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Southcom Says it Will Investigate Abuse Allegations at Guantanamo

By Andrew Selsky
Associated Press
October 13, 2006

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - The U.S. Southern Command has been told to investigate alleged abuse by guards at Guantanamo Bay stemming from an Oct. 6 complaint by a Camp Pendleton Marine officer, the Pentagon's Inspector General's office said Friday.

"It has been referred to Southcom for action. They're going to have to look into this," Gary Comerford, spokesman for the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, told The Associated Press. "As soon as we got this it was turned around and tasked to Southcom."

Military spokesmen at Southern Command headquarters and at GuantanamoBay had no immediate comment on the status of the investigation.

Comerford said the Inspector General's instruction to the Southern Command, which oversees military activities in the Caribbean and Latin America, was issued within the last two days.

Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who represents a detainee at GuantanamoBay, filed the complaint to the Inspector General's office on Oct. 6. In it, he attached a sworn statement from a Marine sergeant who works for him. The sergeant reported she listened as guards at GuantanamoBay bragged about beating detainees and described it as a common practice.

The Marine, a paralegal who was at the U.S. Navy station in Cuba last month, alleges that several guards she talked to at a base club said they routinely beat detainees.

"From the whole conversation, I understood that striking detainees was a common practice," the sergeant wrote. "Everyone in the group laughed at the others' stories of beating detainees."

There are now 454 detainees at GuantanamoBay, Vincent Lusser, a spokesman of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said Friday in Geneva. The Red Cross just completed a more than two-week visit to GuantanamoBay, in which they met with 14 new detainees, including the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who were transferred there weeks ago from CIA custody.

Guantanamo Bay began receiving prisoners, most of them captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in January 2002. Only 10 of the detainees have been charged with crimes.

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