US President Barack Obama’s nominee to command US and NATO forces in Afghanistan should face questions about detainee abuse in Iraq at his confirmation hearing, human rights groups say.
US Army Lieutenant-General Stanley McChrystal, who was scheduled for a hearing before senators yesterday, has spent the past 10 months or so in a senior Pentagon desk job, but ran the secretive Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to last year.
During that time, troops who worked for the command committed abuses, including beating detainees with rifle butts, simulated drowning and using them for target practice in paintball games, said a 2006 New York Times report that cited documents and interviews with more than a dozen people.
Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have also documented reports of detainee abuse by special operations forces in Iraq.
“We hope that the questioning will focus on the command responsibility for this torture and abuse and also on the cover-up of this torture and abuse,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.
In a surprise shake-up last month, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates dismissed Army General David McKiernan as the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan and picked McChrystal to replace him, saying it was time for “fresh thinking.”
Pentagon officials had praised McChrystal as a dynamic, creative leader, and members of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee had not voiced any concerns.
They were reported to have looked into reports of prisoner abuse before confirming McChrystal last year for his current job as director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.
But the committee did not hold a public confirmation hearing at that time and McChrystal has never spoken publicly about detainee abuse by troops under his command.
The committee held an “executive session” with McChrystal over his nomination to his current job before deciding to back his appointment, committee spokesperson Tara Andringa said.
“Executive sessions are held when there are matters that members believe should be discussed in private with a nominee. They often involve classified information,” she said in an e-mail.
The US military has said repeatedly that its policy is to treat detainees humanely and troops who do not follow that policy are disciplined.
Many of the reports of abuse center on Camp Nama, a US base near Baghdad’s airport where special operations troops ran an interrogation and detention center.
In a 2006 Human Rights Watch report, a US military interrogator was quoted as saying that he had seen McChrystal visit the center “a couple of times.”
The interrogator, given the pseudonym “Jeff” by the rights group, said he was told by the colonel in charge that he knew “directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon” that the Red Cross would not be allowed to inspect the center.
Some interrogators would hit and kick detainees, deprive them of sleep, take away items of clothing and subject them to loud music and strobe lights, Jeff told the rights group.
Marc Garlasco, a Human Rights Watch analyst who worked on the report, said that while McChrystal’s visits to Camp Nama linked him to “the scene of the crime,” it was unclear whether he had sanctioned any abuses or how he reacted to them.
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