WASHINGTON — Marines in Iraq conducted mock executions of juvenile prisoners last year, burned and tortured other detainees with electrical shocks, and warned a Navy corpsman they would kill him if he treated any injured Iraqis, according to military documents made public Tuesday.
The latest revelations of prisoner abuse cases, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit against the government, involved previously unknown incidents in which 11 Marines were punished for abusing detainees. Military officials indicated that they had investigated 13 other cases, but deemed them unsubstantiated. Four investigations are pending.
Military superiors handed down sentences of up to a year in confinement after finding Marines guilty of offenses ranging from assault to "cruelty and mistreatment," the documents show.
The new documents are the latest in a series of reports, e-mails and other records that the ACLU has obtained to bolster its contention that the abuse of prisoners goes far beyond the handful of soldiers charged with abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The photographs of naked Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American troops at the prison shocked the world in April. The scandal involved abuse by reservists and members of the Army and National Guard; the latest cases elaborated for the first time on numerous allegations of abuse by Marines.
The mistreatment occurred as early as May 2003, months before the first allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib were recorded. And the most recent case involving prisoner abuse by the Marines occurred in June, two months after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.
Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU in New York, placed responsibility for the abuse on the Pentagon. "This kind of widespread abuse could not have taken place without a leadership failure of the highest order," he said.
Lawrence Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said he could not comment on the latest cases because he was unfamiliar with them.
The documents described Navy criminal investigators scrambling to keep pace in June with an "exploding" number of abuse cases.
"Heads up," an assistant special agent in charge of the Navy's investigative field office in the Middle East wrote to his superiors in a 6 a.m. e-mail June 14, pleading for more investigators. "Case load is exploding, high visibility cases are on the rise," he warned. "We have scrubbed all of our personnel and have no other trained personnel available to deploy."
