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U.S. Navy documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that abuse and even torture of detainees by U.S. Marines in Iraq was widespread. One Navy criminal investigator sent an email in June 2004 describing his Iraq caseload "exploding" with "high visibility cases." "Day after day, new stories of torture are coming to light, and we need to know how these abuses were allowed to happen," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "This kind of widespread abuse could not have taken place without a leadership failure of the highest order." The release of these documents follows a federal court order that directed the Defense Department and other government agencies to comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case. The documents the ACLU released today, posted online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia, describe substantiated incidents of torture and abuse by U.S. Marines, including:

holding a pistol to the back of a detainee's head while another Marine took a picture (Karbala, May 2003)
ordering four Iraqi juveniles to kneel while a pistol was "discharged to conduct a mock execution" (Adiwaniyah, June 2003)
severely burning a detainee's hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them (Al Mumudiyah, August 2003); and
shocking a detainee with an electric transformer, causing the detainee to "dance" as he was shocked (Al Mumudiyah, April 2004)

The new evidence comes on the heels of documents released by the ACLU and its allies last Tuesday, which revealed that a special operations task force in Iraq sought to silence Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who observed abuse and that the Department of Defense adopted questionable interrogation techniques at Guantanamo over FBI objections. [more]