Former detainees from US military jails in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and lingering physical injuries and scars that can be traced to their imprisonment, a human rights group said.
One Iraqi prisoner, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected to electric shocks three times and being sodomized with a stick. His thumbs bore round scars consistent with shocking, Physicians for Human Rights said in report obtained before its official release. He would not allow a full rectal exam.
Another Iraqi, identified only as Rahman, reported he was humiliated by being forced to wear women’s underwear, stripped naked and paraded in front of female guards, and was shown pictures of other naked detainees.
The psychological exam found that Rahman suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and has enduring sexual problems related to his humiliation, the report said.
“Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred,” said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who conducted psychological tests on six of the 11 detainees covered by the study from Physicians for Human Rights.
“It’s a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was,” he said.
All 11 prisoners were freed without criminal charges, either because they were innocent or not valuable enough to the military to hold onto.
The report from Physicians for Human Rights — an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts — is the most extensive medical study of former detainees published so far to determine whether their stories of abuse at US hands could be corroborated with physical evidence. It followed standards and methods used worldwide to document torture.
Doctors and mental health professionals examined 11 former prisoners in intensive two-day sessions. The group alleges it found evidence of US torture and war crimes, and said some US military health professionals allowed the abuse of detainees, denying them medical care and providing confidential medical information to interrogators that was then exploited.
The report came as the US Senate Armed Services Committee revealed documents showing military lawyers warned the Pentagon that some of the methods it used to interrogate and hold detainees after the Sept. 11 attacks violated military, US and international law.
Seven of the former detainees in the study were held at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq between late 2003 and the summer of 2004, a period that coincides with the known abuse of prisoners by some of their US jailers. Four of the former detainees were held at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay beginning in 2002 for one to almost five years.
Those examined alleged that they were tortured or abused, including sexually, and described being shocked with electrodes, beaten, shackled, stripped of their clothes, deprived of food and sleep, and spit and urinated on.
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