More Senior Military Sources Confirm Rape and Sodomy At Abu Ghraib

Fresh confirmations have emerged from senior military sources that suppressed photographs of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison show scenes of rape, sexually explicit acts, sodomy and forced masturbation.

Harper’s Magazine writer Scott Horton, who also writes for The Daily Beast website, writes that he “has obtained specific corroboration” from a “highly credible senior military officer with firsthand knowledge,” who he says has provided even more detail about images being withheld from the public by the Obama administration.

Horton writes that the photographs “depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.”

Horton’s sources revealed that in addition to other sexual acts, some of the photographs show a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner, and a female prisoner being forced to expose her breasts.

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“Other suppressed photographs show a female prisoner assuming sexually suggestive poses in a chair, while a prison guard appears behind her in some frames. In another series, prisoners are shown hooded in a transport with open copies of pornographic magazines in their laps.” Horton writes.

The military source also described an image in which Specialist Charles A. Graner, who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in 2005, is shown suturing the face of a prisoner, effectively stitching the skin, as if closing open wounds, despite the fact that the prisoner required no such medical procedure.

The account directly contradicts yesterday’s denials by both the White House and the Pentagon that the withheld photographs contain evidence of sexual abuse.

By denying the statements of Major General Antonio Taguba, featured in the London Telegraph earlier this week, the White House is denying the facts of the official internal military investigation from 2004, in an apparent attempt to pull off a crude bait and switch.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Taguba merely confirmed to the Telegraph what was in his original report.

Taguba also verified the credibility of eyewitness statements from other detainees that described an American-Egyptian male translator in uniform raping teenage boys.

The fresh confirmations, combined with Taguba’s reiteration of his original findings, as well as other accounts from credible figures such as veteran reporter Seymour Hersh and US Senator Lindsey Graham, disprove president Obama’s assertion that the suppressed photographs are “not particularly sensational”.

The truth will out, and as the ACLU has said, Obama “has essentially become complicit with the torture that was rampant during the Bush years by being complicit in its coverup.”

This article was posted: Friday, May 29, 2009 at 2:15 pm

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