I don’t see anyone in the US administration, at the Pentegon or at Westminister having to address these complaints, but hopefully it will be more than just busy work for lawyers.

US constitutional rights lawyers say they have filed a criminal complaint against the US Defence Secretary.
Donald Rumsfeld and others are named in the complaint, lodged in Germany, over the abuses in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

It comes as the New York Times reports the Red Cross has told the Pentagon that US military methods at Guantanamo Bay have been “tantamount to torture”.

The International Committee of the Red Cross criticised the psychological, and sometimes physical, coercion used.

The New York Times also said the ICRC found earlier this year that some doctors and medical workers helped plan interrogations of detainees “in a flagrant violation of medical ethics”.

The Pentegon says it has done several inquiries and that criminal investigations continue. The US is raising the troop levels to 150 thousand, more than entered the country of Iraq in March of 2003. The reason given for more deployment is security for the January election.

Meantime up to four hundred thousand citizens who fled Fallajah are in makeshift camps, with little medical attention and no hope of return.

And if this is true…

Fifteen years ago in Halabja - at a time when Washington was an enthusiastic supplier of chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein - thousands of Kurds were gassed. Even the US Central Intelligence Agency has disputed Saddam’s responsibility, blaming Iranians instead. Assuming Saddam did it, and did it deliberately, the US may have done the same thing in Fallujah. As Asia Times Online has reported, Fallujah doctors have identified either swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries, or “melted bodies” - victims of napalm, the terrifying cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel. Our sources confirm testimonies by residents who managed to escape the Jolan neighborhood of bombing by “poisonous gases”. A resident called Abu Sabah told of “weird bombs that smoke like a mushroom cloud … and then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. The pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when you throw water over them”. This is exactly what happens to people bombed with napalm or white phosphorus. The UN banned the bombing of civilians with napalm in 1980. The US is the only country in the world still using napalm.

These kinds of reports are so hard to confirm. If they are true…