Abu Ghraib Photos Reveal Rape: US Officer

(NEWSER) - The Pentagon denies a report that classified photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib depict rape and sexual abuse, Reuters reports. Britain’s Daily Telegraph “completely mischaracterized the images,” a spokesman said today. “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described.” The article quotes a former US general as saying the photos show “torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” 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»

(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»

(NEWSER) - Retired Army Gen. Antonio Taguba has seen photos of rape at Abu Ghraib, but they aren’t the ones the Obama administration is trying to keep from the public. “The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen,” he told Salon. The general says he was not misquoted in the Telegraph, but that when he described “torture, abuse, rape, and every indecency,” he was referring to other photos he saw during his investigation of the Iraqi prison. More»

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»