- LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sexual
and physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners continued at least three months after
the Abu Ghraib scandal was revealed, according to accounts by alleged victims
published in the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
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- Vanity Fair writer Donovan Webster, in a report on 60
hours of interviews he conducted with 10 former detainees including a 15-year-old
boy, quoted several accounts of mistreatment that included Iraqi prisoners
being sexually assaulted by American soldiers or being hooded, beaten,
subjected to electric shock and kept in cages or crates.
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- One man said he was hung naked from handcuffs in a frigid
room while soldiers threw buckets of ice water on him.
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- Webster added that several of the people he interviewed
said their mistreatment took place in July, three months after the Abu
Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal broke in late April.
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- The article published on Tuesday said the former detainees
interviewed by Webster are suing two American companies that provided translators
and interrogators to forces in Iraq and that their firsthand accounts comprise
"hundreds, if not thousands, of separate Geneva Convention violations."
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- Vanity Fair said that the accounts of abuses were impossible
to independently verify. The magazine quoted a U.S. military spokesman
for detainee operations in Iraq as dismissing the assertions that prisoners
were held illegally, kept in wooden boxes, handcuffed and blindfolded and
subjected to sexual threats, abuse and assault.
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- In one example cited in the article, a 15-year-old Iraqi
identified only as N said he was pulled from a wooden crate he'd been forced
to crouch inside, wearing handcuffs and blacked-out ski goggles, for 11
days and taken to the bathroom against his will where he was sexually assaulted.
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- He said he was again sexually assaulted two days later
in the prison north of Baghdad but let go later in the day when a soldier
apologized to him for being illegally detained and gave him $50 (27 pounds).
N had been held with several members of his family who also said they were
mistreated.
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- http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050104/325/f9nqf.html
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