A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father's resistance to interrogators.

The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.

... five prisoners have died at four detention camps (including Abu Ghraib) while undergoing interrogation by the U.S.

... at least one of the deaths was previously reported as being from natural causes
the soldiers got off light, mostly without criminal charges.

Brutal interrogation techniques by U.S. military personnel are being investigated in connection with the deaths of at least five Iraqi prisoners in war-zone detention camps, Pentagon documents obtained by The Denver Post show.

The deaths include the killing in November of a high-level Iraqi general who was shoved into a sleeping bag and suffocated, according to the Pentagon report. The documents contradict an earlier Defense Department statement that said the general died "of natural causes" during an interrogation. Pentagon officials declined to comment on the new disclosure.

Another Iraqi military officer, records show, was asphyxiated after being gagged, his hands tied to the top of his cell door. Another detainee died "while undergoing stress technique interrogation," involving smothering and "chest compressions," according to the documents.

....intelligence soldiers and other personnel have sometimes used lethal tactics to try to coax secrets from prisoners, including choking off detainees' airways. Other abusive strategies involve sitting on prisoners or bending them into uncomfortable positions, records show.

"Torture is the only thing you can call this," said a Pentagon source with knowledge of internal investigations into prisoner abuses. "There is a lot about our country's interrogation techniques that is very troubling. These are violations of military law."

Internal records obtained by The Post point to wider problems beyond the Abu Ghraib prison and demonstrate that some coercive tactics used at Abu Ghraib have shown up in interrogations elsewhere in the war effort. The documents also show more than twice as many allegations of detainee abuse - 75 - are being investigated by the military than previously known. Twenty-seven of the abuse cases involve deaths; at least eight are believed to be homicides. No criminal punishments have been announced in the interrogation deaths, even though three deaths occurred last year.

....Of the detainee cases that were not homicides, commanders typically handed down lenient job-related punishments to the accused, instead of seeking criminal convictions. Of 47 punishments given to those accused of prisoner abuse, according to the report, only 15 involved court-martial. Criminal penalties ranged from reprimands to 60 days' confinement.

Also under investigation are reports that soldiers in Iraq abused women and children. One April 2003 case, which is awaiting trial, involves a reservist who pointed a loaded pistol at an Iraqi child in front of witnesses, saying he should kill the youngster to "send a message" to other Iraqis.

BAGHDAD - With attention focused on the seven soldiers charged with abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. military and intelligence officials familiar with the situation tell NBC News the Army's elite Delta Force is now the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation into abuse against detainees.

The target is a top-secret site near Baghdad's airport. The battlefield interrogation facility known as the "BIF" is pictured in satellite photos.

According to two top U.S. government sources, it is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq's prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don't apply, Delta Force's BIF only holds Iraqi insurgents and suspected terrorists -- but not the most wanted among Saddam's lieutenants pictured on the deck of cards.

These sources say the prisoners there are hooded from the moment they are captured. They are kept in tiny dark cells. And in the BIF's six interrogation rooms, Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold a prisoner under water until he thinks he's drowning, or smother them almost to suffocation.

In Washington Thursday evening, a senior Pentagon official denied allegations of prisoner abuse at Battlefield Interrogation Facilities operated by Delta Force in Iraq. And he said the tactics described in this report are not used in those facilities.

A tiny bundle of blanket is unwrapped and inside lies the body of a dead baby, its limbs smeared with dried blood. The mourners peel back the blanket further. Behind lies a second dead baby, wrapped tightly in the same bundle.

Another blanket is opened and inside are the bodies of a mother and child. The child, perhaps six or seven years old, is lying close up against his or her mother, as if seeking comfort. But the mother's clothes are stained with blood, and the child has no head.

These are the images American forces in Iraq had no answer to yesterday.

They come from video footage of the burials of 41 men, women and children Iraqis say died when American planes launched air strikes on a wedding party near the Syrian border on Wednesday.

US forces insist the air strike was on a safe house used by foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria. They do not dispute they killed around 40, but claim American forces were returning fire and the dead were all foreign fighters.

But to the video footage that shows dead women and children they have no answer, no explanation. So potentially damaging is the video to the US occupation that American officials have demanded that the Dubai-based al-Arabiya television news network, which obtained the footage, give them the name of the cameraman who shot the pictures. Al-Arabiya has refused.

US forces are sticking doggedly to this version of events in spite of rising evidence that a wedding party was hit. More and more eyewitnesses are coming forward.

Hussein Ali, a well-known Iraqi wedding singer, was buried in Baghdad yesterday, along his brother Mohammed. Their family said they had been performing at the wedding when it was hit.
The evidence US forces have put forward to back up their version of events has been demolished.

Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the US military spokesman, said American soldiers had recovered guns, Syrian passports and a satellite phone at the scene of the air strikes.

But Shiekh Nasrallah Miklif, the head of the Bani Fahd tribe to which most of the dead belonged, explained yesterday that was only natural, given where the air strike happened.

The wedding party took place in Makradheeb, a tiny village in the desert about 25km from the Syrian border. Every household in Iraq has a gun, usually a Kalashnikov assault rifle, to protect themselves from the lawlessness that has flourished under the US occupation. But out in the desert, it is even more natural for the people to keep guns -- to protect themselves not only from robbers, but also from wild animals. The villagers all worked as shepherds, and they needed to protect their flocks as well.

... "How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilisation?" General Mattis of the US marines said yesterday.

But the truth, according to Iraqis, is that the dead were holding the wedding in the village their had lived in all their lives.

... According to the sheikh, by 2am when the attack started, the celebrations were finished and the guests were asleep. There had been US helicopters in the sky earlier, but they had not fired and the wedding guests were not worried.

General Kimmitt said yesterday: "We sent a ground force in to the location. They were shot at. We returned fire."

But Sheikh Mikfil claims the attack began with air strikes, without warning.

At 2am American planes suddenly started bombing the area. They were followed by helicopters, and after several hours of air strikes, US troops arrived in armoured vehicles and searched the devastated village.

Contrary to earlier reports, the sheikh said there was no celebratory gunfire. Firing guns in the air is traditional at Iraqi weddings, and it was suspected US forces had mistaken such shooting for hostile fire, as they did at a wedding party in Afghanistan where US air strikes killed more than 50 people in 2002.

But Sheikh Mikfil says he questioned the survivors extensively on this, and they were categorical: there was no shooting in the air.

He said the bride came from the same village, so there was no large-scale movement of people that could have aroused US suspicions.

"If they killed foreign fighters, why don't they show us the bodies?" he asked.

"If they suspected foreign fighters were there, why didn't they come to arrest them, instead of using this huge force?"

The sheikh says he suspects the Americans may have been acting on false intelligence information, given by some one who wants to increase the tension between Iraqis and Americans to destabilise the US occupation.