2/9/2005 5:15:00 PM GMT
American female soldiers stripped to their underwear at a mud wrestling party and sergeants lent their rooms to GIs for sex last year at the largest U.S. military prison in Iraq.
The mud wrestling party took place on October 30, 2004, as one military police battalion took over responsibility from another unit at the Army’s Camp Bucca near the southern Iraqi port of Um Qasr.
Photos of the wild party were later found at the prison and were sent to camp commanders.
The New York Daily News, which first published the details of the party, said that it saw about 30 of the pictures and published several of them on Sunday.
The photos showed at least three female soldiers baring their breasts to male soldiers and other women GIs in bras and panties wrestling in a plastic pool full of mud as men were cheering and snapping pictures.
Soldier found guilty of indecent exposure
One U.S. female soldier, identified as Deanna Allen, 19, of Black Mountain, N.C., was found guilty of indecent exposure and was demoted from specialist to private first class, but she is still a guard at the camp.
Other soldiers who appeared in the photos taken at the party have been reprimanded, officials said.
Barry Johnston, the spokesman for Camp Bucca, described the incident as "exuberance". He denied a suggestion in the U.S. press that the soldiers were drunk, in violation of a strict ban at the base.
The U.S. army claims that Iraqi prisoners didn’t see or attend the party.
"Bucca is a large detainee camp, and soldiers are in a completely different area from detainees," Johnson said.
He also claimed that the "Detainees were nowhere in the vicinity," and that "They had no possible way of seeing what occurred."
However, sources familiar with the prison said that security lights may have been turned on in the scene, indicating that the detainees have seen or heard the commotion.
At the time, about 4,000 prisoners were at Camp Bucca. The prisoner-to-guard ratio was 7 to 1, more than the ideal 5-to-1 ratio.
Serious breakdown
The Daily News cited some military experts as saying that the incident revealed a serious breakdown of military discipline.
The army is investigating another incident at the same camp where four Iraqi detainees were shot dead by U.S. guards during a riot in January.
Of more concern is that many sergeants at the camp lent their rooms to soldiers for sex and were seen "noticeably drunk" during the mud wrestling party.
The abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. and British forces has been a major Iraqi grievance since the U.S.-led invasion of the war-torn country in 2003.
A scandal involving the U.S.-controlled Abu Gharib jail near the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, still haunts the U.S. army after photographs of abuse and torture were revealed last year.
Ironically, the soldiers who organized the wild party at Camp Bucca have been assigned to guard Iraqi prisoners who were transferred from the Abu Gharib prison after the abuse scandal there.