Insult to Injury

By David Phinney, CorpWatch. Posted December 17, 2004.

Rotten food crawling with bugs, traces of rats and dirt. Rancid meats and spoiled food resulting in diarrhea and food poisoning.

This is what detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were regularly given to eat by a private contractor in late 2003 and early 2004, causing anger to swell to a furious boil between the U.S. military guards and the prisoners.

Foul as the food was, there never was enough. The private contractor, run by an American civilian who was subsequently killed, routinely fell short by hundreds of meals for Abu Ghraib's surging prison population. When the food did arrive, there were often late and frequently contaminated.

So went another sad chapter in the story of the Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. military personnel and private contractors would make headlines and ignite international outrage over allegations of torture psychological abuse in May of this year.

Captured in photographs now infamous for portraying naked, hooded prisoners and smiling guards, the behavior is believed to be one of the most damning acts toward Iraqi civilians by coalition forces. Other acts of violence toward the prisoners include physical abuse and still unproved allegations of rape and murder.

The Abu Ghraib prison, already infamous under Saddam Hussein's regime, for overcrowding, ill-treatment and torture, was opened up by the over-extended military soon after the April 2003 occupation.

The inmates were a mix of petty and hardened Iraqi criminals, suspected members of the resistance, and thousands of innocent bystanders hauled out of their homes in midnight raids or off the streets of Baghdad. Many say that they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but were held without charges by coalition forces for months before being released. Unable to run the prison themselves, the U.S. military hired private translators from Titan, a California-based company, interrogators from CACI, a Virginia-based company, two large and well known military contractors. In addition, they hired a small, virtually unknown contractor from Qatar, to provide food to the inmates.

A shocked Army Major, David Dinenna of the 320 Military Police Battalion, was one of the first to recognize the food problem. In a string of frantic e-mails to commanders during October and November of 2003, he called for assistance from his chain of command while working at the prison.

"Contract meals disaster," he called it in an October 27 e-mail last year. "That is the best way to describe this issue ... As each day goes by, the tension within the prisoner populations increases," he continued. "For the past two days prisoners have been vomiting after they eat."

The food was largely to blame for a Nov. 24, 2003 prison riots in which Army guards shot four detainees after the prisoners failed to comply with commands to stop and disburse. A subsequent Pentagon investigation found that prisoners were not attempting a "mass" escape as first thought.

"All evidence indicates that the detainees were simply protesting the deplorable food and living conditions," the report concludes, which attributes the same reasons to a second prison riot on Dec. 24, 2003.

Dinenna's messages and the riot investigations are part of a collection of documents from a classified report by Army Major General Anthony Taguba that was leaked to the news media last spring together with the now-famous photos of naked prisoners. The documents were originally obtained by several news organizations, including U.S. News & World Report, Rolling Stone and the Center for Public Integrity in October 2004.

Torin Nelson, a contract interrogator who worked at the prison from November 2003 until February 2004 and aided in the Taguba investigation as a witness, arrived at Abu Ghraib just days after the November riot.

He recalls being told by witnesses that none of the guards had been informed about the ongoing problems of bad food given to the prisoners. "Because the guards didn't understand Arabic, they didn't know the prisoners were complaining about the food," Nelson said. "They thought there was an uprising."

Frustration erupted into screaming and the protest ignited panic among the guards. Guns were pointed as more and more prisoners gathered in the outburst. The situation spun out of control, Nelson said. "The guards began firing non-lethal rounds at the prisoners, but ran out." Then, according to what I was told, they got permission to use lethal rounds.

While the U.S. Justice Department is now investigating six private contractors working as interrogators and translators for Titan and CACI, for their roles in the mistreatment, the food contractor remains forgotten and unnamed in the numerous Pentagon investigations of the prison conditions that have been made public.

The contractor's name, American Service Center (ASC), based in Qatar, has surfaced only after dozens of inquiries by CorpWatch over the past month to the Pentagon and military officials in Iraq.

The little known firm boasts on a simple company Web site that it offers services in the line of housing, furniture, vehicle rentals, telephone and internet services. Closely affiliated to a sister company, Advanced Internet Center, ASC claims to work with the U.S. Amy in Qatar and military contractors such as ITT and Dyncorp.

No mention is made of food services or Abu Ghraib. ASC's owner and chief executive, Ali Hadi, hesitates to talk about the contract or his company's performance at the prison and declined to respond to numerous e-mails with questions about his company.

You can contact the author, David Phinney, at phinneydavid@yahoo.com.

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