Months after Abu Ghraib, the abuse continued. (Vanity Fair article)

[reprehensor]

The Man in the Hood

Months after the Bush administration insisted that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses had been halted, disturbing new claims of sexual assault and brutalization have surfaced.

Last summer, at what they all called "the airport camp," outside Baghdad, few Iraqi detainees wanted to visit the bathroom during the morning shift. That was when, they believed, the Americans sexually harassed prisoners.

Snip

The first guard was Caucasian, tall, blond, and very thin. He was clean-shaven and on some days wore eyeglasses. Then, N. says, speaking in Arabic through a translator, "I was sexually assaulted by an American soldier." N.'s modesty as a Muslim, as an Iraqi, and as an adolescent prevents him from detailing much more about the episode, though in a declaration recently filed on his behalf under penalty of perjury in the U.S. District Court in Southern California, his attorney provides a somewhat more explicit account, saying one or more guards placed "fingers in his anus." (In 20 minutes of humiliating, circular discussion with N. about the above allegation, mediated by a translator, I could never fully ascertain the precise narrative of the July 23 assault, but N. made it clear that a guard's finger or fingers were willfully placed inside him in a manner that N. didn't welcome.)

Far clearer, by N.'s account, are the events of two days later, when he says he was once again torn from his wooden box and dragged to the bathroom during the morning shift. This time the American previously a spectator—a male of average height, clean-shaven, blond, and without eyeglasses—also sexually abused N. After shaming him by watching him defecate, the American grabbed N. by his penis and directed a stream of N.'s urine toward a spider crossing the floor a few feet away.

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Remember: “They hate our Freedom.”