Annual Report

Statement of Jonathan H. Pyle, Attorney, Burke Pyle LLC, Philadelphia
May 23, 2006

Good morning. I am an attorney representing 146 torture victims in a class action lawsuit against the private contractors, Titan Corporation and CACI International that supplied interrogators and translators to the United States military in Iraq. Our legal team has traveled to Amman, Jordan, several times to meet with our clients and hear their stories firsthand.

The government hired a contractor, CACI International, Inc., to supply 36 interrogators to the Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities in Iraq. Interrogators instructed soldiers to “soften up” prisoners for interrogation. One of our clients was stripped naked and suspended by his handcuffs from the bars of his cell overnight. On another occasion, he was subjected to extremely loud noise, consisting of a few seconds of a rock song played in a loop from night until morning. When he asked a guard for medical attention for a wound on his hand, he was told that his interrogator would decide whether he received medical treatment. Another of our clients, a 17-year-old boy, was kept handcuffed and hooded in a wooden box for two weeks. He was taken out of his box only to use the bathroom twice a day or to be interrogated. The guards stationed in the bathroom made him strip naked and wash the bathroom while the guards looked on. His handcuffs, which were kept on all day and night, were so tight that his wrists bled. When he managed to get medical treatment for his wrists, he asked the doctor if the handcuffs could be made less tight. The doctor told him no, because such decisions were up to the interrogator.

The United States hired a contractor to supply thousands of Arabic translators for its operations in Iraq, who translated interrogators’ threats of death, rape, and rape of family members. Many times, they would offer these threats on their own volition. Our clients have told us that when interrogators would beat them, the translators often joined in. And many times, the translators would become violent without prompting from the interrogator. One of our clients, for example, was thrown against a wall by a translator during an interrogation.

A number of our clients understand and speak limited English. They have told us about interrogations in which the translator, often a member of an ethnic group hostile to their own, mistranslated statements to make them appear untruthful, or translated incorrectly out of ignorance of the right English words to use.

The contractors and their employers are outside the military chain of command and outside the reach of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they are not outside the reach of criminal and civil justice in the United States. In addition to pursuing our civil case in the United States District Court here in the District of Columbia, we have offered government investigators the chance to interview our clients. But the government investigators have been unwilling to do so. So long as our clients are not interviewed, we know that the government’s investigations and prosecutions are not only incomplete, but have hardly begun.

In light of the government’s failure to investigate, I am grateful – and I know our clients are grateful – for the work that Amnesty International is doing to investigate human rights abuses in Iraq and hold the wrongdoers responsible for their actions.

####