American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-911 War Crimes by Rebecca Gordon

Author:Rebecca Gordon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Human Rights, International, Corruption & Misconduct, Law, Political Science
ISBN: 9781510703384
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2016-04-04T15:00:00+00:00

The Confessions of “Osama bin Laden”

Saddam Saleh Aboud spoke to New York Times reporter Ian Fisher in May 2004, shortly after the story of Abu Ghraib first broke in the United States. Aboud was a Sunni businessman with an unfortunate first name who’d gone to an Iraqi police station to report a suspected car bomb. Instead of thanking him, the Iraqi police turned him over to the US military, and he found himself in Block 1-A of Abu Ghraib, the section where Charles Graner, Lynndie England, and their cohorts “softened up” prisoners for interrogation.

Aboud was tortured for almost three weeks at Abu Ghraib. He was blindfolded and forced to stand on a box with his arms outstretched. He was struck with a broomstick, first on his hands, then on his arms, his shoulders and his stomach. When he fell off the box, his tormenters threw cold water on him. One of them urinated on him. The next day he was taken to see a sergeant who told him, “If you do not confess, I will have my soldiers rape you.” The threat was not an empty one. Aboud does not say that he was raped, but Maj. General Anthony Taguba’s catalog of outrages at Abu Ghraib includes such practices as “[s]odomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.” The report also mentions a “male MP guard having sex with a female detainee.” Under the circumstances at Abu Ghraib, an American soldier “having sex with” an Iraqi woman detainee can only be a euphemism for “raping.”

Saddam Aboud spent most of his eighteen days at Abu Ghraib chained twenty-three hours a day in a sitting position with his arms over his head while unbearably loud music played. “Every few days,” according to the New York Times, “he was uncuffed for other treatments: douses of cold water, barking dogs, something called ‘the scorpion,’ in which his arms were cuffed to his legs, behind his back ” while he was kicked and beaten. Finally, it was time for the questions.

“They began talking to me,” Aboud told the Times. “They asked, ‘Do you know the Islamic opposition?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They asked, ‘Do you know Zarqawi?’” referring to Abu Musab al-

Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to Al Qaeda. “I told them, ‘I am his driver, I swear to God.’”

Having (falsely) confessed to being the driver for a man the US considered an elite terrorist, Aboud then made an even more startling admission. “They asked me about Osama bin Laden. I said, ‘I am Osama bin Laden but I am disguised.’” Aboud said he meant every word. “I was only afraid that they would take me back to the torture room. I would prefer to be dead.”

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