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The CPT Report
The family of another detained man told us his story: The father had been an officer in the Iraqi army. After the invasion of Baghdad he was afraid and stayed mostly in his home. U. S. soldiers came to his home at midnight, started shooting at his house, then blasted the door open and came in. They searched the house, destroying furnishings, and stole money and gold jewelry. In the process of shooting at the house, they shot the man’s wife in the face, arm and leg, and later she lost one of her eyes. The man was still detained and the family did not know where he was. Suhail, a veterinarian, told us the story of his detention. On May 16, he and his son, Ahmed, had gone out of curiosity to see one of Saddam’s palaces. There was a truck nearby which the U.S. soldiers thought belonged to the two men. Soldiers initially arrested just his son, but Suhail, who spoke some English, decided to stay with him, and was arrested too. Suhail had high blood pressure and was on medication. They were detained at the airport, but later moved to Abu Ghraib prison. They were in tents and slept on bare ground, with no mats or blankets, with about a hundred men in each tent. On June 13, the prisoners shouted, “Freedom!” repeatedly and the U.S. soldiers opened fire on them, killing four and wounding three. Suhail knew one of those killed, a young man of 19 who had been married four months. He held the young man as he died. The next day soldiers gave him clean clothes, told him not to speak about what he had seen, and then released him. We helped find where his son had been transferred, and later, at the end of August when his son had been released, he came to thank us. “This whole experience is so unreal, it’s like science fiction,” an Iraqi science professor told us when recounting to us his three-month ordeal being interrogated in more than a dozen meetings with the U.S. “Scientific Assessment Team.” Many other scientists he knew had similar experiences. One professor he knew was taken away and detained for two weeks. Another was still in detention. “I wish there was something I could do to close this file,” he lamented. “It started with a polite interview,” he said, “and then the interrogation became more harsh and threatening. We were guilty until proven innocent.” They demanded that he tell them where weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are. When he told them he didn’t know about any, interrogators insisted he was lying. “They asked me over and over, telling me I was lying. That was the hardest part. When they asked why I wasn’t telling the truth, I answered, ‘Are you interested in the truth, or just in what you want to hear?’ “We explained in detail how our systems work. The judgment of all in the group of scientists I know, is that WMD do not exist here or elsewhere in the country. The interrogators referred to a ‘reliable source’ claiming the existence of a secret underground laboratory. We were honest. We knew of no such place. I finally said, ‘Then bring that person here and let him find it for you!’” When we first started looking for information about the detainees, we would mostly go to the Iraq Assistance Center where officers were friendly and helpful and would look at computer lists to try to find the names. But in one case we went to an Iraqi police station with an Iraqi man to find out the charges against his brother. When we pressed the U.S. army captain in charge at that station about any due process or time line for a trial, he told us, “This is a war. We don’t have to give them any rights!” Later in the summer, I and Cathy Breen, who worked with us on the Iraq Peace Team, went through a lengthy process to get into the main CPA headquarters. One of the persons we talked to was Judge Campbell, a U.S. judge who was primarily responsible for trying to reconstruct Iraq’s new Justice Ministry. He welcomed us and proceeded to have his staff photocopy two huge documents, one in English, and one in Arabic, listing about 6,000 names. “These were men arrested for anything from curfew violations to murder,” he said. It did not list men accused of violence against U.S. troops or ones currently being transferred from one detention center to another. When we shared with him some of the cases we were working with and pushed him about the lack of legal rights for the detainees and their families, he expressed his frustration. “The situation is horrible,” he said, and then added, “but it is the best we can do right now.” We went away, glad to have the lists of detainees. It would help us with our work, but it was tragic to realize there is not much hope in the system of justice in Iraq being changed or improved in the near future. This also meant we needed to take further steps to deal with the problems of human rights here. We decided to take one case and see how far we could go with it in dealing with U.S. authorities. The Case of Dr. Talib and His Sons In late August, we visited the home of Dr. Talib, a retired physician and his wife, Nawal, a practicing dentist. They told us their story. Just after midnight, August 1, 2003, they woke to the sounds of shooting and the crashing in of the outside door. Their first thought was that it was thieves, so the oldest son shot their gun into the air to scare them away. The response was heavy firing on their house from every direction. They then realized it was American soldiers. For the next two and a half hours Dr. Talib went toward the door and called out in good English, “Come in. We are not violent!” and every time he did this, the shooting would start up again. The family members were afraid they would all be killed.
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