Files suggest US troops tried to hide abuses

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | February 18, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A former Iraqi detainee told Army investigators that a US soldier forced him to sign a statement that he had not been abused even though American interrogators in September 2003 had dislocated his arms, beaten his leg with a bat, crushed his nose, and put an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, according to newly released internal military documents.

In addition, a sergeant at a military camp in southern Afghanistan told an Army investigator in July 2004 that his unit erased a series of digital photographs showing guards beating detainees and aiming guns at hooded prisoners. The sergeant said the pictures were deleted after photos from the Abu Ghraib prison appeared in the media, out of the unit's fear that the pictures could spark a second wave of scandal.

The disclosures provide the first evidence that in both the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of war, soldiers involved in alleged abuse incidents may have sought to suppress evidence of their actions, muddying any inquiry into how pervasive the abuse of detainees was. Other documents released yesterday also suggest that while the military has said it is investigating all allegations of abuse, it is also closing many of the investigations on the grounds that no conclusion can be reached.

''These raise the question of how many other allegations of abuse were buried in the same way," said Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking government documents on detainee abuses. ''That's very troubling because we already think that abuse was pervasive, but maybe there is a whole layer of abuse that we haven't seen."

Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman, released a fact sheet about the documents and a statement saying, ''The Army remains committed to addressing identified problems in detainee operations and to communicating the progress to the public."

The newly disclosed abuse allegations were among 988 pages of Army Criminal Investigation Division files released yesterday by the ACLU, which is making the documents public when it obtains them from various federal agencies.

In addition to indicating two examples of evidence of abuse that allegedly was suppressed, the documents also indicated that military investigators often closed cases quickly on the grounds that they did not have enough evidence to prove or refute the claims, Jaffer said.

''What we do see here is more evidence of a pattern in which the government failed to aggressively investigate credible allegations of abuse," he said.

The files released yesterday cover eight separate Army investigations in detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the one in which the Iraqi detainee was forced to sign a statement saying he was not abused -- in exchange for his freedom -- and the sergeant in Afghanistan who said soldiers wiped out digital pictures of abuse.

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