Four members of a U.S. Special Forces unit assigned to hunt down former senior government officials in Iraq received administrative sanctions this summer for abusing prisoners with guns that fire an electric charge, the Pentagon said yesterday.
The sanctions, a previously undisclosed facet of the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees during the U.S. occupation, were not described by Pentagon officials. But they said the punishments did not include criminal penalties.
Asked at a news conference whether the inappropriate use of Taser guns, which fire an electrically charged projectile into the skin, was tantamount to torture, spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said: "I have nothing to say on that. I just don't know."
Di Rita's disclosure came a day after the American Civil Liberties Union released a June 25 memorandum from the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency to Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. In the memo, the DIA chief reported that two defense interrogators had seen prisoners arriving at a prison in Baghdad "with burn marks on their backs."
Other prisoners had bruises and some complained of kidney pain, said the memo from DIA Director Lowell E. Jacoby, a Navy vice admiral. The memo also said that members of the Special Forces unit had attempted to obstruct the interrogators' complaints about the abuse by confiscating their car keys, threatening them and ordering them not to talk to anyone in the United States about what they had seen.
In response, Di Rita and other officials said, the commander of the task force -- whose identity the department would not reveal -- imposed the administrative sanctions, which amounted in this case to written reprimands. The four people involved were reassigned to tasks other than interrogation, and two were transferred out of the unit altogether.
The defense officials also said the complaints were forwarded to the Army's criminal investigation division, but they could not explain why no criminal charges were filed.
Amrit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, said, "It sounds like torture to us, but even if it isn't, it is unlawful."
"What they've disclosed is too little, too late, and their response is too little, too late. These abuses should not have occurred in the first place, and to the extent that task force members were committing gross abuses of domestic and international law, they deserve more than administrative punishment," Singh said.
In all, Di Rita said, the Special Forces unit in question -- identified by others as Task Force 6-26 -- has issued 10 letters of reprimand for detainee abuse. He also said the Naval Special Warfare Command, which detailed some of its members to the unit, had pending two special courts-martial, four nonjudicial punishments and two other investigations of detainee abuse.
The document released by the ACLU was only one of several dozen detailing U.S. military abuse of prisoners that the group obtained from the Pentagon in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit released Tuesday.
In one, dated June 10, another DIA officer reported what he described as "violations of the Geneva Conventions" and other international laws by the same task force.
He said the abuse involved the slapping of a prisoner during an interrogation and the detention by the task force of a 28-year-old Iraqi mother -- who had a 6-month-old, nursing baby at home -- in an effort to compel the surrender of her husband, a suspected terrorist.
"I objected to the detainment of the young mother" because no one believed she could provide any useful intelligence on her husband's whereabouts, said the DIA intelligence officer, a 14-year veteran.
