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BAGHDAD, Iraq – The U.S. military released five Iraqi women detainees today, a move demanded by the kidnappers of an American reporter to spare her life, but an official said the release was coincidental. The women were freed from U.S. custody and delivered to the home of a senior Sunni Arab politician in Baghdad, where they were returned to their families, according to an Associated Press photographer at the scene. They were later driven away in taxis. Armed men who abducted Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 in Baghdad have threatened to kill the freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor...

By Oliver Poole in Baghdad (Filed: 13/12/2005) Alan Philps: Baghdad weblog American and Iraqi troops have found hundreds of prisoners packed so tightly into a Baghdad detention centre that they had trouble lying down, it was announced yesterday. Some had been tortured. Of the 625 men, 13 were taken to hospital to be treated for broken bones or the effects of electric shocks. Others had fingernails pulled out or cigarette burns on their necks and backs.

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 82nd Airborne, are contained in a report by Human Rights Watch. The 30-page report does not identify the troops, but one is Capt. Ian Fishback, who has presented some of his allegations in letters this month to top aides of two senior Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia and John...

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The U.S. military announced Saturday that it released nearly 1,000 prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison over the past few days in response to a request by Iraqi authorities. The move, the largest prisoner release to date, followed appeals by Sunni representatives to start releasing thousands of prisoners who have been languishing in the jail for months without being charged. After a meeting with President Jalal Talabani on Thursday, Sunni negotiator Saleh al-Mutlaq said the president agreed to release many detainees before the Oct. 15 referendum on the constitution. Al-Mutlaq said hundreds of detainees, most of them Sunni...

In the darkest hours before dawn, groups of 10 detainees toiled 15 feet beneath Compound 5 of America's largest prison in Iraq. The men worked in five-minute shifts, digging with shovels fashioned from tent poles and hauling the dirt to the surface with five-gallon water jugs tethered to 200 feet of rope. They bagged it in sacks that had been used to deliver their bread rations and spread it surreptitiously across a soccer field where fellow inmates churned it during daily matches, guards and detainees recalled. The 105th Military Police Battalion, charged with running Camp Bucca in the scorching desert...

WASHINGTON - The 82nd Airborne Division is sending about 700 soldiers to Iraq to provide extra security for detainees, whose numbers have doubled over the past year, officials said Wednesday. The 1st battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., has begun preparing to deploy over the next two months. It will be the battalion's second tour in Iraq; the first was from September 2003 to April 2004. Before that the battalion was in Afghanistan from July 2002 to January 2003. An announcement at Fort Bragg on Monday gave no information about the battalion's new mission in Iraq,...

Please Join Citizens United Foundation and Citizens United, June 11, 2005 from 12 to 3 on the national mall to celebrate Freedom and Democracy. Musical guests include country music super star Tracy Byrd and former American Idol finalist, Kimberly Caldwell. Confirmed speakers include actor Ron Silver, Major Bob Bevelaqua, former Iraqi POW Tommy Hamill, nationally syndicated radio talk show host and FOX News contributor Mike Gallagher, Government and Media Officer with the Afghan Embassy, Ashraf Haidari as well as speakers from the Ukraine, Iraq and Lebanon. In support of our troops please bring supplies such as toiletries, calling cards, and...

FORT HOOD, Texas (Reuters) - A soldier already convicted of abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal testified on Friday that he was the one who attached wires to a naked, hooded Iraqi in an attempt to gain information about the whereabouts of the bodies of four U.S. soldiers and locate their killers. Pvt. Ivan Frederick's testimony did not appear to help the government's case against Spc. Sabrina Harman, who the government has charged with placing wires on the prisoner pictured in a photo that sparked global outrage. Harman faces six and a half years in prison if convicted on...

CAMP BUCCA, IRAQ -- U.S. military police Friday thwarted a massive escape attempt by suspected insurgents and terrorists from this southern Iraq Army base that houses more than 6,000 detainees when they uncovered a 600-foot tunnel the detainees had dug under their compound. "We were very close to a very bad thing," Major Gen. William Brandenburg said Friday after troops under his command discovered the tunnel that prisoners had painstakingly dug with the help of makeshift tools. Within hours of the discovery on the first tunnel, a second tunnel of about 300 feet was detected under an adjoining compound in...

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - Working in a makeshift lab in a bombed-out building, an Army pathologist dipped her gloved hands into a decomposing corpse - and changed the lives of nine U.S. Marines. Running her fingers along a fragile, U-shaped bone in the throat of a dead Iraqi prisoner, Col. Kathleen Ingwersen felt a break. She concluded the man had been strangled - that Nagem Sadoon Hatab was the first victim of homicide in prisons the U.S. military set up in Iraq. However, since the autopsy that pathologists considered surprisingly conclusive under difficult circumstances, the case has fallen apart. Tissue...

