Improv Troop

There have been several posts on the AntiC, and hundreds of comments placed elsewhere in relation to the war in Iraq, about the terrible tactics that have been used against Iraqis and other combatants who have been captured. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, the numbers of captives that have been tortured, maimed, mistreated in American hands has been far beyond acceptible standards. McCain attempted, and failed, to append an amendment to the 2006 Defense Spending Bill that would require accountability for the mistreatment of soldiers.

And yet, we keep finding out more and more. With the hundreds of unreleased photos of Abu Ghraib to new documentation detailing the terrifying and brutal improvisations of interrogation, the treatment of prisoners by Americans in the War continues to grow, the picture becomes more clear.

Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.

It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a U.S. soldier in Interrogation Room 6 in the western Iraqi desert. Two days before, a secret CIA-sponsored group of Iraqi paramilitaries, working with Army interrogators, had beaten Mowhoush nearly senseless, using fists, a club and a rubber hose, according to classified documents.

The sleeping bag was the idea of a soldier who remembered how his older brother used to force him into one, and how scared and vulnerable it made him feel. Senior officers in charge of the facility near the Syrian border believed that such "claustrophobic techniques" were approved ways to gain information from detainees, part of what military regulations refer to as a "fear up" tactic, according to military court documents.