Pittston soldier denies new claims of beatings

[PaDUer]

By Christopher J. Kelly and Chris Birk TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS 05/12/2004

Detainees at a U.S. military detention camp in Iraq operated by a local Army Reserve unit were sexually humiliated and brutally beaten months before similar abuses happened at Abu Ghraib prison, a former detainee said Tuesday.

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Former Master Sgt. Lisa Girman, who was discharged from the military amid charges she and three fellow soldiers brutally beat Iraqi detainees, called both allegations "ridiculous." Any problems the 320th experienced at Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq, and later at Abu Ghraib, were caused by "incompetent" leaders, not renegade soldiers, she said.

Hossam Shaltout, a Canadian citizen who was imprisoned at Camp
Bucca,has charged Ms. Girman, 35, with beating him last April. He described Camp Bucca as a "torture camp," where detainees were regularly brutalized and subjected to humiliations like being forced to lay naked atop each other and pose in sexual positions.

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Mr. Shaltout said he went to Iraq in January 2003 as a member of a peace organization called Rights and Freedom International. The organization tried to convince Iraqi leaders to step down to avoid war with the United States. In his claim, he said Camp Bucca soldiers tried to get him to confess to being Saddam Hussein's "right-hand man." He was interrogated daily, he said, but had "nothing to confess."

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