Dan Rather's ApologyA statement from Dan Rather of CBS News: Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question -- and their source -- vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome...(snip) Apology not accepted, Rather. You are only sorry you clumsily botched the hit on Bush. Forgiveness won’t be considered until you tell us who in the Kerry...

NEW YORK - Suggesting the government was acting as if it had something to hide, a federal judge Wednesday gave Washington one month to release records related to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein chastised officials for moving at a "glacial pace" in responding to nearly year-old Freedom of Information Act requests from the American Civil Liberties Union and four other watchdog organizations. "If the documents are more of an embarrassment than a secret, the public should know of our government's treatment of individuals captured and held abroad," Hellerstein wrote. "We are a nation that...

A US Army specialist broke down in tears today as he admitted abusing inmates at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, receiving a lighter sentence in return for his testimony against others charged in the scandal. "There is no way to justify it," Specialist Armin Cruz, 24, said after pleading guilty to conspiracy to mistreat subordinates and mistreatment of prisoners at the prison in western Baghdad last October. "I accept full and complete responsibility." Cruz, who had been assigned to the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion, was sentenced to eight months' confinement, demotion to private and a bad conduct discharge. The judge, Colonel...

The mortification of Iraqi prisoners by American military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad has been discomfiting far beyond the impact of the now-infamous images. Coupled with other reports about harsh post-9/11 tactics to garner information from captured terrorists, and with ongoing investigations into deaths alleged to have occurred in connection with interrogations, Abu Ghraib and the reaction to it have forced front and center a profound national evasion: the propriety of torture. As one would expect, the scandal has produced no small amount of righteous indignation. The civil-libertarian lobby, operating in overdrive, has issued ringing declarations that...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top Pentagonofficials and the military command in Iraq contributed to an environment in which prisoners were abused at Abu Ghraib prison, a high-level panel investigating the military detentions has concluded, a defense official said on Tuesday. The independent four-member panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff failed to exercise proper oversight over confusing detention policies at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to the defense official. The official, who asked not...

MANNHEIM, Germany (Reuters) - A U.S. soldier at the center of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal wants his pending court martial to be moved from Baghdad as he believes he has no chance of a fair trial there, his lawyers said on Monday. Specialist Charles Graner and three others are accused of sexually humiliating and, in some cases, beating detainees at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Photos of them tormenting naked Iraqis aroused worldwide outrage when they emerged in April and sparked criticism that sweeping U.S. anti-terror policies had encouraged the abuses. Graner, 35, who faces the most serious accusations...

Prisoner Abuse Suspect Faces German Court 06:25 AM EST - August 23, 2004 The Associated Press MANNHEIM, Germany A key suspect in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison voiced fear he was being made a scapegoat when he was asked to turn over a laptop computer and other evidence suspected of containing photos of the maltreatment, an investigator told a U.S. military court Monday.The investigator, Manora Iem, testified that Spc. Charles Graner consented to the search during a Jan. 14 interview at the prison, but lawyers for Graner questioned the agent's authorization because he said he only...

Military Not Moved by 'Oregonian' Report on Iraqi Prisoner Abuse By E & P Staff Published: August 13, 2004 NEW YORK The U.S. Army says it does not plan to investigate further an incident of Iraqi prisoner abuse that occurred on June 29, despite the story reported by the Oregonian in Portland last weekend that gained national attention. In today's Oregonian, Mike Francis, the reporter who broke the original story, revealed that a U.S. military public affairs officer in Iraq wrote via email Thursday, "We see no reason for a further investigation." Col. Jill E. Morgenthaler, a public affairs officer...

Americans are refusing to do anything about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners under the regime they appointed, writes Paul McGeough. Now there is unambiguous proof of two things we knew were happening in liberated Iraq - Iraqi prisoners are being abused by the new, US-appointed regime; and the Americans, as a matter of policy, refuse to do anything about it. They did nothing in the wake of last month's Herald report of eyewitness allegations that the interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, murdered six prisoners; and they refuse to act on a Red Cross report on systematic abuses at half-a-dozen Baghdad...

LONDON -- The general who headed the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that there had been a conspiracy to prevent her knowing about prisoner abuse at the jail. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was suspended by the Pentagon in May, has denied knowing about any mistreatment prisoners until photographs surfaced at the end of April. U.S. investigators have not implicated Karpinski directly in any of the abuses.