For the first time since the end of the Iraq War in 2011, British soldiers and airmen who helped to operate a secret U.S. torture facility known as Camp Nama at the Baghdad International Airport are speaking out against the methods of torture and abuse coalition forces used to interrogate Iraqi detainees.
Shortly after the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion in Iraq, British soldiers speaking on conditions of anonymity have elaborated on the methods of torture used at Nama, including placing detainees in cells the size of large dog kennels and using electric shock to coerce testimony.
“They [dog kennels] were chest high, and two feet wide. There were about 100 of them, in three rows, and they always appeared to have at least one prisoner in each. They would be freezing at night, and really hot during the day,” said one unnamed British soldier during recent testimony.
Although the U.K. has tried to underplay the British involvement in torture operations, recent accounts show that British forces played a major role in capturing and torturing Iraqis at U.S. detention facilities. “The Americans went out to bring in prisoners every night, and British special forces would go out once or twice a week, almost always with one American accompanying them,” one British serviceman who served at Nama recalled earlier this month.
”The prisoners would be brought in by helicopter, usually one at a time, although I once saw five being led off a Chinook. They were taken into a large hangar to be bagged and tagged, a bag put over their heads and their hands cuffed behind their backs. Then they would be lifted or thrown onto the back of a pickup truck and driven to the Joint Operations Centre.”
According to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, the New York-based NGO, detainees were subject to “beatings, exposure to extreme cold, threats of death, humiliation and various forms of psychological abuse or torture” at the JOC. The New York Times has reported that prisoners were beaten with rifle butts and had paintball guns fired at them for target practice.
Many of the detainees were brought to the facility by “snatch squads” formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons.
Codenamed Task Force (TF) 121, the joint U.S.-U.K. special forces unit was at first deployed to detain individuals thought to have information about Saddam Hussein‘s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Once it was found that Saddam’s regime had long since abandoned its WMD program, TF 121 was re-assigned to missions tracking down people who might know where the deposed dictator and his Baathist loyalists might be.
Hussein was captured December 2003 and executed roughly three years later by hanging.
This is not the only secret torture base used by coalition forces during the Iraq War. The Abu Ghraib prison was condemned widely following an May 2004 article in the New Yorker magazine detailing abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners.
The article detailed instances of soldiers urinating on detainees, psychological torture and at least one instance where a soldier jumped on detainee’s leg wounded by gunfire with such force that it could not heal properly afterward. The allegations also included one instance where a soldier pounded a detainee’s wounded leg with a collapsible metal baton and another who poured phosphoric acid on detainees, severely burning their flesh.
The United States Department of Defense removed 17 soldiers and officers from duty over the incidents, and 11 soldiers were later charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery.
The Nama and Abu Ghraib torture facilities were small parts of the broader U.S. involvement in Iraq. The full impact of the war is not yet known, but initial university reports show that recent U.S. military interventions in the Middle East and South Asia have resulted in hundreds of thousands killed.
According to the Brown University, Costs of War project, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq have resulted in the deaths of 330,000 people and $4 trillion U.S. tax dollars spent. Of those killed, at least 201,000 were civilians.