Evidence mounts for war crimes prosecution of senior-level military and Bush officials

A new report put out by Physicians for Human Rights, an international organization that shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, documents torture and abuse of detainees by American personnel. The report — Broken Laws, Broken Lives — details the experiences of eleven detainees held in American custody at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and prisons at military bases around the world.

Here is an example of the treatment of detainees detailed in this report:

Kamal is in his late forties. He served in the Iraqi Army during the 1980s and later became a businessman and Imam of a local mosque. In September 2003 he was arrested by US forces. At the time of his arrest, he was beaten to the point of losing consciousness. After being brought to Abu Ghraib prison, he was kept naked and isolated in a cold dark room for three weeks, where both during and in between interrogations he was frequently beaten, including being hit on the head and in the jaw with a rifle and stabbed in the cheek with a screwdriver.

He was then placed in isolation in a urine-soaked room for two months. When Kamal was allowed to wear clothes, they were sometimes soaked in water to keep him cold. On approximately ten occasions he was suspended in a stress position, causing numbness that lasted for a month. He was made to believe that his family members were also in prison and that they were being raped and tortured. He recounted,