US troops beat prisoners "to amuse themselves"

"Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves.

"The new allegations, the first involving members of the elite 82nd Airborne, are contained in a report by Human Rights Watch ...

"In one incident, the Human Rights Watch report states, an off-duty cook broke a detainee's leg with a metal baseball bat ..."
NY Times

Human Rights group alleges Iraq prisoner abuse

"The administration demanded that soldiers extract information from detainees without telling them what was allowed and what was forbidden. Yet when abuses inevitably followed, the leadership blamed the soldiers in the field instead of taking responsibility."
Tom Malinowski, Washington Director of Human Rights Watch
The story at Human Rights Watch

[Sure, the US government has adopted brutality as a policy, but let's not let soldiers off the hook either. Right is right, wrong is wrong, and some jobs are simply "wrong livelihood". Let's hope we see both the responsible political 'leaders' and the soldiers in the slammer.]

Tagged: progressive, human+rights, iraq, war, peace, usa, army, military