A Few More Bad Apples

The LATimes reports here:

A military investigator has concluded that low-ranking Marines repeatedly struck two defenseless Iraqis at a makeshift prison camp last June, and one of the detainees died after he was left disabled and naked under a scorching sun.

In two reports obtained by The Times, Marine Col. William V. Gallo also criticized an investigation into the death, saying the deceased Iraqi's bodily fluids were mishandled by investigators and were destroyed on the way to a laboratory for analysis.

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Although Gallo found no evidence of the type of abuse or sexual humiliation depicted in photographs from Abu Ghraib, he did report that testimony showed that the Marine guards at Camp Whitehorse used a stressing technique known as 50/10, in which detainees were required to stand for 50 minutes out of every hour. The tactic was used until the arrival of trained interrogators — members of a "Human Intelligence Exploitation Team" — sometimes as long as eight hours later.

Several guards testified at hearings late last year and early this year that they were directed by the interrogators to use the technique "as a means to soften up a detainee before the initial interview occurred," Gallo wrote. Two military intelligence interrogators denied this in testimony at the same hearings, the military equivalent of a preliminary hearing in a criminal case. But Gallo concluded in his reports that someone from the intelligence unit "must have directed or strongly suggested" that guards use the tactic.