3 soldiers say Iraqi prisoners beaten for information, fun

WASHINGTON — Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division say members of their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves.

The new abuse allegations, the first involving members of the elite unit, are contained in a report by Human Rights Watch. They have also been reported by one of the soldiers, a decorated Army captain, to top aides of two senior Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, the panel chairman, and John McCain of Arizona.

The captain approached the aides after he tried to report the allegations to his superiors for 17 months. Senate aides said Friday that they found the captain's accusations credible enough to warrant investigation.

An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said Friday that the captain's allegations first came to the Army's attention earlier this month, and that the Army had opened a criminal investigation into the matter, which focuses on the division's 1st Brigade, 504th Parachute Infantry. The investigation has just started; the Army knows the identity of the captain and has begun speaking with him, and is seeking the names of two other soldiers.

In separate statements to the human rights organization, the Army captain and the two noncommissioned officers described systematic abuses of Iraqi prisoners, including beatings, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, stacking in human pyramids and sleep deprivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Fallujah. Fallujah was the site of the major uprising against the American-led occupation in April 2004. The report describes the soldiers' positions in the unit, but not their names.

The abuses reportedly took place between September 2003 and April 2004, before and during the investigations into similar misconduct at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Senior Pentagon officials initially sought to characterize the scandal at Abu Ghraib as the work of a rogue group of military police soldiers on the prison's night shift, but since then the Army has opened more than 400 inquiries into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and punished 230 enlisted soldiers and officers.

The trial of a private charged in an investigation into Abu Ghraib, Lynndie R. England, continued Friday in Fort Hood, Texas.