Neil Mackay

Three soldiers — a captain and two sergeants — from the 82nd Airborne Division stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury near Fallujah in Iraq have told Human Rights Watch how prisoners were tortured both as a form of stress relief and as a way of breaking them for interrogation sessions.

The troops would put sand-bags on prisoners’ heads and cuff them with plastic zip-ties. The sergeant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said if he was told that prisoners had been found with homemade bombs, “we would f*** them up, put them in stress positions and put them in a tent and withhold water … It was like a game. You know, how far could you make this guy go before he passes out or just collapses on you?”

He explained: “To ‘f*** a PUC’ means to beat him up. We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day. To ‘smoke’ someone is to put them in stress positions until they get muscle fatigue and pass out. That happened every day.

Many prisoners were completely innocent and had no part in the insurgency, he said — but intelligence officers had told soldiers to exhaust the prisoners to make them co-operate. He said he now knew their behaviour was “wrong”, but added “this was the norm”. “Trends were accepted. Leadership failed to provide clear guidance so we just developed it. They wanted intel [intelligence]. As long as no PUC came up dead, it happened.”

Pictures of abuse at FOB Mercury were destroyed by soldiers after the scandal of Abu Ghraib broke.

To read more visit:
http://www.thewe.cc/contents/more/archive/circus_torture.html