According to the December 9 Washington Post, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said four members of Task Force 6-26, a Special Operations unit assigned to hunt down leaders of the Baathist regime in Iraq, used Taser guns on prisoners during interrogations in June. The guns fire an electrically charged projectile into the victim’s skin, which is designed to deliver an incapacitating shock. The Pentagon declined to give details of the sanctions against the task force members but said the punishments did not include criminal penalties.

Defense Department officials said that reports on the abuse had been filed with the Army’s criminal investigation division. They said they could not explain why no criminal charges had been brought, the Post reported.

The Pentagon’s revelation about the sanctions came one day after the American Civil Liberties Union released 43 classified military documents about ongoing abuse of Iraqis by U.S. military personnel. The documents were obtained by the civil liberties group under the Freedom of Information Act despite vigorous opposition from the Bush administration. The documents are posted on the group’s web site.

One of the documents is a June 25 “Info Memo” from Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. The memo states that Defense Department interrogators assigned to work with a Special Operations task force reported that prisoners arriving from temporary detention centers in Baghdad had burn marks on their backs, bruised bodies, and complained of kidney pains.

The prisoners were detained and interrogated by the task force, also known as TF 6-26. One of the Defense Department interrogators, the memo says, watched as members of the task force punched a prisoner in the face to the point the individual needed medical attention. The interrogator in this instance was asked by task force members to leave the room, according to the memo.

Jacoby wrote that one of the interrogators took photos of the prisoner’s injuries in order to record them. When he showed the photos to the task force supervisor they were confiscated. The Defense Department interrogators were threatened by the TF 6-26 supervisor, and told not to talk to anyone about what they had seen. They were also ordered not to leave the compound without specific permission, “even to get a haircut at the PX.” Keys to their vehicles were confiscated.

According to the Post, the interrogators said that TF 6-26 members also slapped prisoners during interrogations. In one instance the task force detained a 28-year-old Iraqi mother who had a 6-month old nursing baby at home with the object of compelling the surrender of her husband, suspected of “terrorism.”

One of the documents obtained by the ACLU describes clashes between military interrogators at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and FBI and Defense Department agents. The Defense Department and FBI personnel supposedly complained that the military’s methods might be illegal, in addition to being ineffective in producing reliable information. Both sides agreed, however, that each had their own way of doing things.

In another document, an FBI agent who had repeatedly observed detainees who had been stripped naked and placed in isolation in Abu Ghraib said he made no protest because it seemed no different from strip searches at prisons in the United States. The agent, whose name is deleted from the document, said he was aware that sleep deprivation was used to force prisoners to talk but added he was not sure if that was illegal. Defense Department officials have defended the practice, said the Post. The daily also noted that the U.S. State Department’s annual accounting of human rights abuses by other governments has traditionally described sleep deprivation as a form of torture.
 
 
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