Further prison abuse?

[sithknight]

Ok, I just got into an argument with my sister about supposed "new prison abuse" stories coming out of Iraq.

She claims she heard on the radio this morning some story about how our military had a tactic of searching for specific insurgents/baathists and when we couldn't find them, grabbing their families, holding them in prison, and torturing them.

I just can't believe that this was our tactic, it might have happened, but a coherent policy of torturing the families?

So my questions are thus:

1) is this story correct as posed above?
2) if so, was this a recent policy? (ie. post abu-grabe)
3) perhaps they just held them without torturing them? (ie. held them as hostages?)
4) am I correct in thinking she is conflating a possible incident that occured during the fall of Sadam when we just plain rounded up bunches of folks and stuck them in horribly mismanaged/coercive prisions?

Call me a naive, but I can't bring myself to believe that our troops would stomach a policy of directed torture upon a person they didn't at least have a thin reason to believe was "one of the bad guys" but instead "the wife of one of the bad guys". I have too many friends in the military who'd sooner face a court martial.

Help me out here people, and please provide links to legit news sources/sites to back up what you tell me. I'm a terrible skeptic.