Reports have surfaced that US troops took two Iraqi businessmen and pushed them towards a cage in the Presidential Palace in which two lions were caged. They pulled them back only after they got really close to the cage. The ACLU has taken the case and has sued Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Meanwhile in Washington two Iraqi businessmen detained by US forces in 2003 have claimed soldiers threw them into a cage of lions, pretended to be executing them, and carried out other acts of torture during months in captivity.
Are there no depths to which the US won’t go? Details below.
No, I did not make this up. The US has no limits when it comes to torturing prisoners, including throwing them into a cage of lions. Here is the rest of the piece in the Guardian:
Sherzad Khalid, 35, and Thahe Sabbar, 37, are suing defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials in a federal court in Washington. They said they had been abused because they could not tell their captors where Saddam Hussein was hiding, and knew nothing about weapons of mass destruction.
“That was a terrifying moment for me,” Mr Khalid told the Washington Post on Monday, describing how three times he was shoved into a lions’ cage at a presidential palace in Baghdad, and then soldiers lined him up for a mock execution. “I was wondering if it could be real that the American army would act this way.”
I thought I had seen it all when I learned about the torture reports. I thought wrong. I thought I had seen it all when I heard about the extraordinary renditions. I was wrong. I thought I had seen it all when I heard about the White Phosphorus reports. I was wrong. And, given the past history of the Bush administration, I suggest this will not be the last I have seen.
The story has been picked up in other papers as well.
An announced investigation by the army into charges U.S. forces put prisoners into cages with lions in 2003. Charges have been brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First. Two Iraqi businessmen say they were taken to lion cages on the grounds of the presidential palace, forced to enter the cages, and were pulled back only as the lions approached. Rumsfeld called these accusations “far-fetched.”
Thahe Mohammed Sabar said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union that soldiers had pushed him and Sherzad Khalid, a friend, into the cage, then pulled them out when a lion moved toward him. Mr. Khalid said soldiers had forced him into the cages after repeatedly asking where to find Saddam Hussein and unconventional weapons.
This is a direct result of the Bush administration’s decision to have the soldiers use all interrogation methods short of death to try to find the WMD’s. So, not only has the Bush administration copied the Soviet-style torture methods from the Cold War, they have actually improved on them and gone beyond them.
Furthermore, this is a direct result of the Bush administration’s dehumanizing of the Iraqi insurgency. In other words, they are terrorists, not people. Therefore, they are not totally human, and we can do whatever we want with them.
“They took me behind the cage, they were screaming at me, scaring me and beating me a lot,” Thahe Mohammed Sabbar said in an interview. “One of the soldiers would open the door, and two soldiers would push me in. The lions came running toward me and they pulled me out and shut the door. I completely lost consciousness.”
Army spokesman Paul Boyce said he has never heard of lions being used in any detainee operations and it has never come up in any of the more than 400 investigations into detainee abuse conducted by the military over the past three years.
“We take every allegation of detainee abuse seriously,” Boyce said. “But it does seem unusual that this is now coming out for the very first time after three years of investigations.”
I suggest the reason those people took so long to report this was because of the psychological trauma that they experienced, given the fact that one of them blacked out. So, logically, it is reasonable to assume that they waited three years to come forward because of the more favorable atmosphere and because they needed that long to come to terms with the abuse. This sort of thing happens a lot in abusive relationships as well.
It’s common wisdom that this administration has, from the outset, and right up to the present, made a habit of accusing others of what it is guilty of. I’ve always thought of that as just an effective technique — put your opposition on the defense, so that, at best, no one notices what you’re doing, and, at worst, people excuse your crimes because the other side supposedly does it too.
But when self-described Christians are choosing to replicate the history of their faith in reverse, casting themselves in the villains’ place, while somehow still claiming the innocence of holy victims, it looks more like pathology than political spin. They remind me of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, aroused by Christian iconography, fantasizing himself as a Roman soldier. Then throw in something too twisted for Alex -fantasizing himself, simultaneously, as a martyr.
Sick. Just sick, these Clockwork Christians.
When hearing these reports, I wonder personally if I should totally reevaluate what I believe in and why I believe it. I can’t speak for others who are Christian, but I can speak for myself.
The Post has more details of the suit:
The men, with six others who say they were abused in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue that top officials should be held accountable for their actions and ask the U.S. courts to grant them damages for their suffering. The case is currently in U.S. District Court in Washington, according to Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer with the ACLU.
Guttentag said Rumsfeld and other top leaders “failed to fulfill their duty to prevent the torture they knew or should have known was going on” and that they “willingly turned a blind eye” when they heard about abuse, such as that at Abu Ghraib.
Khalid said soldiers showed their own desperation for information during interrogation sessions, repeatedly asking Khalid if he knew where Hussein was or if he knew about weapons of mass destruction.
“I laughed,” Khalid said. “I thought he was joking, so I laughed. He just hit me.”
“They took us to a cage — an animal cage that had lions in it within the Republican Palace,” he said. “And they threatened us that if we did not confess, they would put us inside the cage with the lions in it. It scared me a lot when they got me close to the cage, and they threatened me. And they opened the door and they threatened that if I did not confess, that they were going to throw me inside the cage. And as the lion was coming closer, they would pull me back out and shut the door, and tell me, ‘We will give you one more chance to confess.’ And I would say, ‘Confess to what?'”
Inside the Republican Palace — the site of Saddam’s former office — Sabbar says troops taunted him with a mock execution.
“I found the other prisoners who had come before me there in the line beside me mocking, in a way as to make it a mock execution,” he said. “They all stood up, those of us who could stand up. They directed their weapons towards us. And they shot, shot towards our heads and chests. And when the shots sounded, some of us lost consciousness. Some started to cry. Some lost control of their bladders. And they were laughing the whole time.”
After a night in jail at the Republican Palace, Khalid says he was taken to the prison at the Baghdad airport where the torture continued.
“They put us in individual cells,” he said. “And before entering those cells, they formed two teams of American soldiers — one to the right, one to the left — about 10 to 15 each American soldiers. And they were holding wooden sticks. It was like a hallway, like a passage. And they made us go that hallway while shouting at us as we were walking through and hitting us with the wooden sticks. They were beating us severely.”
Khalid says U.S. soldiers deprived him of food, water, and sleep. He claims he began to suffer from stomach ulcers, but was denied medical care.
All the while, Khalid says, soldiers routinely asked for information about Saddam’s whereabouts: “I said to him, ‘How would I know where Saddam is?’ And I thought that he was kidding me. And that’s why I laughed. And he beat me again.”
So, Bush does not have moral authority to claim that we went to stop Saddam from torturing his people. This is exactly the sort of thing that Uday and Qusay, Saddam’s sons, did in their days of power. So, any time Bush or his right-wing allies talk about what an evil man Saddam was, all we have to do is point to the lions the prison guards used on two Iraqis.
The Age has these photos:
Victims: Sherzad Khalid (left) and Thahe Sabber.