I know lots of you may not have a subscription to nytimes.com, so I'm going to paste the text into the post straight from the website:


Red Cross Found Abuses at Abu Ghraib Last Year
By NEIL A. LEWIS

Published: May 11, 2004


ASHINGTON, May 10 — In a visit to the Abu Ghraib prison last October, Red Cross inspectors were so unsettled by what they found that they broke off their visit and demanded an immediate explanation from military prison authorities.

As recounted in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, prisoners were being held "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness," apparently for several days.

The inspectors were also able to document the exact sort of behavior that has produced a firestorm over the last two weeks: "acts of humiliation such as being made to stand naked against the wall of the cell with arms raised or with women's underwear over the heads for prolonged periods — while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position."

The report also said military intelligence officers had confirmed the inspectors' impression that those "methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information."

The 24-page report, completed in February, appears to contradict several statements by senior Pentagon officials in recent days concerning how and when the military learned of potential abuses in Iraq, how they reacted to reports of abuses and how widespread the practices might have been.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said Monday that the organization's president, Jakob Kellenberger, complained about the prison abuses directly to top Bush administration officials during a two-day visit to Washington in mid-January when he met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul L. Wolfowitz.

Antonella Notari, the chief spokeswoman for the international committee in Geneva, suggested that Mr. Kellenberger had raised the issue with senior administration officials because the situation had not improved sufficiently after the prison authorities in Baghdad had been informed of the criticisms.

"If it's a serious problem and it persists, we would make use of our contacts with higher-ranking people," she said.

Ms. Notari said the February report had been based on private interviews with prisoners of war and civilian internees during the 29 visits the committee's staff had conducted in 14 places of detention across Iraq between March 31 and Oct. 24, 2003.

The Red Cross document, which also covers abusive behavior at prisons run by the British armed forces, was first disclosed by The Wall Street Journal.

The report said that as far back as May of last year, the Red Cross reported to the military about 200 allegations of abuse, and that in July it complained about 50 allegations of abuse at a detention site called Camp Cropper. The latter complaint included one case in which a prisoner reported having been deprived of sleep, kicked repeatedly and injured, and had a baseball tied into his mouth. Medical examinations supported the prisoner's account.

The report called some of the abuses "tantamount to torture."

Mr. Powell's spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said Monday that "when such information came to us, as it did over the course of time, late last year and early this year, we certainly took note of the information."

A spokesman for Ms. Rice said Monday that Mr. Kellenberger had not raised the issue of Iraq prison abuse with her at their meeting on Jan. 15. Sean McCormack, the spokesman, said staff members who had attended said their notes showed that "this issue was not discussed in this meeting." He said the entire session had been about the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

An aide to Mr. Wolfowitz said Mr. Kellenberger had briefly mentioned a forthcoming report about problems at the Iraqi prisons. Charley Cooper, special adviser to Mr. Wolfowitz, said, "No mention was made of any specific allegations of abuse or mistreatment of prisoners at any of the facilities housing detainees inside Iraq."

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview on Monday that the "timeline is not yet clear in my mind, but it is critical."

"If, in fact, Pentagon and other administration officials were alerted by the International Red Cross to the abuse in the prisons," she said, "it's very troubling to me that those allegations were not followed up and pursued." The Red Cross, she said, has enormous credibility and its observations should be taken very seriously. The International Committee of the Red Cross is typically given access to detention sites like Abu Ghraib to monitor human rights under an agreement in which it does not publicize its concerns but tries to work to resolve problems through the host government.

The February report seems at odds with some of the testimony given before Congress last week by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith and other top officials.

On Friday, General Smith was asked whether there were complaints about Abu Ghraib before a soldier at the prison turned over copies of incriminating pictures to investigators on Jan. 13.

"There were reports that there was trouble in those places, but not of the character we're talking about here," he replied. General Smith, the deputy commander of the Central Command, which supervises operations in Iraq, said the military responded formally on Dec. 24 to the Red Cross's complaints after its October visit, and had made improvements.

"Whether the response was adequate or not, I can't tell you," he said. "But the I.C.R.C. came back and visited 4 through 8 January and they — the indication from there was that there were improvements."

One senior military official said Monday that the Red Cross complaints appeared to have been handled by company commanders in Iraq and not handed up the chain of command to someone like General Smith.


Fiona Fleck contributed reporting from Geneva for this article.

I found this absolutely appaling to begin with, and I hope you all shae the same feelings of disgust and disdain. But to think that this shit has been going on for THIS long is absolutely disgraceful.

___________________

It has to start somewhere,
It has to start sometime,
What better place then here?
What better time than now?
--Rage Against the Machine