The other prisoners

The other prisoners

Most of the coverage of abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on male
detainees. But what of the five women held in the jail, and the scores
elsewhere in Iraq? Luke Harding reports

Thursday May 20, 2004
The Guardian

The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital
photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside
the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents
were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi
women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found
them hard to believe.

The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who
were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women
were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked
in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb
the jail to spare the women further shame.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...220674,00.html