[Mb-civic] Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

<>Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs
Interrogated General's Sleeping-Bag Death, CIA's Use of Secret Iraqi 
Squad Are Among Details

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 3, 2005; Page A01

Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American 
captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation 
tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 
2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green 
sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical 
cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.

It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his 
last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a U.S. 
soldier in Interrogation Room 6 in the western Iraqi desert. Two days 
before, a secret CIA-sponsored group of Iraqi paramilitaries, working 
with Army interrogators, had beaten Mowhoush nearly senseless, using 
fists, a club and a rubber hose, according to classified documents.

The sleeping bag was the idea of a soldier who remembered how his older 
brother used to force him into one, and how scared and vulnerable it 
made him feel. Senior officers in charge of the facility near the Syrian 
border believed that such "claustrophobic techniques" were approved ways 
to gain information from detainees, part of what military regulations 
refer to as a "fear up" tactic, according to military court documents.

The circumstances that led up to Mowhoush's death paint a vivid example 
of how the pressure to produce intelligence for anti-terrorism efforts 
and the war in Iraq led U.S. military interrogators to improvise and 
develop abusive measures, not just at Abu Ghraib but in detention 
centers elsewhere in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 
Mowhoush's ordeal in Qaim, over 16 days in November 2003, also reflects 
U.S. government secrecy surrounding some abuse cases and gives a glimpse 
into a covert CIA unit that was set up to foment rebellion before the 
war and took part in some interrogations during the insurgency.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201941.html

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