By Mark O’Brien
Impunity Watch Reporter, North America
WASHINGTON, United States — British troops spoke out on Monday about human rights abuses of Iraqi detainees by American forces at a secret US detention facility in Baghdad.
The whistleblowers, who included soldiers and airmen from the Royal Air Force and the Army Air Corps, claimed they witnessed various forms of torture after the US-led invasion in 2003.
“I saw one man having his prosthetic leg being pulled off him, and being beaten about the head with it before he was thrown onto the truck,” one British military officer was quoted as saying in The Guardian.
Other allegations included claims that Americans at Camp Nama—a secret center at Baghdad International Airport—gave Iraqi prisoners electric shocks, brutally beat Iraqi prisoners, and locked them in dog-like kennels. The prisoners reportedly were routinely hooded before allegedly being subjected to these tortures and were interrogated in sound-proof shipping containers.
“The prisoners were taken into a hangar to be bagged and tagged, a bag put over their heads and their hands plasticuffed behind their backs,” another soldier told The Guardian. “Everyone’s seen the Abu Ghraib pictures, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
Indeed, these new allegations follow the scandal over abuses at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison, as well as the beating death of civilian Baha Mousa by British forces in 2003.
The Guardian’s investigation highlighted that the joint American-British special forces unit, called Task Force 121, was responsible for detaining Iraqis believed to have information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq.
“The methods [of abuse] were so brutal that they drew condemnation not only from a U.S. human rights body, but from a special investigator reporting to the Pentagon,” The Guardian reported.
When confronted about the new allegations, Geoff Hoon, Britain’s defense secretary at the time, said he had no knowledge of the secret US camp or anything that may have transpired there.
“I’ve never heard of the place,” Hoon reportedly said when asked about the involvement of British troops in providing support services to help detain inmates at Camp Nama.
Although there is no indication that British troops helped carry out any of the alleged abuses at the camp, Britain’s Ministry of Defense refused to say whether it was aware of concerns about human rights abuses there.
A California-based investigative organization, called Project Censored, estimates that more than one million Iraqis were killed as a result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country.
For further information, please see:
Al Arabiya — Baghdad’s Camp Nama: Brutal Prison Torture During Iraq War Revealed — 2 April 2013
Kuwait News Agency — Human Rights Abuses at Detention Centre — 2 April 2013
Press TV — UK Troops Reveal Torture at Secret US-Run Prison in Iraq — 2 April 2013
Daily Mail — British Forces ‘Witnessed Electric Shocks, Beatings and Dog Kennel Torture of Iraqi Prisoners in Secret US Prison in Baghdad’ — 1 April 2013
The Guardian — Camp Nama: Baghdad’s Secret Torture Facility — 1 April 2013
