Amanda Kluveld van de Volkskrant 9

'Niet de islam maar de westerse cultuur [is] superieur,' schrijft een zekere Amanda Kluveld in de Volkskrant.

Taguba Saw "Video of Male Soldier Sodomizing Female Detainee"

Friday 29 May 2009

In 2007, shortly after he was forced into retirement, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba made a startling admission. During the course of his investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Taguba said he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee."

Taguba told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that he saw other graphic photos and videos as well, including one depicting the "sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees."

That video, as well as photographs Taguba saw of US soldiers raping and torturing Iraqi prisoners, remains in the possession of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID).

Taguba said he did not discuss details of the photographs and videos in his voluminous report on abuses at Abu Ghraib because of the Army's ongoing criminal probe and the photographs' "extremely sensitive nature."

Taguba's report on the widespread abuse of prisoners did say that he found credible a report that a soldier had sodomized "a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick."

The rape video, or photographs like it, "was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it," Hersh wrote. "Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib."

Now, a report in Britain's Daily Telegraph this week stating that the photographs and video Taguba first described to Hersh two years ago were the ones the Obama administration has decided against releasing to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has done just that.

But the photographs described by the Telegraph are not those at the center of the five-year-old lawsuit between the Bush administration and the ACLU that Obama had agreed earlier this year to release.

Two weeks ago, after Obama decided against releasing the photographs, the Telegraph published a report along with several pictures depicting Iraqi prisoners being abused, implying that they were the ones Obama was withholding. That report was also incorrect, as the photographs the Telegraph published two weeks ago had first surfaced in 2006.

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/052909R