現在地 HOME > 掲示板
> 戦争54 > 788.html
★阿修羅♪
|
現在地 HOME > 掲示板
> 戦争54 > 788.html
★阿修羅♪
|
|
| Tweet |
(回答先: 大酒、自殺…アブグレイブ刑務所勤務の米兵、実態語る（朝日新聞）『抗うつ剤』を大量にばらまく 投稿者 天地 日時 2004 年 5 月 06 日 20:33:41)
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82%257E1865%257E2128341,00.html?search=filter
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,82%257E1865%257E2128341,00.html
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Oakland Tribune
Notorious Iraq prison, from inside
Bay Area MPs tell of endless
By Sean Holstege and John Geluardi
STAFF WRITERS
Wednesday, May 05, 2004 - Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison was never a holiday in the Bahamas.
Saddam Hussein jailed tens of thousands of people there, cramming everyone from political enemies and ethnic or religious minorities to common criminals into medieval cells. The Baath regime tortured thousands of dissidents in rooms with a hook in the ceiling. Thousands were executed.
In U.S. hands, the 280-acre compound 20 miles west of Baghdad holds between 5,000 and 6,000 Iraqis, often for months without formal charges. Many are common criminals, some are low-level insurgents, but many are innocent civilians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, say members of a California National Guard military police unit that recently returned to the Bay Area after five months at the prison.
They were at Abu Ghraib when -- in a different part of the prison -- an East Coast unit of MPs, some intelligence officers and some private contractors got involved in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. The prison has gained new infamy as the place where U.S. guards degraded naked inmates in sexually suggestive poses, amid allegations of coercion and hints of torture.
Men and women with the Pittsburg-based 870th Military Police Unit said they were "shocked," "sickened" or "weirded out" by what apparently happened inside a cell block area of the compound they called the Hard Site. That is the part of the original prison where intelligence officers held and extracted information from high-ranking Baathists, people suspected of leading insurgents or other "high-value targets."
Few of the Bay Area MPs ever set foot there. It was a place where lots of rumors but little hard information ever came out. Rumors of the now famous pictures surfaced in early February. Then came stories about a mattress surrounded by chairs and a movie camera, and repeated stories about anal sex.
None of five MPs interviewed said they knew who was in charge of the Hard Site. They guessed the abuses stemmed from bored and immature guards getting carried away in a place devoid of rules or limits.
Abu Ghraib became for the MPs a prison within a prison in a war within a war.
"They had no time off. They were so angry. Even if you got time off, you just sat in your cell. We were in jail too," said Sgt. Denis Ensminger of Alameda. Unlike Marine guards who stayed fresh with four-hour rotations, his unit worked 12-hours at a time, seven days a week.
By Christmas, when the unit's tour was extended a fourth time, the stress began showing. MPs reported heavy drinking, suicide attempts, telephone fights with spouses and lots of mood-altering drugs.
"Combat Stress Management was handing out Prozac and Paxil like crazy, trying to get a handle on the frustration and depression," said Spc. David Bischel of Rodeo.
Meanwhile, "there was a war going on between the military intelligence command and the military police command," said his colleague, Sgt. Joe Martin, a 24-year veteran of the Hayward Police Department.
Instead of setting the tone and demanding accountability inside the Hard Site, he said, the higher-ranking military intelligence commanders picked nits about wearing cold-weather fleece jackets in sub-freezing temperatures because they were not the uniform attire.
All of the MPs said they saw commanding Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski only once or twice. Her tours involved a full entourage, but the general who oversaw all Iraq prisons never got out of her air-conditioned Humvee, they said.
Away from the Hard Site on the other side of the prison, the 870th oversaw one of eight tent cities where the remaining detainees were kept. Each was called a Ganci City, named for Peter Ganci, a National Guardsman and firefighter who died in the World Trade Center.
Overall, the equivalent population of San Quentin Prison was housed in Abu Ghraib's tents.
The Bay Area unit oversaw about 600 prisoners in Ganci 7, an area cordoned off by miles of razor wire. The entrance gate was posted with a wooden sign that read: "Welcome to the Hotel California."
Guards rarely entered the sprawl, where 30 inmates crowded into each dirt-floored tent. The fabric was water-proofed with kerosene, and some caught fire from cigarettes.
Cigarettes were the coin of the realm inside Ganci 7, Ensminger recalled. He enlisted English-speaking prisoners to control the others. They would get a pack of cigarettes a day, the regular inmates would be rationed four a day. Order was kept by rewarding or withholding cigarettes.
The camps were dangerous. One prisoner shot an MP in his body armor with a 9mm handgun smuggled in by Iraqi police. In a subsequent investigation, U.S. authorities were told of a plot to smuggle in hand grenades.
"If you could breathe, you would get an arm band as some kind of police officer. The police are people who want a job, any job. It's wide open," Martin said.
By the time the 870th left in March, Iraqi insurgents lobbed mortar rounds over the cinder block prison walls from the nearby fields and neighborhoods three or four times a week. After they left, a sustained mortar attack killed 21 prisoners. During their five-month assignment none was killed.
There were riots. On one occasion several U.S. soldiers were hurt by hurled rocks. Before the uprising was quelled, they shot prisoners during the fray, several of the MPs said, although accounts of the exact number killed vary from one to six.
Adding to tensions, nobody told the MPs who they were watching. When they asked, the were told simply "security detainees," and when they asked what the term meant, they were told "the detainees were all insurgents who had tried to kill coalition forces and it wasn't true," Bischel recalled.
He and other MPs said many got swept up in raids. Some were as young as 13, he said. Sgt. Martin remembered asking one U.S. Marine why a prisoner was being brought in.
"Interfering with coalition forces," he was told. When he asked for elaboration, the Marine said he "didn't get out of the way quick enough."
His unit didn't know if they were guarding prisoners of war, terrorists, criminals or innocent civilians. When they asked what rules to follow, they got no answer. Only months later were there written procedures for treatment of prisoners issued. "By then you could have given out a copy of 'Gone With the Wind.'"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。