Lara Marlowe talked to the Farhan brothers, who were detained in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison
I met the Farhan brothers by chance last month, in a dusty street in Khan Dari, between the infamous towns of Abu Ghraib and Falluja. Local residents had taken me to see a grain merchant whose shop was broken into by US soldiers on the night of October 31st, 2003. The soldiers took $900 and 1 million Iraqi dinars, I was told.
A few days earlier, a US army captain in Tikrit told me his unit always confiscates large amounts of money in raids.
The shop belonged to the Farhan family, not the merchant tenant. The soldiers had been told by an informer that the Farhans supported "the resistance", and they proceeded to the family home to arrest Mohamed (38), Hadi (30), Hamid (27) and Mahmoud (26). "When they arrested us, they took my sister Soumaya's gold necklace," Mohamed said.
The two youngest brothers are still in Abu Ghraib prison. I wonder how the Farhans felt on April 30th when al-Jazeera television broadcast over and over photographs showing the humiliation, sexual abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
The photographs were shown on CBS television's 60 Minutes programme last week. They had been left out of a secret report by Maj Gen Antonio Taguba, excerpts of which were published by the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in this week's New Yorker magazine.
I doubt that the Farhans were surprised by the sudden, sensationalistic coverage of the Coalition's abuse of prisoners. Mohamed and Hadi showed me purple-brown scars on their wrists and ankles, from handcuffs and shackles. They had been beaten with clubs, especially on the kidneys, at the US camp they called Sadamiyat Falluja. They were starved for the first four days and woken every time they fell asleep.
In Gen Taguba's report, Sabrina Harman, one of seven US military police now accused of mistreating prisoners, said it was her job to keep detainees awake. In one of the photographs, a hooded prisoner stands on a box with electrical wires attached to his fingers, toes and penis. The floor is flooded with water, and he believes that if he falls he will be electrocuted.
I asked the Farhan brothers if the soldiers used electricity on them. They said no, which strengthened my belief that they were telling the truth. But they were forced to sit and stand repeatedly with crossed hands tied to a pulley and a heavy container of water. "Who is attacking the Americans in Falluja? Who is in the resistance?" they were asked over and over.
Mohamed moved his front tooth with his thumb and index finger and told me that a soldier had pulled it with pliers. "They did other things to us," he said several times. Then he glanced at the crowd around us, which included schoolboys, and fell silent.
At Abu Ghraib the Farhan brothers were held in tents, not the infamous cellblock where prisoners valued by military intelligence were left naked, without sheets, blankets, towels or water, sometimes handcuffed to the doors of their cells or forced to wear female underpants.
US and British officials have mustered the sort of "shock and horror" reactions you would expect to the photographs from Abu Ghraib and images which appear to show British soldiers kicking and urinating on Iraqi prisoners. But they had no excuse for not knowing.
Gen Taguba's secret, damning report on what he calls "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib was completed in February. The military ignored earlier reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on the ill- treatment of prisoners, which has taken place in military camps and prisons across Iraq, not just at Abu Ghraib. "It's rather disingenuous for the military to say it's not systemic or that there are just a few bad apples," says Kathleen Cavanaugh, a lecturer in international human rights law and a member of the executive committee for Amnesty Ireland.
Brig Gen Janis Karpinksi, the US reservist who was responsible for Iraq's prison system, was suspended in January. So quiet was the suspension that when I requested an interview with her last month, the military information officer in Baghdad recorded my request and promised to process it. He also gave me a handout on prisoners which cited the Geneva Convention six times in three pages.
Gen Taguba's report explains how military intelligence used the military police to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation. The general names those most responsible as Col Thomas Pappas, the commander of military intelligence brigades, Lt Col Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Centre, and two civilian contractors, Steven Stephanowicz and John Israel of CACI International. It is especially shocking that private contractors are being used in Iraq to interrogate prisoners.
The authenticity of photographs published by the Mirror newspaper on May 1st has been questioned on the grounds that British forces in Iraq are not equipped with the type of gun and headgear shown in the pictures.
If the photos are a hoax, it is important to remember that at least four Iraqi prisoners have died in British custody in Iraq, and that in at least one case, there is no doubt that the cause of death was torture.
One shudders to think of the revenge that Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims will seek. For as Ms Cavanaugh points out, the Geneva Convention is meant to provide "double protection" for both sides in a conflict. "It will be very hard for the Americans or British to expect better treatment than they are doling out when they fall into enemy hands," she says.
International law does not provide a clear dividing line between ill-treatment and torture, although the intent to inflict pain and subsequent physical and psychological damage are often used as criteria. The disgrace at Abu Ghraib has raised a small debate about terminology.
As documented in Gen Taguba's report, US soldiers broke chemical lights and poured phosphoric liquid on prisoners, sodomised a detainee with a flashlight or broom stick and set military dogs on Iraqis. Not only do such acts constitute torture, they have destroyed any shred of moral legitimacy that US forces in Iraq might still have clung to.