Revelations add to picture of US torture - World - smh.com.au

Revelations add to picture of US torture - World - smh.com.au

By Eric Schmitt in Washington and Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco
March 20, 2006

AS THE Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite US special operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret prison. There, US soldiers turned a former government torture chamber into their own interrogation cell, calling it the Black Room.

In the windowless room, soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, spat in their faces and used them for target practice in games of jailhouse paintball. Their aim was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, US Defence Department personnel said.

The Black Room was part of a temporary prison at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of the elite Taskforce 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to nearby Abu Ghraib prison.

Pentagon personnel who worked at Camp Nama said prisoners often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "There were no rules there," one Pentagon official said.

The revelation adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at US prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret CIA jails around the world.

The account of Taskforce 6-26 reveals the extent to which prisoners were mistreated months before and after the abuse at Abu Ghraib was made public in April 2004, and it makes nonsense of the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists.

Taskforce 6-26 has had a high percentage of its troops punished for prisoner abuse.

At one point, a Defence undersecretary, Stephen Cambone, ordered his deputy, Lieutenant-General William Boykin to, "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

A melting pot of military and civilian units, Taskforce 6-26 was formed in mid-2003. CIA officers, FBI agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the taskforce.

The unit had one priority: to capture or kill Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said. The harsh treatment of prisoners extended beyond Camp Nama to outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk.

At these some prisoners were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, Pentagon personnel who served with the unit said.

In January 2004, the taskforce captured the son of one of Saddam's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told army investigators he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators closed their inquiry in June 2005 after they said taskforce members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify the soldiers involved. The unit also claimed that 70 per cent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the taskforce's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids often failed, yielding little if any intelligence, Pentagon officials said. By early 2004, the CIA and the FBI had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.

In the middle of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 70 kilometres north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

The Justice Department inspector-general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Taskforce 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said.

The New York Times

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