Abu Ghraib Photos Reveal Rape: US Officer

Doctor listed Hena Akhter’s death as a 'suicide'

(NEWSER) - The family of a 14-year-old girl who was beaten to death in Bangladesh says she didn’t commit adultery—she was raped. Hena Akhter’s family talked to CNN this week, and offered a heartbreaking story of the girl’s death. In their telling, Akhter’s much older cousin, Mahbub Khan, had repeatedly harassed the girl, and finally this winter trapped her in a bathroom stall, gagged her, beat her, and raped her. When his wife walked in on the scene, she beat Hena, too, and then reported the “adultery” to the local Imam. More»

A milestone for sovereignty, challenge for the government

(NEWSER) - The last American-run prison in Iraq will be handed over to the Iraqis today, marking the end of a massive US prison system that has processed more than 100,000 Iraqis since the fall of Baghdad. Tariq Aziz and other former high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein's regime were handed over to Iraqi authorities ahead of the changing of the guard at Camp Cropper. Around 200 detainees will remain in American hands until next year. More»

Human Rights Watch details abuses

(NEWSER) - They were hung by their feet and whipped, suffocated with plastic bags. If they passed out, they were revived with electrical shocks to the genitals. That's just a taste of the horrors prisoners describe in Human Rights Watch's report on the recently revealed Iraqi-run secret prison in Baghdad, where suspected Sunni militants were sent without due process, according to the New York Times . “Abu Ghraib was a picnic” compared to this place, said an influential Sunni leader. More»

Maliki denies knowledge of prison run by his elite military force

(NEWSER) - An elite military force answering directly to the Iraqi prime minister held hundreds of Sunni men in a secret Baghdad prison for months, Iraqi officials say. The detainees—arrested without warrants in military sweeps in October—were routinely tortured, officials tells the Los Angeles Times . Human rights officials overcame resistance from military commanders and managed to gain access to the prison last month after following up complaints from family members of the detainees. More»

(NEWSER) - Human rights groups may be upset that President Obama is classifying photos of detainee abuse, but former Army staff sergeant William Quinn thinks it’s a good thing—for the detainees’ sake. When Quinn was assigned as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib, he discovered that the detainees took a very different view of that prison’s photo scandal than Americans, he writes in the New York Times. More»