted watching ”Taxi to the Dark Side,” the documentary on America’s treatment of terror suspects that won this year’s Academy Award as best documentary feature. The review DVD I was sent was sitting on top of my television set for a week, reminding me - no exhorting me - to look at it, but I kept avoiding it. I literally had to steel myself to finally sit down and watch, knowing how sickened I’d be by the subject matter.
The featured story was of Dilawar, an Afghani taxi driver, who was dead five days after he was taken into American custody at the Bagram Air Base in 2002. He was an innocent man, as it turned out, and not someone who had participated in a rocket attack on American forces, as was claimed by the Afghan militiamen who turned Dilawar over. Still, the dark-haired husband and father spent his last days in an American military prison with his arms shackled to the ceiling, forced to remain standing, hooded and not allowed to sleep.
He was beaten so badly about the lower body that the coroner said his legs had been pulpified. His death was ruled a homicide.  We killed him - slowly.
The documentary offers a stark description of this monstrous crime, including pictures of the prisoner isolation cages with the chains hanging from the ceiling and chilling admissions by those who joined in Dilawar’s suffering.

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