US commanders stop troops from protecting Iraqi torture victims

By James Conachy 12 August 2004

Last June, senior US officers ordered American National Guard troops in Baghdad to withdraw from a prison where alleged insurgents were being subjected to sadistic torture by security forces of the newly installed interim government headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

The Oregon National Guardsmen came upon the scene of the torture and intervened to stop the abuse and protect the helpless victims. When word reached senior US officers of the Guardsmen’s intervention, the order quickly came down for the American troops to leave the scene and abandon the prisoners to their fate. The soldiers were ordered to say nothing of the incident.

The episode occurred on June 29, the same day that Washington officially installed Allawi and his interim government in power as the supposedly “sovereign government” of Iraq. In practice, Allawi had been acting since the end of May as the front man for the US occupation, and his cabinet had assumed control of Iraq’s Interior Ministry.

The US military’s intervention to protect the torturers and abandon their victims says a great deal about the American occupation of Iraq. It gives the lie to the claims that the installation of the interim government represents a “transition to democracy” in Iraq, and demolishes the official US position on torture at US-run prisons such as Abu Ghraib—namely, that any incidences of prisoner abuse are aberrations carried out by a few “bad apples,” and not the product of US policy decisions.

The June 29 episode was first reported on August 8 by the Oregonian newspaper, which published an extensive account based largely on testimonials from Guardsmen who were directly involved. The US soldiers, who had acted out of revulsion over the treatment of the prisoners and an instinctive impulse of human decency, were bewildered and angered by the order from above to hand the prisoners back to those who were savagely abusing them.

The incident has been barely reported by the major US media.

The report in the Oregonian was based on the written testimony of Captain Jarrell Southall of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd National Guard Infantry—a middle school teacher in civilian life—whose account was supported by other members of the unit. The author of the article is Oregonian reporter Mike Francis, who was embedded with the National Guard unit.

Read the rest at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/aug2004/oreg-a12.shtml