Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON

The scandal spawned by evidence of Iraqi prisoner abuse at the hands of their U.S. captors continued to widen on several fronts last week. Among the developments:

• USA Today reported that more than half of the 37 prisoners who have died while in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were victims of severe abuse and violence. While four of the deaths — shootings during a riot at the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison — have been ruled “justifiable,” others indicate unwarranted assault, according to the report. At least 10 prisoners died from “blunt force trauma,” excessive force, strangulation, asphyxia, smothering, or “compromised respiration.” No U.S. soldiers have been criminally charged in any of the cases, USA Today reported.
• More than 90 cases of possible misconduct by U.S. soldiers have been the subject of investigations — a number that indicates a broader scale of possible wrongdoing than widely acknowledged by military officials, the Washington Post reported. The 91 cases, disclosed by a U.S. Army official, include 42 of alleged abuse inside detention facilities and 49 outside the facilities. Deaths, assault, and theft account for nearly all of the investigations, 59 of which have been closed, largely without disclosed actions or punishments, according to the Post.
• The Associated Press reported that the Army general who commands the criminal investigators looking into abuse allegations issued a report last fall saying that no such abuse was taking place. His findings, challenged by later investigations and proliferating images of abuse, may create a conflict of interest if his subordinates find evidence that he failed to do his duty or disclose abuse, according to the AP. While Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder’s deputy commander, Col. Scott Taylor, insisted that criminal investigators “feel absolutely unencumbered from command influence,” others are less confident. “It’s a real complicating factor in my mind,” Walter Huffman, the Army’s judge advocate general from 1997 until 2001, told the AP. “It’s obviously unfair to ask [an investigator] who has his career and advancement opportunities in the hands of his commanding general to make a finding adverse to General Ryder.”
• Two U.S. marines were sentenced to prison time for using a power generator to deliver an electric shock to an Iraqi prisoner who irritated them by speaking loudly and throwing trash outside his cell. Pfc. Andrew Sting was sentenced to a year in prison; Pfc. Jeremiah Trefney will serve 18 months. Both 19-year-old men will lose rank and pay and receive bad-conduct discharges for the abuse, which occurred in April, reported the AP. Two other marines implicated in the abuse await courts martial.
• The Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and several medical and veterans’ groups last week sued the U.S. government for failing to release documents related to the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. The groups sought the documents last October under the Freedom of Information Act, but have been stonewalled, according to the Agence France-Presse. “The public has a right to know what the government’s policies were, why these abuses were allowed to take place, and who was ultimately responsible,” ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer told the AFP.